I have traveled across the country so many times, I can no longer accurately count. Mostly east to west or west to east: on train, on plane and in automobiles. I’ve been across the top tier of states, the southernmost tier and across the middle. I’ve boon to every one of the continental 48 states and all Canadian provinces save Prince Edward Island.

And I’ve gone vertically, too. Drawn a giant Tic-Tac-Toe grid across the landscape. Past blogs have chronicled the trips I’ve made from Tijuana, Mexico, to Vancouver, Canada; north along the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Nova Scotia; and down the Mississippi from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico.

In each of these trips, I’ve learned more about my nation, most of it good, but in a few cases — like the persistence of racism — troubling.

One trip I haven’t blogged about yet I took in 1997 for the newspaper where I worked — up the Hundredth Meridian from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. That line is the mythic backbone of the nation, a dotted fold-line that divides the country in two. It’s just a line of longitude, and therefore imaginary, but this particular line has traditionally marked the beginning of the West. To the east of it, more than 20 inches of rain falls annually; to the west, less than 20 inches.

That means that to the east there were once tall-grass prairies that are now farmland; to the west, the High Plains where cattle now graze.

Of course, the change doesn’t exactly run due north and south; it meanders back and forth over the 100th Meridian, so the drive up its length passes from prairie to plains and back, moving from cotton field to feedlot, from pasture to spinach.

It’s the perfect drive to see the middle of America that is so often forgotten by the majority of us whose attention is too often turned solely to the twin coasts.

If you take a trip up this spine of America, you will see more than a few kine, some goats, some sheep and a couple of ostriches.

To say nothing of some interesting people.

Ah, green grass, blue sky and a yellow line down the center of the road.

Some things have changed since I wrote these stories: Harlow’s World Famous Bar-B-Q is closed; a flashy new visitor center has opened at the Washita Battlefield National Historical Site; and several of the elders I talked to have now passed on. But I thought the trip as a whole was interesting enough to revisit in this blog.

It will take three entries; the first never gets out of Texas.

THE TRIP

Mile 0, Laredo, Texas

The planet we live on is divided into 360 degrees of longitude, beginning with the one that runs north and south through Greenwich, England.
Not many of the meridians carry much significance: The Greenwich Meridian has been the one that keeps the world’s time; the 180th Meridian, for the most part, is the International Date Line, separating Mondays from Tuesdays. And the 100th Meridian has traditionally marked the eastern edge of the American West.
It is purely a geographical accident, but the 100th Meridian is where the rain gives out. To the east, crops grow with little help; to the west, there is either dry farming, irrigation, or, mostly, cattle grazing.

I took a week in October to drive up the six states that form the central axis of the country, keeping as close to the meridian as I could, but occasionally detouring east or west for interesting sights.

The trip begins in Laredo, Texas.

The 100th Meridian enters Texas just to the west of the border town of Laredo.

The city’s downtown looks more like Tijuana than any other American city I’ve seen. There are the narrow, uneven sidewalks; the old storefronts with overhanging eaves, whose windows are filled with carefully lined up watches, wedding dresses or toys. The streets are narrow through the old part of town.

Laredo was first settled in 1755 and the Woolworth’s looks at least that old.

There are a bunch of border crossings in town, and the lines of people move constantly through the archways; maquilladores flourish across the border and the employees move from one country to the other.

North of the old part of town, Laredo looks more like any other Western American city. Along the interstate that pushes north are hordes of strip malls, Wal-Marts, Popeye’s chicken franchises and home-repair discount supermarkets. Every 1.6 miles, there is a McDonald’s.

U.S. 83 heads northwest out of town and soon crosses the 100th Meridian, then paralleling it in its march to North Dakota.

As soon as you leave the city, you begin to see evidence of the uncertainness of the geography, as you move from farms to ranches.

The prairie doesn’t turn instantly to plains: There is a wide, undulating transition zone.

First, surrounding the city are “winter gardens,” where tomatoes and other vegetables are grown for places that can’t. But as soon as we leave the garden area, we hit the chaparral, where there are hundreds of ranches in the scrubland filled with mesquite, juniper and, most of all, purple sage, which turns patches of the chaparral into an inky lavender.

But as soon as you hit the tiny town of Asherton, the ranches give way once again to agriculture.

Mile 89, Crystal City, Texas

During World War I, the small community of Crystal City tried an experiment: to grow a winter crop of spinach. In only a year, spinach became the area’s principal crop. There was a “spinach boom.” People talked of “green gold.”

By 1933, the Crystal City Cannery was producing 10,000 cans of spinach a day. In 1945, Del Monte took over as primary processor; it now produces an average of 2 1/2 million cases of spinach a year.

In 1936 the Chamber of Commerce held its first Spinach Festival and crowned its first queen and Texas Governor James Allred proclaimed March 16-21 as “Spinach Week” and Crystal City as “the world’s largest spinach shipping center.”

But the chamber of commerce wanted a symbol and found one in Popeye the Sailor Man. They arranged with Elzie Segar, the comic strip’s creator, to use Popeye to sell spinach and a “life-size” statue — if you can say that about a cartoon character — was erected, which now sits on a pedestal in front of City Hall.

“Let us give three rousing whoops for Crystal City,” wrote Segar.

Crystal City has its Spinach Festival every year on the second weekend in November in honor of its “Patron Saint” Popeye. The city of 8,000 grows to 50,000 for the three day event.

Spinach, though, is no longer even the main crop. “We grow onions in the summer and cabbage in the winter,” explains the woman at City Hall.

There are also murals all over the building, including a giant cowboy, Mexican vaquero and a large crocodile. I don’t know what the croc is doing there, but there are some peccaries behind it, and an Indian on a horse with a spear and his head hanging low. Also a Jesus and an American flag, some campesinos and a woman in a graduation gown. It’s quite an iconographical salad.

But not all of history is rosy for the town. During World War II, a Japanese internment camp was built here, which at its peak, held 3,374 people, mostly Japanese American, with a few German and Italian families added, held temporarily as potential immigrants.

Mile 128, Uvalde, Texas

Uvalde, Texas, is best known as the home of John E. “Cactus Jack” Nance, vice president of the United States under the first two terms of Franklin Roosevelt.

The irascible Nance, who had been a powerful member of the Senate and House, termed the job “the first demotion of my life,” and said that the vice presidency “ain’t worth a bucket of warm piss.”

During a long career in the House and Senate, Nance had built a great reputation as a parliamentarian, and over the years, he was given scores of “honorary” gavels to replace one he broke in use.

