In 1494, at the age of 23, after years of apprenticeship as an artist in Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer left Germany to visit Venice and Italy and find out what all the Hoohah was about. He was amazed at what he saw and when he returned home to Germany, he brought the Italian Renaissance with him. He went back south for seconds in 1505 and stayed for over a year, soaking up the influences. It was what he had to do if he wanted to see what the Big Boys were doing.
If you wanted to see, you had to travel. There were no full-color coffeetable art books to thumb through. If you wanted to see the work of Bellini, you had to go to Venice; for Raphael, to Rome.
“Goethe in Italy” by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1786
In 1786, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then age 37, made the trip, this time to see the Roman and Greek sculpture that had been so highly praised in the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He stayed until 1788, studying more than the statues, including many statuesque young women, which he later wrote about in his book of poetry, Roman Elegies.
For most of history — until improvements in color printing in the middle of the 20th century — the only way to see famous art was to leave home and go there. Yes, there were engraved black and white copies published, and later monochrome halftones, but you could not really get a sense of Rembrandt or Titian without traveling.
It gave rise in 17th century to the practice of upper-class families sending their sons on the “Grand Tour” to become educated and cultured. From the 1600s to about the middle of the 19th century, it was common for well-off young men to take a “gap year” — or two — to visit the Continent and see the sights and become men of the world before taking up their roles in government or business. Of course, many of these youths were more attracted to the live demoiselles and regazze than to the canvas madonnas.
“Rose,” Philbert-Louis Debucourt 1788
It wasn’t just visual art. Before recordings, if you wanted to hear a Beethoven symphony, you had to attend a live concert. If you lived outside the city, you had to travel to get to the concert hall. Bach famously walked 280 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck in order to hear Buxtehude play the organ. Even to hear now-famous symphonies and concertos you likely had to wait years between programmed performances. You might be lucky to have heard Beethoven’s Fifth once or twice in your life. Now, it seems, you can’t get away from it.
Today, when you can own 30 different CDs of the Beethoven symphonies and have your choice from Furtwangler to Norrington; you can fill your bookshelves with illustrated volumes of any artist you want; and watch endless YouTube videos about the Mona Lisa, it is important to remember that they are not the actual experience of the art in question, but varyingly faithful simulacra. You still need the real thing. A three-inch color plate of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa cannot replicate the experience of seeing the real thing.
And so, we go to museums and galleries to get to know the art that is our cultural inheritance. Even today people travel across the world to see some of the world’s most famous art. The Grand Tour still exists, if only in ghost form, as a gap year or a summer abroad. My granddaughter had her high school summer in Italy. The traditions continue. Such travel affords an education that books just cannot give.
In the 1960s, I accompanied my grandmother when she went back to the Old Country for the first time since she was five years old. We went to the village where she was born, Mosby, in southern Norway, and as part of that trip, I was sent on a (literal) Cook’s tour of Western Europe, taking in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. I saw the Cologne cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, Ste. Chapelle and the Louvre, among other things. Mostly, it made suburban New Jersey seem even more banal.
Met; Guggenheim; Frick; Whitney; Cloisters; MoMA
But then, I tried to escape the Garden State as much as possible. I was lucky: I had my own Grand Tour just a few miles away. During my own high school years, living on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, I spent as much time as I could in Manhattan, going to concerts and visiting all the museums: The Met, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Whitney, the Cloisters, the Asia Society, even the long-gone Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle.
And most of all — the Museum of Modern Art, where I felt most at home. I came to know many famous paintings as old friends. Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Matisse’s L’Atelier Rouge; Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon; Pollock’s One Number 31; Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie; Henri Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy; Dali’s Persistence of Memory — all proper blue-chip Modern Art landmarks.
After I went away to college, I frequently made the trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the National Gallery of Art, and later, the Hirschhorn and Corcoran. I ate up art like a starving man. It’s hardly surprising that I later made my career as an art critic.
And working for the newspaper, I was sent around the country for major exhibits in Boston, New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia. I was even sent to South Africa in 1989 to study the art scene there. And vacations brought me and my wife to France many times. Seeing as much as possible and finding troves of art in even small corners of the Continent.
There have been dozens of important artworks I have been grateful to have known, not just in reproduction, but live, in front of my own eyes. My inner life is infinitely enriched by the experiences. There are many I could name, from Rembrandt’s self portrait in DC to Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Art We? Where Are We Going? from Boston, but I need to pick out at least these six as central to my understanding of art, and of life.
When you know works from reproduction, you cannot feel their size, cannot know the precise colors and pigments used, cannot grasp their tactile surfaces. Some of the most famous art in the world is known to most people by their reproduction on coffee mugs, T-shirts or commemorative plates. What you think is art is really just iconography — the nameable subject matter. The actuality, the physicality of the work is irrelevant in such cases. Seeing the original can then be a revelation.
So here are the six works that have meant the most to me, that I am most grateful for having been able to know personally.
Picasso, Guernica — When I was growing up, this, perhaps the greatest painting of the 20th century, was sitting in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, and I visited it often. As a teenager, I knew it was “important,” because I had seen it in books and magazines. But I thought of it as “mine,” because I knew it would always be there for me. Alas, in 1981, it was repatriated to Spain, where, I have to admit, it belongs. An old friend moved away. It was the first important artwork that I had what felt like a personal relationship with.
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles — In reverse, Blue Poles is a painting that came to New York for me. Pollock’s 16-foot drip painting from 1952 was auctioned off from a private collection in 1973 and sent to Australia. I loved many of the great Pollocks from MoMA and the Met, but thought I had lost the chance forever to see perhaps his most famous work. But a retrospective Pollock exhibit in 1998 at MoMA brought it back temporarily to the Big Apple. I got to see it there, where it was the jewel-lit highlight of the last gallery.
Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece — The giant altarpiece comprises 10 paintings by Matthias Grünewald, including the pathos-laden crucifixion as its centerpiece, and a group of polychrome wood sculptures by Nikolaus Hagenauer, executed between 1512 and 1516. It sits in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, France. The altarpiece was designed to be either closed or open, with various panels showing at different times in the Catholic calendar. I have no stake in the religious significance, I cannot help but be overwhelmed by the pathos and power of the work.
Lascaux II — The cave paintings at Lascaux, France, date from about 20,000 years ago. They were discovered in 1963 and include about 600 images of prehistoric animals. The caves have been closed since 1963 to protect them, but a copy has been made and open to the public. I never thought I would get to experience them, but I got to visit both the reproduced experience at Lascaux II, but also the genuine cave art at nearby Font-de-Gaume. Seeing the original art there threw my spine into a buzz of uncanny deep-time — a state not rational but limbic.
Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows — In 1999 the LA County Museum of Art mounted a 70-piece show of the paintings of Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, including many of his most famous works. My job got me sent to cover the exhibit and I was blown over by the works (also, astonished at how amateurish and awful many of his early works were: It took a while for Van Gogh to become Van Gogh).
One of the last paintings in the last gallery was Wheatfield with Crows and up close you could see who wild and feverish the artist’s brushstrokes were, and what colors sat on his pallete, left largely unblended on the canvas.
North Rose Window, Chartres Cathedral — I have been back to Chartres many times, and each visit, I spend a half hour, at least, sitting in the transept staring at the North Rose Window. It is, as I have said many times, the single most beautiful man-made creation I have ever seen. It is transcendent, a glowing object of meditation, whose shapes seem to move, to dance around the centerpoint. I am awe blasted. It almost makes up of all the misery, suffering and death human beings cause to each other.
This is, of course, a limited selection. Before writing, I made a list of paintings, sculptures, plays, operas, architecture, poems, novels — I could just make a list of the types of art that would already be too long to include in a single blog entry. Narrowing down to visual arts still left me with too many things to write about — hence my squeezing it all into only six works. (It tried to make a conventional 5, but I already feel bad about only including six.)
Seeing all this art and lamenting all that I never had a chance to see, only reinforced my sense that art is not just what makes us human, but how it makes us human.
I was talking with my very Southern wife about how those brought up down here have a stronger connection to the land than us Yankees. Southerners have often lived on the same patch of land for generations and their sense of identity can course back through great-grandparents and beyond. Your sense of who you are includes the centuries before you were born. New Jersey never gave me that.
But I do have that same sense when looking at the paintings or hearing the music of the past. This all gave birth to me; it is who I am. We too often think of culture in terms of hoity-toity high culture. But really, culture is all the things that have accumulated over time to make the lives we now take for granted.
When I see or hear the so-called canonical works of Western culture, I have that sense of belonging to a long, continuous line. It speaks to me; it tells me who I am.
When I was a kid, most things in the world just were. Everything was normal, even if it wasn’t. People lived in houses, roads were paved, families had a mom and dad. And, for a kid, parents were just parents; I never gave much thought to why they did what they did. It wasn’t even that if they did something, they must have had a reason. They just did things. They were Mom and Dad, and as children, me and my brothers just followed along. As a child, the world is a given.
It’s hard to recall that state of affairs, when things happened because they happened. That they might have done things for the abstract good of their children never dawned on me. Of course, now that I am old, I look back and realize how much they did for us, things they didn’t have to do, or things they probably would have preferred to do some other way, including some other things they might have wanted to do with their sparse vacation time.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
But one of the things they did for us was travel. When we had our summer school vacations, Mom would pore over various brochures, magazine articles, and roadmaps and carefully plan routes to drive and sites to take in, and then, when it came time, we would load up the car and take off. We went to Washington D.C., to Niagara Falls, to Fort Ticonderoga, to Gettysburg — and many spots in between. Only later did I come to understand there was a purpose to these vacation trips. they chose these things to expose their children to history, geography, politics and to let us see what was possible outside suburban New Jersey. Travel was part of our education.
Back when they were children, they didn’t get to travel. They both grew up in northern New Jersey and neither had more than a high school education. Dad’s family was heavily religious and didn’t approve of having fun, and Mom had to raise her two younger siblings after her father died when she was still in grade school and her mother had to find work in New York City. And so, the worlds they grew up in were limited.
German gun, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France
But when my father was drafted in 1940, he was sent to Camp Wheeler in segregated Georgia. He didn’t talk much about his army life, but he did express shock at discovering the pervasiveness of racial discrimination. And then he was sent overseas after D-Day to France, Czechoslovakia and Germany and found that other peoples had various ways of making a decent life. His horizons were involuntarily expanded.
When they got married, shortly after the war, they felt it was important to broaden their children’s horizons, too, and to make sure we got the best educations. There was never any question that their kids would go to college. (I was told that when I entered second grade, I asked if that meant I could go to college “next year?”) Education was Priority One. Travel was a component of that.
Kristiansand, Norway
Later, when I was in high school, they made it possible for me to go to Europe, accompanying my immigrant grandmother to her birthplace in Norway, and to take a bus tour through France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. A few years later, my younger brother, Craig, was sent off on a similar trip.
Mark Twain famously said that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
The vast bulk of the MAGA world, it seems to me, is made up of those who have never ventured far from their birthplace. If they had seen how others live, they would not accept the lies.
Cairo, Illinois
Travel, then, has pretty much always been an essential part of my life, and having become an adult — at least as quantified in years accrued on the planet — I have continued the habit instilled by my parents. Education wasn’t only in books; I read Huckleberry Finn, of course, but I’ve also been to Mark Twain’s childhood hometown of Hannibal, Mo., and to what remains of Cairo, Ill. I’ve driven along the entire length of the Mississippi River, from Lake Itasca, Minn., to the Venice Marina where the road ends in Louisiana.
Vancouver Island, British Columbia
It is rare to mention a place I haven’t been in the continental United States or provincial Canada. Big Sur; Mt. Katahdin; the Everglades; El Paso;, the Union Pacific Bailey Train Yard in North Platte, Neb.; Hudson Bay; Halifax, Nova Scotia; the Tehachapi Loop in California; the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota; even Glacier Bay in Alaska.