These gavels, along with his canoe, hunting rifle, official papers, tons of PR photographs and some very nice oil paintings made by his wife, are on view at the Garner Museum on one of the shady back streets of Uvalde.

About 30 miles north of town, a state park has been named for Garner, in the spotted green canyons of the Texas Hill Country. The park, along the Rio Frio, is bumper to bumper with visitors in the summer, but on an October morning, it is nearly deserted, save for one family swimming in the icy clear water of the river, which is lined with bone-white cobbles eroded from the limestone hills.

Farming has given way once again to grazing land, although most of what chews the tough dry grass are sheep and goats. Central Texas is the Angora wool and mohair center of the nation.

“But we don’t eat mutton,” explains the volunteer at the park information desk. “You know, there’s a historical antagonism between the cattlemen and the sheepherders. That hasn’t completely disappeared.”

“Oh, but it’s changing a little,” says her colleague in the office. “You can buy sheep meat in the H.E.B.”

The H.E.B. is the local chain of supermarkets. It is short for its owner’s name: Howard E. Butt, a major figure in the area, whose name you keep running across for his charitable donations.

If my name were Butt, I’d name my store with my initials, too.

Mile 260, Menard, Texas

The land flattens out by the time you reach Menard, Texas. The town was founded in 1858 and was once — this is a litany in the Plains states — prosperous. Now most of the old stores on the town’s main street are empty.

One exception is the old Luckinbach hardware store, which now houses one of the world’s most successful manufactury of hunter’s game calls.

Burnham Brothers specializes in predator calls, but they carry all kinds, from turkey to mouse calls. You squeeze them, hammer them, blow into them and rub them together, to make the variety of squawks, wheezes, yelps and chatters that will bring your desired prey into the sights of your 12-gauge.

Outside of Burnham Brothers, the towns main income comes from sheep manure, according to Coby Phillips, who works behind the counter.

“My father used to work in the hardware store, and now I work in the same building,” he says. “It was his first job and this is mine.”

J. Morton Burnham is “recognized as the father of predator calling,” says the catalog. In 1952, his sons started up the business using their father’s know-how. They sold it in 1991 to its present owner, who supplies predator calls to the world. They have mechanical calls, cassette tapes of animal calls, and most recently, they have added 60 digital animal calls.

The catalog lists a Coyote Howler, which looks something like a child’s toy trumpet, a Buck Grunt Deer Call, a Coon Squaller, a Mini-Squeal and, Phillip’s recommendation, a Mini-Blaster, which has variable pitch and is “the best for calling coyote and bobcat.”

I am taken with a slate and wood turkey call and ante up the purchase price of $13.95.

“This is one of the top three turkey hunting areas in the world,” Phillips says.

Phillips was born in Menard and can’t imagine leaving. “Many young people do leave, but a lot come back when they are older,” he says.

He has a long list of reasons to stay, despite the generally depressed economy.

“The town is small, so everyone knows everyone else. There’s no crime to speak of and a good school system with small classes. My high school graduating class was 22.”

He was a Menard Yellowjacket.

And in the winter, “There’s only a week and a half out of the year that’s freezing.”

Mile 317, Ballinger, Texas

Near Ballinger, Texas, I start seeing fields of cotton. The fields are completely white with it, looking almost like snow.

Like many of the small towns — this one has a population of 4,170 — there is not much of note.

However, there is a giant high-tech steel cross on the rise overlooking town and a bronze statue of a cowboy in front of city hall. Like many such city halls, the building is the most impressive architecture in the county and and built of sandstone.

When I tune in the local radio station, the newscaster tells me there is some controversy in the city over the community center, which is sometimes used on weekends to hold dances.

Several neighbors have complained about the noise.

“Curtis Jennings appeared before the city council and said he felt past city fathers did not build the community center to be turned into a beer hall and dance hall.

“He told city councilmen that the music went on till almost 1 in the morning.

“Councilman Jerry Willingham said he felt 10 p.m. should be set as the time to shut down activity at the community center. Mayor Rudy Hoffman instructed them to set guidelines and make recommendations for the next council meeting.”

Big, white, puffy cumulus clouds are moving across the sky like a marching band.

Mile 373, Abilene, Texas

Nothing says Texas like a good, thick steak in a sleazy tin-sheathed dive.

Harlow’s World Famous Bar-B-Q and Steaks in Abilene is just off the interstate and just the ticket. Ribeye is sold by the measure: from three-quarter inch (for sissies) up to 2 solid, meaty inches.

The ceiling is patterned tin sheathing, punctuated by six slow-moving fans. The walls are in need of a good scrubbing and are covered in a variety of neon beer signs. A piece of a Texas flag is framed at one end of the room and the 17 tables in the front room are lined up under plastic tablecloths. The chairs are a grab bag of ’30s oak office furniture and ’50s kitchen dinette moderne.

Racks of potato chip bags hang on the counter next to the cash register and the menu is hand-printed on posterboard above the bar.

One old sign says “Beer 5¢” and just under it, “Dancing girls,” but the beer is the normal price and the closest thing to dancing girls are the jeans-and-T-shirt waitresses who hustle from one end of the painted concrete floor to the other.

The owner of this establishment is Timmy Harlow, who looks to be somewhere between 69 and death. His white hair and gaunt body look like that of an old, worn-out cowboy. His beach-ball gut is largely covered by his red apron, but from behind, he has no shape at all: a thin, tubular body with neither shoulder nor hip nor waist. His jeans hang low on his frame and stay up only the way crew socks stay up on skinny shanks.

In actuality, Harlow is 49 years old and a worn-out former beer distributor. His Lone Star franchise fell through in the oil bust of the early ’80s and Harlow, always a hard-liver, had to drop out. There were divorces, some hard times and an inspiration.

So, he opened this restaurant in the former beer warehouse. The building still looks like a warehouse — or at least the back of it does: a utilitarian cinderblock box with “Harlow’s” painted its length.

But in front of that, he has built a kind of garden, with trellises made out of unfinished wood and lots of climbing vines. You have to walk through this little paradise before you get to the fried onions and potatoes with sour cream.

There is a back room, also. It is fitted out with aviation memorabilia in honor of nearby Dyess AFB. There is also a shrine to Chuck Yeager, who has been known to eat here.

Yeager, in fact, so enjoyed the homemade honey ice cream that he asked Harlow for the recipe. Harlow said he wouldn’t give it away, but would trade it for one of Yeager’s flight suits. The suit now hangs near the front of the room.

There is also a wall full of dinner plates signed by celebrity customers. Among the 40 plates, I spotted George Strait, Clint Black and Lori Morgan. Many of the names are less luminous — at least, I didn’t recognize them; probably local radio personalities.

The clientele was a mix with on one hand, well-to-do slummers in their “stone” colored chinos and Oxford-cloth shirts and on the other hand a few broad-bellied men with scraggy goatees and glassy eyes who looked like they just got off the construction site, or more accurately, had stopped on the way for a six-pack or two.

It’s a very Texas mix.

The mesquite broiled ribeye, by the way, was juicy and delicious.

Mile 492, Crowell, Texas

Crowell is one more dried up little town in the flat plains of northern Texas.

Most of the buildings along the downtown highway are closed up. There is little traffic through the town as I step into the M and M Family Restaurant across from the courthouse and order my breakfast.

“Two scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits and gravy and your largest orange juice.”

“I’m sorry, but I just ran out. I mixed up a whole gallon this morning and it’s gone.”

“That’s OK, I’ll have water then.”

I find out from three retired farmers who are lollygagging in the M and M that the whole land is thirsty for water.

“All there is in the wells is briny, so we can’t use that to irrigate,” says Abe, who is about 65 and has gone through two heart surgeries and is on the waiting list for a third. He wears a straw cowboy hat and a white shirt.

“The government has a brine reduction project with a pipeline that runs from Guthrie and tries to impound the briny runoff from wells, to reduce the saltiness of the Wichita River so cattle can drink out of it,” Abe says.

“But don’t give this gentleman the idea that we don’t like it here,” says Joseph, who is in his late 50s and seems a little more cosmopolitan than Abe. He turns out to have once run the local newspaper.

“What do you like about it?” I ask.

“Everything,” Abe answers.

But the conversation seems to center on the disasters.

“The problem here is it’s always too hot, too cold, to dry and too wet,” cracks Abe. “The weather is too irregular to make a regular living.”

And the weather is the constant topic of conversation — that and government policy.

The biggest weather they ever had was a tornado in April, 1942. It killed 11 people and tore straight through town.

“That tornado was the biggest thing that ever hit this town,” says Joe.

“I wasn’t here for it,” says Wendell, “But I got here the next day.”

Wendell is 92 and talks slowly. He is also wearing a white shirt, although it is now a couple of sizes too large for him, and a ball cap.

“It took the dome off the courthouse and took off three of the clock faces. One dial was left, but the works was blown out.”

“No, you can’t count on the weather,” Joe says. “We normally get 24 inches of rain a year, but in 1941, we had 40 inches and there were lakes all over.”

But the usual problem is not enough, or at least, not at the right time.

“It’ll rain all around us and Foard County won’t get any,” says Abe.

“Story is, when Noah had his flood, Foard County got a half-inch.”

In the flat country around town, they tell me, the main product is cattle and wheat. A bit further south there is also cotton, but they don’t grow it anymore in Crowell.

“It’s the boll weevil,” says Joe.

“Deliver us from weevil,” says Abe.

“They got a weevil eradication program and it’s the best thing the government spends money on,” he continues. “Maybe one day, they will eliminate the problem — now I’m not saying they’ll ever completely get rid of it — but maybe they’ll reduce it enough that you can make a living with cotton again.”

He doesn’t sound convinced, more hopeful than anything.

As for government, Wendell says the only real non-agricultural industry in town is a company that makes “gimme” caps, but they are feeling the pinch from Mexico.

“I don’t like talking politics,” he says, “But you can hear that giant sucking sound that Ross Perot spoke of.”

North of town I spot a box tortoise slowly trying to cross the road, with his head tentatively dangling in front of his dome.

The roadside weeds are drying in the October sun. The sunflowers have passed the flower stage and a spattering of black seedheads dot the tan grass. Clouds blow quickly across the sky, leaving racing dapples of sun over the fields.

With the car window down, you can smell the damp straw in the fields, the wet earth and the smell of the cattle as they go by in a truck. Once in a while, the rhythm is broken by the smell of a roadkill skunk.

Just north of Crowell is the Pease River, where Cynthia Ann Parker was stolen back from the Comanche Indians in 1836 after 24 years of living among the Indians. Her Indian son was Quanah Parker, the greatest of the Comanche leaders. His name meant “fragrant.”

And the next town on the route is named after him.

Next: The Central Plains

Night train

September 20, 2014

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Italy has its Colosseum. Cambodia has its Angkor Wat. And South America has its Machu Picchu.

They are all the ruined monuments of empire. Vines grow through the masonry joints and small birds build their twiggy nests where windows used to be.

As Stephens and Catherwood found in the Yucatan, nature takes back what we borrow. Our cities crumble and trees clothe everything once again in general greenness.

You can see the process in action from your railroad coach window, as the train passes through Toledo, Ohio, at three in the morning.

All across the southern rim of Lake Erie, factories made of brick under the harsh midnight illumination of security lights begin to metamorphose back into clay soil.

The train moves slowly through the back lots of rust-belt cities, where the tracks themselves groan and rattle under the weight of the bogeys, and the whole urban backstage is like the rough inside of a carnival mask. From the streets along the refurbished waterfront, the city looks shiny and prosperous. It is the face the town fathers want to show.

But from the rails, the potemkin city is revealed in its rich, resonant decay. It is the same in all municipalities, from Trenton to L.A. The tracks take us to our ruined monuments and we can see the picturesque disintegration of our urban ambitions.

I have always found these scenes seductive.

It is why I have always loved to ride the trains. It is the same thrill the theatergoer gets when allowed to wander backstage through the flies and backdrops. A bit of the mystery is explained but a greater mystery fills its place.

I have been awake all night, the passing lights flashing briefly through the window. In each Toledo or Syracuse, N.Y., we pass, the train rolls through the back yards of the inner city and shows us the unhinged screen doors, jacked-up Fords and abandoned barbecue grills. Once in a great while a kitchen light is on and you can see a man rummaging for a midnight snack in his refrigerator.

It is 3 a.m., and the Southern Crescent is pulling into Greensboro; the Twentieth Century Limited into Erie; the Empire Builder into Minneapolis; or the Sunset Limited into New Orleans.

The train crawls into the station past the lowered crossing gate with its flashing lights and clanging bells. Behind it wait the one or two trucks working at this hour. A squeal of airbrakes and the shush of escaping air and the train comes to a halt. The passengers step off the stairway at the end of the coach, hanging on the thin metal rod that counts as a handrail, looking for the relatives who have awakened in the middle of the night to meet them.