Glacier Bay, Alaska
Believe me, I can be quite irritating, when someone mentions some far-off place and I chime in, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been there. Had a great Po Boy sandwich in a little shack along the road in Pecan Island.” Which is a tiny community along the southernmost road in Louisiana. Or “Abiquiú? Yes, we visited Georgia O’Keeffe’s place there.” I am slowly learning to keep my yap shut.
Red Mesa, Navajo Reservation, Arizona
I’ve been to every state except Hawaii, and most of them many times, and every province in Canada, save only Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. I’ve lived in four corners of the continental states, growing up in the Northeast, moving to the American South, then to Seattle in the Northwest, and spending 25 years as a writer in the Southwest. Each move gave me a chance to explore all the territory nearby, often in some detail (There’s hardly a square meter of Arizona that I haven’t been to. Go ahead, name something obscure: Ajo? Red Mesa? Tumacacori? Freedonia? Gadsden? Quartzsite? Check, check, check, check, check and check.)
Cape of Good Hope, South Africa
I’ve been to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and to Marylebone Road in London; I’ve been to the Chartres Cathedral, and to the bull ring in Arles, in Provence. My late wife and I went back to France many times, and drove to all six corners of “The Hexagon.”
And so, yes, I’ve been to the D-Day beaches at Normandy and to the bomb craters still evident in Verdun, to the cave art along the Vézère Valley, to the paleolithic menhirs and dolmens near Locmariaquer.
Dolmen, Locmariaquer, Brittany, France
I’ve visited the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Hammer Museum of Haines, Alaska.
And it has all been an education. I certainly learned that the omelet I get at Denny’s is a pale mutilation of the rich, creamy offering you can find at any neighborhood cafe in Paris.
O’Keeffe Country, New Mexico
Of course, I’ve also learned how little of the world I’ve actually seen. I have so much of the non-European inflected planet yet to see, although, at my age, it’s almost certain I will never get to Japan or the Seychelles or Samoa. Just as, no matter how many books I’ve read, there is always a hundred times more books I will never get to read, and not enough time left even to put a dent in that list. I keep trying.
Windsor Ruins, Mississippi
And so, in addition to bragging about all the places I’ve been, I am shamed by all those places I have not gone to, just as all the art I haven’t seen, all the books I haven’t read, all the music I have never heard. But I think that it is only because of all I have read, seen, and heard, that I know enough to feel the gaping holes in my education.
It began when I was watching syndicated reruns of old Gunsmoke episodes and I couldn’t help, as an adult, but wonder, “Where do all these people live?” I mean, there didn’t seem to be any houses in Dodge City.
Yes, we saw that Marshall Dillon slept on a cot in his office and that Miss Kitty had a room at the back of the saloon, and Doc Adams had an apartment attached to his surgery. And perhaps Sam the bartender had a room upstairs at the Long Branch and perhaps Jonas had a second-floor apartment above his general store. But the town was fully populated with people and the only street we ever see on Gunsmoke is lined with shops and businesses — at least two saloons, the Dodge House hotel and a restaurant where the gang often dined. Where were the houses?
I know it’s not really important. Westerns are America’s foundational myth, and like myths from the time of Gilgamesh through Ancient Greece and up to Gunsmoke, we don’t ask realism of the stories. They are moral tales, parables, etiologies, and euhemeristic histories. Unnecessary detail just clutters up the telling of the tale. As I said before, no one asks if Hercules had a mortgage.
But the issue of Dodge City housing interested me nonetheless.
I found an old map of Dodge City from 1882 and there were plenty of houses along the side streets that led off from Front Street, the main road of the town. There were four churches, a courthouse, a school, a grist mill, an Odd Fellows Hall, a railroad depot, a newspaper office and at least four hotels, including the Dodge House, Cox & Boyd, proprietors.
Admittedly, 1882 is about five or six years later than the fictional Gunsmoke Dodge was supposedly set (according to its creators), but it should tell us something about Western settlements of the era. Yet, except for a few episodes of rowdy trail hands shooting up the place, Gunsmoke rarely mentions either the railroad or the cattle business. Where are the cattle pens? Why does no one ever mention the stink?
Then I discovered a trove of historical photographs from the Gunsmoke era and pored over them for what they might tell me.
Gunsmoke, first on radio and then on TV for 20 years was intended as an “adult” Western, with more grown-up plots and themes than the standard cowboy movie. And in the early years, largely succeeds, with some quite grim stories about the difficulties of life on the prairie. But even given that, the series relies on many of the Western movie tropes, including its sense of how a Western town is built and functions: one main street lined with storefronts and saloons.
As I have said, I am not asking a television entertainment to be a documentary, and I am not complaining that Matt Dillon’s town had little to do with the historical Dodge City. But I couldn’t help but want to find out what the reality might have been.
Ruts still visible from the Santa Fe Trail, near Dodge City
A little background: Once, there was a piece of land in the middle of the continent halfway between another piece of land controlled by people speaking English and another piece of land controlled by people speaking Spanish. And the English- and Spanish- speaking peoples wanted to do business together and so wagons of goods moved from one side of America to the other side along familiar routes that eventually became well-worn trails. The one we’re concerned with was called the Santa Fe Trail.
Of course, the parcel of land between them was not empty, but occupied by native peoples, who sometimes took exception to the Europeans who trespassed over their land, and so, the English-speaking peoples sent out their army to build forts along the trails to protect the merchants and their teamsters, and later to protect the European immigrants who wanted to live in the middle of the continent or travel across it to get to the parts further west.
Fort Dodge in 1879 and General Grenville Dodge
And so, on April 10, 1865, a company of soldiers from the Eleventh Cavalry Regiment under orders from General Grenville M. Dodge established a camp on the Arkansas River along the Santa Fe Trail. Lacking building materials, they made dug-outs into the river banks for shelter. Dodge later wrote in his autobiography that the soldiers sarcastically named the place after him because they “were so mad at being sent there .. with so little accommodations that they named the place Camp Dodge.”