While we wait, the brakemen walk back and forth under the passenger windows checking the journal boxes with their flashlights.

Then the car jerks forward with a rattle and the train picks up speed. Out my window, I see a junk yard surrounded with a tornado fence topped with coils of barbed wire. It is followed by an empty five-story brick factory. A thousand windows face the tracks and not one has an unbroken pane of glass; what is left is a tracery of empty mullions. The roof has partially collapsed and what was once a loading dock is now a tangle of wire, iron and tatters of tarpaper.

It is a world of oily soot collected as a film on steel I-beams, a world of concrete rubble and red bricks turning back to powder.

What is garish in the electric light disappears in the inky black and the clack of the rails rises by a tone and opens wide as the train begins to cross a bridge. On the other side, the train leaves the city, entering the suburbs that are unlit and fast asleep.

Up front, the airhorn sounds its warning and the slow burn of sunrise is faint behind us.

At one point, we pass our companion train, headed in the other direction toward the sunrise from which we came. The two trains slow as they pass each other in a kind of railroad pasodoble, and I can see dimly into the passing coaches.
Most passengers are sleeping, their heads drooped back and their mouths hanging wide. But every so often you see another face looking back at you.

A rising cloud of blackbirds rotates into the air, roused by the train. As we pass, they settle again into the bare winter trees.

Who can sleep in such poetry.

Crossing the country by rail

September 19, 2014

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I’m in Chicago and it’s close to midnight late in November in 1978. The air is raw. There is a sleety mist falling and I haven’t eaten anything since leaving Syracuse early that morning.

I am fleeing across the country, jobless, broke, and emptied inside. I want to put a continent between me and my broken heart, but somehow, it is following me. “Stay!” “Stay!” I say, as if I were talking to an uncomprehending dog, but it just drools, looks at me with brown glazed eyes and won’t leave my side.

There is little that so perfectly captures this experience than a train rattling through the wintery night, with its distant points of light and the Doppler whirr of clanging bells as we pass a grade crossing.

The Twentieth Century Limited had once been a great route on the New York Central line, driving north along the Hudson from Manhattan and turning west at Albany, passing Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland and Toledo on its way to frozen Chicago. It had been the train of movie stars and tycoons. The route no longer exists, replaced by Amtrak’s luxeless Lake Shore Limited.

But as I ride the train, in its last days and paying the minimum fair for a seedy coach seat, it is more like a linked chain of crowded, smoky Greyhound busses, rattling along from one decaying rust-belt depot to the next.

There is a lot of talk of the romance of rail travel, but we should remember that romance is not born of ease and indoor plumbing, but of struggle: The most memorable times in our lives are those we survive, not those we glide through.

So, it is one of the travails of train travel that you are at the mercy of inconvenient schedules that are never met, coaches that are always either too hot or too cold and bad tracks that jerk you awake as you try to grab a few winks leaning awkwardly across two seats.

I am in Chicago between trains, with a ticket for the Empire Builder, which will take me the rest of the way to Seattle, crossing the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains along the way.

In the meantime, I’’m walking the block around Union Station looking for a bite.

What I find is a lonely kiosk, spewing steam, where a man is selling sausages and sauerkraut. He is getting ready to close up and I’m his last customer.

The sleet darts like needles through the cone of light under a streetlamp and I’m shivering by the time my boarding call echoes through the station like plainchant in a cathedral.

The Empire Builder I enter still is decorated with the orange and green of the long-gone and multiply-merged Great Northern Railway and each coach is painted with oval-and-bar animal paintings of the Kwakiutl Indians. Here a beaver, there a raven and there a killer whale. It is a train with character.

It is dawn by the time the train reaches St. Paul and I step out on the platform to stretch my legs. It is cold but dry and I’m surprised by the comfort. “Don’t stand there too long in your shirtsleeves,” the conductor warns. “The temperature will fool you: It is 14 below zero.”

For the next two and a half days, I sit, squirm, fidget and fitfully doze as I ride the Empire Builder across the broad portions of the continent. I talk to my coachmates, but most of them only stay on board for a few stops as the depots tally up: Red Wing, St. Cloud, Fargo, Devils Lake, Minot, Williston, Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Cut Bank.

But there are rewards paid for the suffering.

You can never see the expanse of the nation better than through a train window. From the air, you see what looks mostly like a huge map, with rivers and interstates. From the car, you see the consumer culture of Burger Kings and drug stores. But from the train, snaking its way through the unprogrammed portion of the country, you see the farms, the factories, the land and its people.

Across North Dakota and eastern Montana, the land rolls like a seaswell and we see no roads, only wheat. Houses blip by only once every few miles. Only the moon is less populated than the American West.

It is night as we pass the Glacier National Park.

But when the train pulls out of Cle Elum in Washington and begins climbing the draw up the Yakima River, an elk stands on the side of the canyon, no more than 15 feet from the train window. Steam blows from his nostrils in the cold air and he watches the steel pass, with faces in its windows, each with a heart, swelling or drained.

Hauling miles

September 18, 2014

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It was the weekend I drove across America: I left Phoenix after work on Friday and pulled into North Carolina before breakfast on Monday. I was hauling macadam.

But to paraphrase Mr. Bernstein from Citizen Kane, “There’s no secret to piling up miles, if all you want to do is pile up miles.”

At any rate, I logged 1,886 miles between work on Friday and sleep on Sunday.

People sometimes ask me if driving doesn’t wear me down, but it doesn’t. There is nothing I find as relaxing as spending a week on the highway, watching the scenery scroll by and the sun roll around heaven all day.

I get up at 5 each morning and count a hundred miles on the odometer before stopping for breakfast. You notice the difference from one edge of a time zone to another: On the same day, 5 a.m. can be black night in Williston, N.D., and broad daylight in Pensacola, Fla., both in the Central Time Zone.

It gives you a cosmic feel: You know you are moving across the arc of the planet’s edge. In Saskatchewan you can watch the grain elevator behind you sink below the horizon in your rear view mirror, like the sails of a ship dropping under the curve of the earth, just as the next elevator breaks the surface in front of you. You are always on the top of a mound that falls off to every side.

The point of this particular dash across the continent was to collect my wife, who had been visiting her mother in North Carolina, and continue on our vacation, making a great loop across the Northeast and back through central Canada.

I left the office at about 4 p.m. on Friday and drove the 289 miles to Gallup, N.M., where I stayed in a chain motel and ate supper at a tiny, empty dive, where a Navajo woman made a great turkey sandwich.

Saturday took me from Gallup to Oklahoma City, some 725 miles. I could have gone further, but I did some sightseeing in Endee, N.M., and in Amarillo, Texas.

Sunday, I stopped for a couple of hours in Arkansas, but still managed to make 872 miles, stopping in Kingston, Tenn., just short of Knoxville.

I usually avoid the interstates, but to waste as little time as possible before joining my wife, I took I-40 most of the way, playing dodge-cars with semis, terrorizing slow-moving RVs and watching my odometer spin like a slot machine.

The next day, I drove across the Smokies, up along the Blue Ridge and down into the Piedmont, managing to cruise through Andy Griffith’s Mount Airy.

There are some disadvantages to this kind of travel. Meals, for instance, are either awful or non-existent. Mostly, I keep a box of Fig Newtons in the back seat and gnosh occasionally. The entree is beef jerky bought at a truck stop; I’ve become quite a connoisseur of jerky. A liter of bottled water sits on the back floor.

When I do stop and eat dinner, it is uniformly greasy, oversalted and overcooked. And don’t even mention the salad bar.

Then, it’s into the motel room for a night’s sleep before getting up again at 5, to see the dull light in the east spread out along the fuzzy line that separates the sky and its brightening clouds from the ground below and the road that stretches toward the rising sun.

Whistle a happy tune

September 13, 2014

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In Shelley’s Ode to a Nightingale, he reminds us that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” And in classical music, our greatest symphonies, quartets, sonatas and trios all give us a complex emotional universe — and the greater the music, the more likely it will contain heavy, dark, profound and difficult emotions. When it’s doing its job, a symphony is not background music.

You can go through it all: Even music that is ostensibly about joy tends to be about a kind of manic fervor or about the transcendence of the pains of mortal life — not simple happiness. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” for instance, is so over the top, that sometimes you just want to say, “Boy, get a grip.”

Happiness would seem to be the province of the popular song — Feelin’ Groovy, or Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies (you should hear Duke Ellington’s take on that one in Blues No End). What you feel coming out of a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony is something different — rung out, depleted yet renewed, taken through the paces of all of life. Happiness is irrelevant. Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’ First, Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, Mozart’s Jupiter — They are all large, complex and attempts at metaphor for the joys and pains of being alive.

“Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught.”

But mere happiness? You can look long and wide to find anything that simple in classical music. And yet …

And yet, as I was driving to the store the other day, with Brahms’ First Serenade in the CD player, I felt a swelling of pure happiness as I listened. The music flew by with a genuine joie de vivre, a thought you rarely think when Brahms comes along. Johannes is all gravitas, Weltschmerz, longing — it used to be joked of Brahms that when he is happy, he sings, “The grave is my joy.”

But here he is, without a thought in his head, spinning out tunes of unreflexive pleasure. The horns and clarinets seem to dance their way through the six movements, with no angst over whether the G-major of this theme leads to the e-minor of that one, or whether the rising fourth here is balanced by a descending fifth in the finale. None of it, just tunes. Bouncy, happy tunes. Who knew Brahms had it in him.

And I began to consider other pieces in the standard repertoire that might share something of this simplicity, this sheer pleasure in the notes — that feeling of walking along on a sunny day with some spare change in your pocket, knowing you will see your sweetie in the evening and whistling a happy chune.

Could I list at least 10 such compositions: It was a challenge I set myself.

First up, of course, come Schubert’s “Trout” quintet. No one has ever written so many hummable tunes in a single piece of music, from beginning to end, pure forward-moving bouncy, danceable melody. It is the counterweight to that other quintet, the string quintet that seems to bind up in its aching arms all the sorrow and pain of the world. In the “Trout,” there is none of that, only hope and pleasure and everything that a major key can shout.

Did Beethoven ever write anything so worry-free? Beethoven had bigger fish to fry. He was busy creating a new century. And yet …

Buried in that treasure hoard of piano sonatas — the so-called “New Testament” of piano literature — there is one tiny sonata in G-major, op. 78 — alla Tedesca — that has nothing but bounce and verve. It is short, clever, witty and fun. Not your usual Beethoven adjectives.

Haydn, of course, is the fountain here. You can pick almost any of his works and find acres of wit, bounce, pleasure and fun. There are his more profound moments, but pick any symphony in the 60s or 70s and you can run from start to finish with a smile in your heart. When I want to feel good, I snap in a Haydn symphony to listen to.

For instance, the Symphony No. 73 in D, “La Chasse,” which ends with a fox hunt, a rousing ride through the countryside with horn and hounds.

Or the Symphony No. 60 in C, “il Distratto,” which has a joke larded into it every 11 bars — you never have to wait long for another one, like a New York City bus. There’s the place where he stops and has the orchestra retune, right in the middle of the finale; there’s the second theme in the first movement, that just stops in its tracks harmonically and seems to fall asleep. But it isn’t the jokes, per se, that I am touting here, but the sheer joy of the music, unalloyed with anything like “the saddest thought.”

If you want to find the same music, but in a 19th century idiom, you have it in Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C, which he wrote when he was a mere stripling of 17. It begins with joie and ends with enthusiasm and in between it is stuffed with buoyancy and energy. You cannot listen to it without it putting a bounce in your step.

I had the pleasure of seeing the New York City Ballet perform George Balanchine’s Symphony in C at the Palais Garnier in Paris, and I couldn’t tell which thrilled me more, the choreography or the music. It is one of the high points of my esthetic life and kept me smiling for days, even weeks.

You get something of the same confident buoyancy in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, written as a virtuoso piece for orchestra, and everyone gets to join in the party. No shadow hangs over the music — it is all joy.

The 20th century is a sorry one, filled from end to end with war, murder, oppression and genocide. But there are points of light in the music. Prokofiev may have the three great “War Sonatas,” with all the weight of the world on them, but he started out with his Classical Symphony, which is a nod back to the music of Haydn, but with all the hot sauce of Modern dissonance tossed in for spice. The music bounces its way from the get-go. You can’t have a heavy thought while listening to it.

And Paul Hindemith — who used to count as one of the big three of Modern music with Stravinsky and Schoenberg (how the mighty have fallen) — joins my list with his Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. He is helped out, of course, with the jaunty tunes that he culled from Weber, but he costumes those tunes with the happiest, bounciest orchestrations and developments.