Arkansas River near Fort Dodge
Sidenote No. 1
Researching history can be a nightmare. There are ambiguous and conflicting sources everywhere. Dates are in question, name spellings are helter skelter, tall tales sometimes intrude with frequently told-fictions. First-hand accounts often appear to glorify their authors. I have tried to relate the most dependable version of Dodge City’s history, but there are sometimes smudgy areas.
For instance, Grenville Dodge isn’t the only Dodge involved, and sometimes one of the others gets credit for the fort’s name. In 1851 a Col. I Dodge established a fort to protect the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas. The fort proved temporary. Gen. Grenville Dodge ordered the construction of Fort Dodge near what is now Dodge City in 1865. Later, in 1872, the fort was commanded by Col. Richard Irving Dodge. Confusion seems inevitable.
Back to our story
The camp was soon refurbished with sod house buildings and then wood and stone buildings and officially became Fort Dodge and manned by up to four companies of soldiers.
Henry Sitler in later years, and his sod house in 1871
In 1871, rancher Henry L. Sitler built a sod house about five miles west of the fort, which became a stopping place for those traveling on the Santa Fe Trail, and a year later, a town was platted and George M. Hoover set up a tent to sell liquor to the soldiers at the fort. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived in town later that year and things picked up quickly.
At first it was the trade in buffalo hides that built Dodge City, with the bones and skins of the buffalo sent by rail back to the east. Indeed, the settlement was first named Buffalo City.
Buffalo hides at Dodge City
When cattle from Texas needed to be shipped to eastern markets, towns were established along the route of the railroad. In Kansas, first in Abilene, in 1867. An outbreak of cattle fever led to a quarantine line in the state, and the railhead moved further and further west, reaching Dodge City in 1876, roughly the years when fictional Marshal Dillon ruled the town.
From 1875 to 1886, some 5 million beeves were herded up the trail from Texas to Kansas railheads. In 1877 alone, Dodge City was the largest of the cattle-shipping boom towns, loading up and shipping out 500,000 head of cattle.
Route of the AT&SF Railway that got the beef to the slaughterhouses and meatpacking industry of Chicago
As Dodge City grew, and Kansas became more populated, the need for a fort on the Santa Fe Trail became less important, and by the end, when the fort closed in 1882, it was garrisoned by only about a dozen soldiers. The remaining buildings were later turned into a home for retired soldiers.
Dodge City, 1872
This was the milieu that the fictional Dodge City supposedly took place in.
Gunsmoke remained on TV for 20 years and the town barely changed, despite having moved from its original outdoor location shooting to being filmed on fabricated sets in the studio.
Constructing Dodge City in studio for “Gunsmoke”
The actual town grew and changed continuously, beginning in 1871 with a population of 1 — as Henry Sitler built a sod house in the location five miles from Fort Dodge — to a population near of 1200 just five years later and to 1,763 by the 1890 census. TV’s Dodge City should have been filled with ongoing construction. The trains not only took cattle out of Dodge, but brought in supplies and lumber to build the town in a region mostly devoid of timber.
The town was incorporated and platted in 1872, and George Hoover moved to a wood building on Front Street to serve thirsty Fort Dodge soldiers, buffalo hunters and the increasing number of cattle herders.
Front Street, Dodge City, 1872
Gunsmoke’s Dodge City was a standard-issue Western town, like those of so many other towns in other TV series and movies — a wide dirt street with wood-frame buildings on both sides.
The reality of Dodge City was that it was built alongside the Arkansas River, where the Santa Fe Trail paralleled the river. When the railroad came, it, too, followed the river. The town then grew on the far side of the tracks, leaving the town plan with the river to the south, the tracks to the north, and Front Street and the primary businesses in a single row on the north side of the street, as shown in this detail of the bird’s-eye view map, from 1882.
This was a common city plan, and can be found all across both the West and the South, wherever a town grew alongside railway tracks. Tracks; road; storefronts, in that order.
Winter 1872, Dodge City
Sidenote No. 2
The constant growth of the town from 1871 to 1900 means that there is no single version of Dodge City to be had. It was always changing. Over the two decades of Matt Dillon’s TV tenure, the place barely changed a whit, although Dillon did. James Arness was 32 with a boyish face when the series began. When the series ended, he was in his 50s. Gunsmoke movies continued to be made, and by the time of the last, Gunsmoke: One Man’s Justice, from 1994, Arness was 71, which, if we insist on a concurrent timeline, puts the movie’s action into roughly 1914.
The TV show seems to remain static in time, other than the persistent aging of its inhabitants, but if we pretend the town aged as the actors did, the final episodes would have taken place in the 1890s. By then the cattle drives were long over, the town had settled into domesticity, and the six-guns and stetsons were relics of the past. The most common hat worn by men in Dodge city was a bowler.
Back to the main story
Dodge City, 1873
In the group of photos I collected, I found records of many of the town’s inhabitants, and they tell a story of Dodge City’s growth and character. I wanted to share a few of them. I purposely did not include information on several of the more mythic figures that are frequently dredged out to tell the tale. You can find all kinds of stories about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Dora Hand or Bat Masterson, and they have all been through the Dime Novel, Hollywood movie, TV series myth-making machine and many of their stories are questionable at best. Many conflicting versions abound.
So, I wanted to mention George Hoover, Chalk Beeson, Ben Hodges, Thomas McCarty, James “Dog” Kelley, Ormond Wright, and Squirrel Tooth Alice, among others, all of whom are central to Dodge City’s history.
George Hoover and wife, Margaret
Hoover was the second person, after Henry Sitler, to settle on the site of what would become the town, in 1872 and set up a bar to serve travelers and the soldiers of Fort Dodge. He sold whisky by the ladle for 25 cents (equivalent value today: about $20.) At the time, alcohol was forbidden at Fort Dodge and for a radius of five miles, which is why Hoover’s tent-and-wood-plank bar was opened where it was and Dodge City took hold five miles from the fort.
Hoover became the town’s first elected mayor, reelected three times, became a state legislator, and, after many successful businesses, opened the town’s first bank. He died in 1914, a few months after his wife, Margaret, died. He said, according to the July 16, 1914, Dodge City Globe, “that he had but little desire to live longer, and declared that life had no more interest for him [after his wife’s death].”
James Kelley, Kelley on horse, and Ben Hodges
British-born James Kelley was mayor of Dodge City from 1877 to 1881. He was part owner of the Beatty and Kelley Restaurant and kept a tamed black bear, named Teddy, behind the shop. Kelley had a white horse and often wore a white corduroy suit and kept a bunch of greyhounds, hence his nickname, “Dog” Kelley. His restaurant burned down in 1885 and he opened up the Kelley Opera House on the corner of Front Street and First Avenue. Kelley died in 1912, having spent his last years at the soldiers’ home at the former Fort Dodge.
Dodge City, 1878
Ben Hodges was half-Mexican, half Black and a cook’s helper on a cattle drive, who stopped in Dodge in 1872 and began a series of (unsuccessful) land-deal swindles and claims to wealth and nobility. He lived for years in a little shack on the south side of town, near the river and kept young boys fascinated with his tall tales. The town seems to have tolerated Ben as the “town character.” He was made an “Assistant Deputy” and allowed to carry a gun, minus the firing pin and his shoplifting of food from stores was accepted since, “he only took what he needed.”
When he died, in 1929, a collection was raised to buy him a plot in the elite Catholic cemetery rather than a pauper’s grave. According to one pall bearer, “We wanted him where they could keep an eye on him.”
Larry Deger and T.L. McCarty
Dodge City’s original Matt Dillon and Doc Adams were Marshal Lawrence Deger and Dr. Thomas McCarty. Deger was the first marshal of the town.
From 1871 till it was incorporated in 1875, Dodge City had no law officers, and things were quite chaotic, with a number of murders gone unaddressed until a vigilance committee was formed. Unfortunately, the committee soon became the source of violence and the Kansas governor appointed Charles Bassett sheriff of Ford County in an attempt to establish some order. It is estimated that between 1872 and 1876, some 70,875 gallons of whiskey were consumed in Dodge City, which is the equivalent of approximately or 4,536,000 individual shots — a lot for a town of about a thousand citizens.
St. James Saloon, Dodge City
In 1875, Deger was appointed marshal by the town council (there is some confusion in the popular mind, as a U.S. marshal is a federal employee, while a city marshal is essentially the police chief and is hired by local government. However, in some locations, marshals were elected — it’s all quite confusing. Sheriffs are usually politicians, who are elected). Deger was a saloon keeper and took sides in a developing confrontation among townspeople between those who wanted a more open town to provide booze and professional women to cattle drivers, i.e. “good for business,” and those who wanted a quieter, more civilized town. Deger wanted peace.
What ensued in 1873 is sometimes called the Saloon Wars and sometimes the Dodge City Wars. Deger was by that time mayor and had laws passed establishing prohibition and outlawing prostitution. It was also suggested, for instance, “We should have an ordinance prohibiting the firing of guns within the city limits.” And, “We should have a law not allowing the riding of horses over sidewalks and into the saloons.”
In the course of these reforms, three “singers” at the Long Branch saloon were arrested, but none of the workers at other saloons were also nabbed. Favoritism was charged and the pro-business group, called “the gang,” hired a bunch of former lawmen as muscle for their side of the argument.
Dodge City Peace Commission
A famous photo of the group was made at the time, with (standing L-R: William Harris; Luke Short; Bat Masterson; William Petillon. And seated, L-R: Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp; Frank McLean; and Neil Brown.)
The sides stared each other down, but it was finally resolved without gunfire, and the Long Branch was allowed to reopen. But women in the profession were moved south of the railroad to the “wrong side of the tracks.”
Varieties Dance Hall, Dodge City
Deger married German-born Etta Engleman in 1883, and moved to Texas where he operated a lumber company. He died in 1924.
Thomas McCarty, his wife, Sarah, and Sing Lee
McCarty was the town’s first civilian doctor and Ford County’s first coroner. He and his wife, Sarah, arrived in Dodge City in 1872, on their way further west, but stayed in town. He operated his surgery and partnered in a drug store with Herman Fringer and later opened his own, called City Drug Store.
City Drug Store, 1877
McCarty’s son, Claude, was reputedly the first legitimate baby born in Dodge City, and later also became a doctor and with his father opened the McCarty Hospital in 1905, remodeling the old four-story Central Hotel.
The doctor’s household included a servant named Sing Lee, who wore the traditional Chinese queue.
Dr. Thomas McCarty died in 1930, ten years after his wife Sarah. His son lived until 1950.
Chalkley Beeson
Chalk Beeson came to Dodge in 1874 with his wife, Ida. Soon, he received the Billiard Hall Saloon as payment for a debt and renamed it the Saratoga, one of the few that didn’t employ prostitutes. Instead, he featured a five-piece band, with himself as leader on the fiddle. In 1877, the Dodge City Times wrote, “It is a rare treat to drop in at the Saratoga upon Mr. Beeson, and listen to his last and best musical combination. Mr. Beeson is a thorough lover of good music, and by his skillful selection of good performers … draws crowds of attentive listeners.”
Dodge City Cow-Boy Band, Beeson in center with fiddle
In 1884, he expanded his band to form the Dodge City Cow-Boy Band and toured, including an appearance in the inaugural parade of President Benjamin Harrison in 1889.
Beeson was later elected sheriff of Ford County and in 1903, elected to the state legislature. He died in 1912 when he was kicked by his horse.