And finally, to round out my self-assigned Ten, there is the verve and sass of Darius Milhaud’s Le boeuf sur le toit, which is 15 minutes of toe-tapping polytonality based on dance tunes from Brazil and named after a cabaret in Paris where the avant-garde met and drank and did their best to show off to each other. Listen to the music once and you will not be able to get it out of your head for days — or out of you hips, knees and feet. Not a care in the world.

The cares of the day will come back, as they always do, and even such happiness as embedded in this music can wear out its welcome, joyful, but a bit thin compared to the Big-Boy cousins in the concert hall, but for a moment, like that happiness you feel skipping down the street on a good day, it seems like all the world needs.

Here’s my list. Please add to it or make your own:

–Symphony No. 60 in C “il Distratto” by Joseph Haydn

–Symphony No. 73 in D “la Chasse” by Joseph Haydn

–Piano Sonata No. 25 in G, op. 79 “alla Tedesca” by Ludwig van Beethoven

–Piano Quintet in A, op. 114, D. 667 “Trout” by Franz Schubert

–Symphony No. 1 in C major by Georges Bizet

–Serenade No. 1 in D, op. 11 by Johannes Brahms

–Capriccio Espagnol, op. 34 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

–Symphony No. 1 in D, op. 25 “Classical Symphony” by Serge Prokofiev

–Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith

–Le Boeuf sur le Toit, op. 58 by Darius Milhaud

What Stuart learned from his brother’s dog

September 8, 2014

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My friend Stuart sent me a letter:

You can learn a great deal from a springer spaniel. For instance:

Total order and total chaos are the same thing. Identical. Not a dime’s worth of difference. And neither is very helpful.

Think of it in terms of the Linnean metaphor. I’ll get to the spaniel in a moment.

At one end of the spectrum is chaos, a totality that is unordered, a cosmic goo. This is not the current chaos of the eponymous theory, which is merely a complexity beyond calculation, but rather the mythic chaos out of which the gods either create the cosmos, or arrive unannounced from it like Aphrodite from the sea. It has no edges, no smell, no shape, no parts, no color, no anything. Inchoate muddle.

So, in the beginning was the word: Or rather, our ability to organize this chaos through language. The universe exists without form and void. Then we begin the naming of parts to help us understand the welter.

And so, god created the heaven and earth, dividing the parts. And this division of parts is in essence what the Creation is all about.

Of course, the incessant need to divide and name is only a metaphor, but it will help us understand the conundrum of order in the universe, and how the ouroboros of Creation begins and ends at the same place, no matter which direction we go in: The law of entropy and the law of increasing order both have the same final destination.

When we look at the world around us, we immediately split what we see into two camps: That which is living and that which isn’t. It helps us understand the world we live in and we make many of our biggest decisions on this basis: Ethics, for instance. We have no problem splitting a rock in half with a hammer, but would feel rather evil doing the same to a dog.

But the living things fall into two large camps, also: Animal and vegetable (again, I’m simplifying. I haven’t forgotten the bacteria, but we can ignore them for the sake of the metaphor).

Some of us have a problem eating animals but not eating vegetables. So, again, our ethical world depends on how we sort out the chaos.

Let’s take the animals and subdivide them, the way Carl von Linne did, into classes, orders, families, phyla, genera and species.

Each level makes our divisions less inclusive, more discriminatory.

Let’s take the dog, for instance. It is classified as a chordate, which means it has a central nervous system stretched out into a spinal chord. This is different from, say, a starfish or a nematode. But there are many chordates, so, if we want to differentiate a dog from a shark, we have to look to its class. It is a mammal. That makes it distinct from birds and fish.

But there are lots of mammals, too. Some of them eat other animals; we call them carnivores. A dog is a carnivore.

Notice how each level of nomenclature narrows our definition down to a smaller and smaller group of initiates. When we had only living and non-living, there were only two groups; with each level, we add dozens, hundreds and then thousands of other groups disincluded in our catalog.

The order carnivora is one of many orders in the class of mammalia, which is one of many in the phylum chordata, which in turn is one of many in the kingdom animalia.

The order separates our subject, but lets us see in relief that it is just one constellation in the heavens populated by many other constellations.

The same poor pup is in the family canidae, which includes all the dog-like animals, from fox to coyote to jackal. Among them, it is in the genus Canis, and species lupus, which makes it brother with the wolf.

But our wolf is a friendly one, as long as you aren’t the postman. So, now we call it Canis lupus familiaris, or the family dog. And our particularization of the beast means we are conversely aware of all of creation — each in its own genus and species — that makes up the non-dog, and each of them is like the billions and billions of stars that make up the many constellations in the night sky.

Yet, this isn’t far enough. For the dog I’m thinking of isn’t just a dog, but a spaniel, which is a type of dog which isn’t a poodle and isn’t a terrier. It is a dog with “a long silky coat and drooping ears.”

Each time we subclassify, we are adding to the order we impose on existence, and each classification adds to the proliferation of categories just as it reduces the members inside each class.

So, there are also different kinds of spaniels. The dog I’m thinking of is a springer spaniel, which come in two forms, with a brown-and-white coat and a black-and-white coat.

My brother’s dog is a brown-coated springer spaniel named Sylvie. She is getting old now, and her backside — very much like humans — is getting broader.

And now, by classifying things to the level of the individual, we have as many categories as there are things in the universe, which is effectively the same as nothing being categorized: It is all primordial goo and might as well not be cataloged: Total order and total chaos are the same thing. QED.

Little Bighorn

September 6, 2014

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What you see in eastern Montana is grass, oceans of it, from horizon to horizon.

It was on this sea of grass that many of the plains tribes of Native Americans navigated in their search for herds of buffalo, and it was on this sea that the most famous battle of the Indian Wars was fought.

You can walk through the history and try to reconstruct the events at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the Crow Reservation south of Billings. On these grassy hills on June 25, 1876, George Custer died with more than 260 of his soldiers.

Over the years, “Custer’s Last Stand” has been the source of a great deal of mythologizing, on both sides of the battle. You have only to look at such Hollywood histories as They Died With Their Boots On to see a heroic Errol Flynn, fighting to the last with his brave men as they are inundated by hordes of screaming Sioux and Cheyenne. A famous chromolithograph, from a painting by St. Louis artist Cassilly Adams, hung in almost every saloon from 1896 to up till the Korean War. It was called Custer’s Last Fight, but almost everyone remembers it as “Custer’s Last Stand.”

In the heroic versions, Custer and his men are unundated by a sea of Indans and go down fighting to the last man.

An alternate version has taken hold since then, in which Custer is an egomaniacal buffoon who sees genocide as his ticket to the White House, and was personified by Richard Mulligan in Little Big Man.