By the middle 1870s, there were a little over 1000 residents in Dodge City but 16 saloons. In addition to the Long Branch and the Saratoga were the Alamo, the Alhambra, the Crystal Palace, the Lone Star, the Oasis, Congress Hall and the Green Front. Some of them just one-room storefronts.
A reporter from the Hays City Sentinel wrote of Dodge City at the time, “The employment of many citizens is gambling. Her virtue is prostitution and her beverage is whisky.” On TV, the saloon girls share drinks with cowboys, but, as one writer put it, “Miss Kitty wasn’t selling chocolate bars.” We know the names of several of these hard-working women.
Sarah “Sadie” Ratzell was born in Philadelphia but grew up on a Kansas farm. When she was 18, she became a prostitute and lived with a Dodge City dance hall owner in the 1880s.
In July, 1881, she complained to then-Marshal Fred Singer about a man prowling around her home after dark. Singer found and shot 23-year-old Joseph McDonald hidden in a growth of sunflowers. A coroner’s inquest that followed notes “the latter raised his arm horizontally, as though in the act of firing. The marshal apprehended some danger from this movement, and not knowing whether the man had a pistol or not, raised his weapon and fired, the shot striking McDonald in the hand and passing into his right side, causing death in three hours.” Singer later resigned as marshal and opened saloon, which occupation he said was more financially rewarding.
Front Street with Long Branch Saloon, 1875
Squirrel Tooth Alice was born Mary Elizabeth Haley in 1855 in Texas. She was kidnapped by Comanches in 1864 and ransomed three years later. She ran away from home at 14 to become a dance-hall girl and prostitute. She hooked up with”Texas Billy” Thompson. In 1873, Thompson shot and killed the sheriff in Ellsworth, Kan., but escaped from jail and fled to Dodge City, where she took up her trade. Later the pair, by then married, moved to Colorado and later, Texas. She was known as Squirrel Tooth after a gap in her front teeth. She also kept pet prairie dogs on leash and collar. As Libby Thompson, she had nine children by several men, while running a brothel. She died in California in 1953 at the age of 97.
Rose Vastine was known as Timberline because she was 6”2’ and worked in Dodge City in the 1870s. According to one account, she was suicidal, and while later living in Creede, Colo., shot herself six times, but lived. “She made yet another attempt to shoot herself in the chest in 1893. ‘Medical attendants were at once summoned and the would-be suicide is in a fair way to recovery,’ said the newspaper.” Little else is known.
Dodge City, 1879
Celia Ann Blaylock was born in Iowa in 1850. When she was 18, she ran away from home and found her way, as Mattie Blaylock, to Dodge City, where she became a prostitute. In 1876, she took up with city deputy marshal Wyatt Earp and for six years lived as his common-law wife while maintaining her profession. She suffered from extreme migraines and became addicted to laudanum as a pain killer. She left Dodge City with him in 1879, going to New Mexico, and then to Tombstone, Ariz. Eventually Earp left her, and in 1888, she died from an overdose, ruled by the coroner as “suicide by opium poisoning.” She was 38.
Interior, Long Branch Saloon
The Long Branch has become the most famous, although there never was a Miss Kitty. It was established in 1874 and named for its owner’s hometown of Long Branch, N.J. It passed through several hands and in 1878, Beeson bought a share in it. He sold his portion in 1883 to Luke Short.
Zimmerman’s hardware store
Two years later, it burned down in a fire that destroyed much of Front Street, taking out in addition, Dog Kelley’s Opera House, Charles Heinz’s Delmonico restaurant, the York, Parker, Draper Mercantile Company, F.C. Zimmermann’s hardware store and even the first brick building in town, Robert Wright’s store, which held out long enough to retrieve a good deal of his merchandise before the building went. But, as the newspaper reported, “Some awful good whiskey was allowed to burn up.”
That fire, and a second, smaller one a month later, led the city council to establish a fire department and a city water works, with fire hydrants around the city.
Robert M. Wright and his book
There are many more citizens of Dodge back then, and I can’t include them all. One early resident (and later mayor — they all seem to have taken turns as mayor) was Robert Wright, who, in his old age, wrote a book called, Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital and the Great Southwest in The Days of The Wild Indian, the Buffalo, the Cowboy, Dance Halls, Gambling Halls, and Bad Men, published in 1913. It is loaded with familiar stories of the early times in Kansas, but also argues that it wasn’t as bad as all that. He tries to put a clean face on the popular image. (I have read it; let’s just say, Wright was not a graceful writer — it’s a tough slog). Wright dies two years after his book was published.
L-R: Margaret Walker; Dave Mather; Rev. Ormond Wright
Among the many people I have had to leave out of this blog entry are Margaret Walker, the town’s first schoolteacher; “Mysterious Dave” Mather, who owned the Opera House Saloon and was the survivor of one of the more famous gunfights in town; Rev. Ormond Wright, who presided over the first church built in Dodge, a non-denominational worship.
Dodge City, 1887, with Arkansas River
There were enough documented personalities from the early years of Dodge City, that a TV series could have been made without resorting to the fictions of Matt, Doc, and Kitty. (I mean no slight on Gunsmoke, which, especially in its early years did truly attempt to be more faithful to the spirit, if not the fact of its times, and was often extremely well written.)
Dodge City, 1890s
Dodge City went from tents and sod to wood frame buildings and to multi-story brick in a little over ten years, in the process building institutions, electing a town council and mayor, and hiring a police force, so that, when the cattle industry largely disappeared in the 1880s, it was prepared to be a self-sustaining community. The real town was a dynamic entity; on TV, it was just a stage set.
The foundational mythology of the United States belongs to the cowboy. An argument can be made for the Founding Fathers, but they are understood more as history than as myth. And by myth I don’t merely mean something that isn’t “true,” but as a mental model that we have absorbed as the definition of what makes us American. We are more John Wayne than we are John Adams.