Despite the hundreds of books and movies about Custer, none has ever resolved the contradictions of his character. Certainly, in the years just after his death, he was canonized — partly due to the propagandizing of his wife — and served as a rallying cry for those who wanted to end the “Indian problem” once and for all.

But Custer himself isn’t the only myth of the battle.

How often have you heard that there were no white survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn? As you drive through the battlefield, you learn the complexity of the fight and that fewer than half of Custer’s men were killed. Granted, that’s still a bloody battle, but it’s not quite the same thing as the legend.

On finding the Indian encampment, Custer divided his troops into three groups and intended to attack the bivouacked Indians from both the North and the South. He took field command of one third of the forces and marched them north, along the hills above the Indian encampment.

The other two thirds of his forces, at the south end of the battle, took heavy casualties and eventually retreated to relative safety at the top of one of the bluffs on the eastern side of the river. Custer’s third of the force — about 225 men — was wiped out.

Yet, 328 men survived to tell the story, which they did to official inquiries.

Another myth is that it is the only battle the Indians ever won. That is wrong on both ends of the deal, since there were many battles won by Indians, but the Little Bighorn cannot really be counted as one of them.

The purpose of Custer’s foray into Montana was to oust the Sioux and Cheyenne from the Crow Reservation, where they were not particularly welcome, and nudge them back to their own reservations.

The battle ended when word of the approach of General Terry’s troops from the north came and the Indians decamped. Most of them wandered back to their own reservations. In other words, while the battle is remembered as a defeat for Custer, its military objectives were largely met, though such a victory is truly Pyrrhic.

You can read about the battle in any number of books, but you can’t really get the feel of it without visiting the site.

It is a quiet place, with the hiss of wind in the grass and the buzzing of grasshoppers. The road through the park continues for about five miles, past the congested visitor’s center and along the high ridge of bluffs and coulees over the river bottom to the location where Custer’s subordinates, Reno and Benteen, held off the Indian siege for two days.

Most people hang around the monument on Battle Ridge, where small white crosses mark the places where Custer and his men fell. But if you drive to the end of the pavement, you can walk out in the grass, which curls in the breeze like white horses on the sea swell, and hear the phoebe’s song among the seedheads, and watch the approach of an afternoon thunderstorm with its dark clouds and flickering glow of lightning.

And you can get a much deeper sense of what this part of Montana was like 119 years ago, before the roads and visitor’s center, before the white crosses and shallow graves.

Bighorn Mountains

September 5, 2014

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Wyoming is a flat grassy state interrupted by some of the most beautiful mountains in the country.

That includes the Tetons on its western edge, looking like mountains ordered out of central casting, with the perfect features of a Hollywood star. But there are also the Wind River range that seem to extent forever and the thorny Absorokas, high to the east of Yellowstone.

In Wyoming’s east, you find the Laramie and Medicine Bow ranges.

All of them high, stony, craggy, pine-sided cordilleras rising over the high plains like the abodes of gods.

And in north central Wyoming, the Bighorn Mountains divide the state in half. Approached from the west, they are a dry range, not rain-forested like the Olympics; you see a sedimentary ridge, not a wall of frozen lava like the Sierras. They are not green or gray or blue, but are a rich orange and yellow, stratified and striped with darker reds and browns. What you see are the Cambrian, Ordovician and Carboniferous sandstones and limestones. They surround a central core of granite that you only see as you climb to the high plateau and cross Granite pass at 8950 feet.

Along the way, traveling from Greybull, you drive up the Shell River Canyon and its waterfall. And when you reach the top, you don’t find a peak to descend from, but a 30-mile wide plateau of trees and lakes, unimagined from the grasslands below.

As we followed the plateau top across the range, we passed a cattle drive. Slow, lurching cows wandered distractedly across the narrow road. The look in their eyes gave me a new etymology for “vacant,” from the Spanish “vaca” for cow.

The kine stumbled off the road on both sides, some climbing the rocky hill to our left and some dangerously nearing the edge of a cliff that dropped into the wide canyon to our right.

Cowhands on horses herded the cattle back onto the road — all an extremely slow process. Traffic was snarled and it was almost like being on the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour. Well, not quite. There were only two or three cars, bumper to bumper, but the thick cattle traffic was nose to tail.

The road was a bakery display case of cow pies.

We wondered about the men on horses, how they had their bedrolls tied to the back of their saddles, and whether they really did have to spend the night under starry skies boiling coffee in tin pots and sleeping to the sounds of lowing cattle.

Among them were several small children riding horses and watching their daddies at work.

One blond, tow-headed youngster in front of our car was hardly bigger than the saddle horn on his saddle.

There was a relaxed, even lazy festive air about the job at hand, as though it were a community project forced to work at the cows’ pace.

The men were dry-faced workers with oily hats and tattered shirts, the extreme opposite of the drugstore cowboy. There were no shiny 10-gallon stetsons, no arrow-ribbed shirt pockets, no fringe, no buckskin, and no shooting irons on their hips.

What there was was flies, horse sweat, the squeak of leather saddles and the muffled clop-clop of hooves on pavement.

When we asked, we learned that the cows were being herded up the mountains to their summer pastures on the plateau.

The mountains that were so rocky and rugged seen from the west, in fact did become a plateau and we drove for nearly an hour across the summit of the Big Horns, past those forests and lakes.

So, when we reached the eastern escarpment, it was a shock to see the land stretch out under us as flat rangeland, semi-desert again for as far as the eye could see.

Kodak validation

September 3, 2014

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At a pull-off along the Highway of the Giants in the Redwoods of Northern California a lumbering, topheavy RV pulled to the side of the road and stopped. Its driver got out, walked to a spot about 25 feet behind the vehicle, raised his camera, snapped one picture, got back in and drove off.

I’d seen many people line the wife and kids up against a scenic backdrop, or ask Aunt Emily to smile in front of the Grand Canyon, but this was the first time I’d seen anyone take a picture of his truck.

In a way, it made sense. The redwoods are notoriously difficult to photograph. They seem like they’d make wonderful subjects: They are green, tall, impressive and make their own weather. But they only grow in the lowlands and river bottoms and are surrounded by dense hills. There is no way to step back and get them all in perspective. Heck, there is no way to step back and get them all in the viewfinder. One has to be satisfied with bits and chunks of tree trunk surrounded by ferny growth.

And even that is disappointing photographically. I set up my camera at an especially impressive trunk, maybe 15 feet in diameter, covered in green moss. In front of it were the biggest ferns I had ever seen in my life, with fronds that were six feet long. I looked at them carefully in my viewfinder, with my camera set on a tripod. I groaned. Since everything was of the same immense scale, the picture looked like an ordinary patch of ferns in front of an ordinary tree.

The only solution is to put something whose size you know in front of the tree, something like the wife and kids — or your RV.

As an aside, I want to mention the obsessive proclivity of the West Coast states for naming every Department of Transportation speed bump in memory of someone. The Muriel O. Ponsler Memorial Wayside was little more than a widening in the road so cars could pull over and see the ocean. There is the Joseph and Zipporah Russ Memorial Grove in the redwoods. The habit is essentially harmless, but it helps if you pay attention to the name you are commemorating. We soon passed over a bridge named for Elmer Hurlbutt. The Hurlbutt Bridge: Someone was asleep at the switch when that got named.

But what I meant to talk about when I started writing this column was why people make photographs when traveling. The answer seems simple at first: They make pictures to help them remember the trip, or so they can show their friends that they were, in fact, to the redwoods or the Grand Canyon.

But after years of watching people raise their Nikons to their eyes, I am not so certain anymore that the pictures are always aids to memory.

Because the pictures are made so offhandedly, and their makers so quickly jump back in their RVs and drive off to the next natural wonder, I believe they must use the photographs instead as a substitute for memory.

Instead of really experiencing the woods, with its dripping humidity and spongy forest floor, its green smells and muffled silence, they use the camera to arrest a slice of vision that they can take home and dissect, using the image rather than the trees as their primary experience of the redwoods.

It may be that we have become so acculturated to the television reality that the aromatic reality of primary experience no longer retains its validity. It must be transmuted into a Kodak moment — metamorphosed from sense experience to media experience — before it is taken seriously.

But, more likely, people have always done the same, zooming past the magic to chalk up another name on their life list of scenic destinations.

In 1937, long before television became the central fact of American life, photographer Edward Weston was using his huge, cumbersome 8-by-10 camera to photograph Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. A car pulled up with three German couples, among them were six cameras — “One woman had none, but one man had two.”

“The five enthusiasts lined up, focussed on the same view, decided on the exposure, made the picture. Four of them lined up at the other side of the turnaround, made a second picture in unison. Then they climbed back in the car and drove away.”

Oxford, Mississippi

September 2, 2014

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In northern Mississippi, where the iron-rich clay is the color of a hunter’s vest, the town of Oxford sits in the middle of Lafayette County in exactly the same central position as Jefferson sits in the middle of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Faulkner’s fictional county began in the 1820s with the first white settlers and an Indian named Doom. The real Oxford was founded in 1833; 11 years later, the University of Mississippi opened for business. There are many similarities between the fiction and the reality, and not the least of them is the way progress seems to have obscured the the old ways that Faulkner felt were the heart of the South.

The town of 20,000 still radiates out from the central square, where an old, large courthouse still stands and is still the central political and legal fact for the county.

But unlike Jefferson, Oxford is a college town and the existence of Ole Miss changes the equation radically. For one, there are bookstores in Oxford.

And, when you stay in the motel at the edge of town, the nearest restaurant serves Orange Roughy with Cilantro Salsa — an Eastern attempt at Fish Veracruz — and Pork Chops Stuffed with Morel Mushrooms and Pine Nuts.

And what is worse, the trendy, warehouse atmosphere with its scrubbed concrete floor and unfinished wood handrails, is home to waiters brandishing pepper grinders, who say, “Good evening, my name is Brian and I’ll be your server tonight.”

So, it can be disappointing, if you go to Oxford to find the flavor of the Compsons, Sutpens and Snopeses.

The courthouse square, where the town used to buy its dry goods, hardware and groceries, now houses restaurants, sportswear shops and a very fine bookstore with a very fine section of Faulkner first editions. Upstairs is a coffee bar and tables, where students and tourists mix while reading the morning paper over a cup of hazelnut mocha.

But if you could walk back in time just a few years, you would find a little shopfront cafe called Smitty’s. In the early morning, it would be filled with courthouse lawyers and snappy waitresses, drawling conversation accompanied by the music of clinking glasses being racked in the kitchen.

At Smitty’s, the waitress still called you “Honey,”’ and meant it. The biscuits were still smothered in white sausage gravy and the buttered grits were always salted and peppered.

And the weathered faces of the Old South still gathered for their morning cup of coffee and the local gossip.

When I was there once, in 1994, one particular and dignified gentleman caught my eye. He must have been 75, with thin white hair combed so the furrows left by the comb were clean lines. He wore a striped tie and a dark blue suit that his frailing limbs couldn’t quite fill out anymore. He also wore bifocals and talked in that sweet, subdued aristocratic drawl.

He was natty in a way only very old, very respectable Southern men can be.

At first, he shared the next table with three other men who we learned were lawyers from the courthouse. The blue suit was a judge.

But more and more men filed in and eventually, they all gravitated to one wall, where several tables were lined up end to end. There must have been 20 or more lawyers, all talking and laughing and keeping each other amused with good ole stories and friendly joshin’.

The judge sat dead center at the row of tables, the obvious center of gravity. The surrounding lawyers looked almost like apostles at the Last Supper.

The old man might as well have been Judge Sartoris. He could have come straight from the pages of Sanctuary or Intruder in the Dust. You could sense he knew not only everyone in town, but knew their granddaddy.

But there were also things that had changed: A few of the lawyers were black.

Smitty’s is gone now, replaced first by a yuppified eatery called 208 South Lamar, after its street address, and currently by a Mexican restaurant.

But even with the changes — in some ways, Oxford is impossible to tell from any other university town, whether Chapel Hill, N.C. or Charlottesville, Va. — but the building now occupied by La Paz, formerly 208, formerly Smitty’s, and before that Grundy’s, and before that other bars and restaurants, was built in the 1880s, and despite the frequent facelifts, the past is still there underneath.

Those who don’t understand it laugh when you tell them that in many ways, the South is more civilized than any other region in the country. They shouldn’t. While the rest of the nation is fragmenting culturally, the South is holding on, however tenuously, to the culture and history that made it what it is and that Faulkner chronicled.

In New York, history is a subject taught in school; in Mississippi, history is your grandfather.

—Richard Nilsen

Heartland odyssey

Night train

Crossing the country by rail

Hauling miles

Whistle a happy tune

What Stuart learned from his brother’s dog

Little Bighorn

Bighorn Mountains

Kodak validation

Oxford, Mississippi