Like many of us, I grew up on Westerns, although because I am in my 70s, my foundational Westerns were those from the 1930s recycled in the 1950s on television. I grew up knowing who Ken Maynard was, or Buck Jones. Back then, TV stations were starving for content to broadcast, and the pile of old Westerns filled the Saturday morning hunger. Those younger than me likely didn’t have such a cinematic indoctrination. Later TV Westerns became their version.
But, since I wrote a blog piece about TV’s Gunsmoke, (link here) I have been thinking about Westerns and their role as our national psychic subconscious, and about how the fictional version differed from the historical. And what is more, what that shift means, culturally.
It has not always meant the same thing, and the evolution over time describes the changes in America’s perception of itself.
I believe there were distinct eras of Westerns, that have evolved over the past two centuries. These versions of the West overlap, and all of them have been present from the beginning, or near enough. But the preponderance of each defines each era.
The West began in upstate New York with Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, as he was known in The Last of the Mohicans, and gave us the prototype of the rugged individualist. He morphed into Jim Bridger, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and various mountain men living in the wilderness.
Jim Bridger; Joseph Walker; Jim Baker; Jim Beckwourth
These heroes played out the myth of how we conquered a vast wilderness with rugged individualism and tenacity. It grew into the myth of Manifest Destiny.
After the Civil War, when economic exploitation of the West began in earnest, with mining and cattle industries, the cowboy took over, with adventurous exploits popularized in a thousand dime novels. Certain names begin showing up with regularity, including Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Belle Starr. These elided into the early Western movies, including The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Across the Plains (1911), which starred Broncho Billy Anderson, the first cowboy movie star.
And a split in the myth. On one hand, you had William S. Hart, who attempted a level or realism in costume and plot (matched with a high level of sentimentality), and on the other hand, you had Tom Mix, the show-biz cowboy all duded out with fancy kit.
The difference was between movies made for general audiences and those aimed at children, mainly young boys. Mix brought glamour to the Western, with fancy cowboy duds and sparkling saddlery to his horse, Tony.
That split continued into the sound era with hour-long Saturday matinees with Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele and dozens of others, including John Wayne, who made scores of cheap oaters and even took to trying out as one of the singing cowboys that were briefly popular.
Through the 1940s, the cowboy movie became stereotyped with stars such as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. There was little attempt at realism. Sometimes they actually fought Nazis.
These were the cowboys wearing shirts with crescent pockets and shoulder fringe, and often sported a six-gun on each hip.
All that carried over into the television era, with a skein of popular Westerns mostly aimed at kids: The Lone Ranger; The Cisco Kid; renewed popularity of Hopalong Cassidy.
Meanwhile, there were always Westerns made for grown-ups, too. From John Ford’s Stagecoach and Howard Hawks’ Red River, through the Budd Boetticher films with Randolph Scott. There was Shane, and High Noon, and Winchester ’73.
Initially, the lone hero version carried over into the TV era, also, when The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, with Hugh O’Brien, kicked off a decade of evening programing with cowboy heroes, such as Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun — Will Travel, Bat Masterson, and The Rifleman. And, of course, Gunsmoke. You can name a dozen others. The market became glutted and then, suddenly, it seems, Westerns were shot dead.
There came a cultural shift. Maybe it was the Vietnam War, maybe it was fatigue with the cowboy cliches, but when Westerns eventually did return to the silver screen, they took a dark turn. There had been revisionist Westerns before. Indians weren’t always the bad guys. But starting in the 1960s, with films such as Ride the High Country (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the subsequent Spaghetti Westerns, Hang’em High (1968) and ultimately, The Wild Bunch (1969), the new Western was brutal, filled with low-lifes and lots, and lots of grime.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”
The trend continued through McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) to Unforgiven (1992). Even the more positive films like those from Larry McMurtry novels or with Tom Selleck attempt a more naturalistic view of the times in which they were set.
Of course, there’s a good deal of overlap in the eras. It’s a question of what predominates in what decade. There have been revisionist Westerns from the earliest years, but this view of the overall shape of the Western in American consciousness over time is, I believe, basically accurate.
What is not accurate, though, are the Westerns themselves. Admittedly, they were never really intended as realism: They are myth and they are national epic. Our equivalent of the Iliad or the Kalevala. Even those attempting fidelity to historical fact ultimately underline the myth more than the fact. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Actual cowboys
As a kid, I loved the cowboy movies, but as an adult, I am bothered by them. I try to remember they are not meant to be documentaries, but crystallizations of myth, and you don’t expect myth to be realistic. You don’t ask Hercules if he has a mortgage.
Yet, there are sore thumbs that stick out for me in almost all filmed Westerns; four of them — aspects that scream out: “No, this isn’t the way it was.” And perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but these things make it difficult for me to appreciate Westerns the way I did when I was a kid.
I have four primary gripes. They are: economy; geography; ethnic diversity; and language. Let’s take them in order.
Two movies, same location
Towns exist in Western mainly to stand in for civilization. It’s where the people are — the people largely left undefined. They stand in front of general stores or the saloon while the heroes and villains play out the ritual of the gunfight. The same set can be used and reused in many pictures, even as diverse as Westworld and Blazing Saddles. The Western movie town is just the stage set for the plot.
But actual towns are built for economic reasons. There was some industry that needed workers and the workers needed services, and so, towns grew. But in most Western movies, there doesn’t seem to be any functioning economy. There are references to cattle and ranches, but aside from giving rustlers something to do, they barely show up as economic factors.
While the standard movie Western town has its saloons, its general store, its hotel and restaurant, its stable and blacksmith, there is never a thought to where its residents get the money to pay for their drinks, meals, gingham or horseshoes. A town doesn’t grow for just no reason.
Even Dodge City, in the 1870s, when Gunsmoke is supposedly set, had a mayor and council and a police force. There would also likely have been an elected sheriff for Ford County and a judge, to say nothing of at least two lawyers, advertising on the front page of the Dodge City Times in 1878.
Sometimes it is downright preposterous. Consider Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. Its town is built on Mono Lake in California with no economic base at all — just a hodgepodge of buildings erected near a salty lake that cannot even provide drinking water for the residents.
“High Plains Drifter”
Or, one of my favorites, the supposed farm built in Monument Valley in Arizona, in The Searchers. The idea of such a farm is ludicrous — not made better because the landscape is supposed to stand in for Texas.
“The Searchers”
Again, there is a reason towns were built where they were. On rivers for shipping; near mines to provide supplies and provisions; along railroads to ship cattle; near army forts to unload soldiers of their pay.
As seen in the movies
My second beef with Westerns is its geography. Most of the Western tales we have historically took place in the most boring landscapes imaginable, in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas.
What the actual working West looked like
But such places are not very photogenic. And so, we move them lock, stock and barrel to the Rocky Mountains, the Desert Southwest or California’s Alabama Hills with the Sierra Nevada in the background.
“Gunsmoke”
Even Gunsmoke, set in Kansas, sometimes shows a mountain range off in the distance sighted down the main street. (I’ll discuss Dodge City in more detail in Part 2 of this essay, to follow). Matt Dillon is sometimes shown accompanying a prisoner, for instance, across the Rocky Mountains or into the desert, hundreds of miles from his jurisdiction. To say nothing of the months it would take to ride there on the back of a horse.
In the 1950 film Broken Arrow, Jimmy Stewart rush back from Lordsburg, N.M., to Tucson, Ariz., and somehow manages to pass through Sedona, Ariz., on the way — a detour of several hundred miles. Clearly Sedona was more photogenic than the Wilcox Playa or Benson.
Wilcox Playa (left); Sedona, Ariz. (right)
As in so many Westerns, the West is just a mental landscape, where any buttes and saguaro cactus will do as a setting.
As a sidenote, related to the geography: Cowboys stranded in the desert reach for their canteen and take a slug of water, or else hold it upside down so we can see it’s empty. I lived in the desert for 25 years and can tell you water is a big deal. Driving through Death Valley one July, I became so dehydrated I developed a headache and was beginning to become disoriented. I had to drink a full gallon of water to recover. A few swigs from a canteen is basically meaningless.
The third and fourth distortions are perhaps less important, but they nevertheless stick out for me when I’m watching an old Western. There is the lack of ethnic diversity and the matter of speech.
Cowboys: Vanilla, Native American; African American
It’s been documented that about a quarter of all cowboys were African-American. They don’t much show up in the movies (John Ford had his Woody Stroud and at least that was a nod to the fact). And another 20 percent were Mexican and many were Native American. In the towns, segregation was normal, even if the working cowboys out on the plains were mixed. Virtually all the laundries and restaurants in the Old West were run by Asians, mostly Chinese. Other ethnicities were notable factors in various troubles, as the Irish clashed with the English.
Finally, there is the language spoken in 19th century America, which was much more formal than we take for normal now. In the Western movies, the actors tend to speak in the manner current when the films were made, and that changes over time, just the way the hats went from 10 gallons to three pints, and the brassieres just kept getting pointier.
The evidence from letters and from novels written during the period tell us that people spoke in longer sentences with fewer contractions. At home, you might relax when talking to your spouse or children, but in public, you attempted to be correct. Even the illiterate miners and farmers spoke more formally.
This last bothers me less, because if Randolph Scott or John Wayne spoke as they would have in the Old West, the audience might laugh, or at least yawn. How often have you heard parodies of Ken Burns’ Civil War, when they read letters soldiers wrote home? What was normal speech in the 1870s sounds utterly archaic, even stilted, to our ears.
Next: Part 2 — A look at the historical Dodge City
Take two of the most famous paintings in the Louvre. Most of us first experienced them in pictures in a book, perhaps Janson’s History of Art in an art history class. Or, projected onto a screen in the darkened classroom while the teacher pointed out details of the iconography. But these are images, not paintings.
Often, today, we confuse the two, seeing pixels on a cellphone or iPad, and can easily believe we know the art because we can recognize the familiar shapes and colors. That is why so many people remark, on visiting the museum in Paris, about how “small” the Mona Lisa is.
It’s not that small, of course. It’s a fairly normal size for a Renaissance portrait, but the fact is that separated out, as it is, for display, it takes up precious little wall space. Really, most people hadn’t given any thought to the actual size of the painting when seeing the reproduction in a book. It’s just an image, an icon, familiar not only in its regular shape, but also parodied to death in comic take-offs.
You could look at the caption next to the printed image in your book, and see that there is a bunch of information in parenthesis beyond the identification of artist and title. It will often give you the date, in which museum collection it resides, and the size of the painting. In the case of the Mona Lisa, 21-by-30 inches.
But then, perhaps you wander into the gallery with Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. You’ve seen it in your Janson and think you know it. You don’t. It is 16-by-23 feet — the size of a billboard.
You see them as images, and they are adjusted to the size of the page and you can have no sense of their relative sizes.
But walk through the Louvre and it is quite different.
I remember when I was a teenager and going to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and seeing Picasso’s Guernica, which stretched out across its own wall. You could see it from afar, stepping out of the elevator and looking to your right, several galleries away. Just under 12 feet high and 26 feet across, it was more than a painting and more than an image. It was a presence.
And that was part of its meaning. It was made in outrage over the 1937 German bombing of the Basque down in Spain and if it had been made to display comfortably on a gallery wall, it would have been just another painting for sale. But at size, it forces you to consider the suffering and death. Its size means you cannot just look away.
The world we live in is increasingly a virtual one. The TV screen, the computer screen, the cellphone screen, the tablet and even the wristwatch screen have become so normal to our daily lives it has become easy to mistake what we see there as real. It is not.
You cannot have the personal experience of Guernica from a photographic reproduction or a pixel image. You can memorize its iconography and discuss its provenance and the biography of its creator, but you will not have the gut-level experience of it I had visiting it at MoMA.
And it isn’t just the size. Seeing art in person means you can see the pigments used, the brushstrokes, the opacity or transparency of the paint, whether it is on panel or canvas — a whole range of physical properties not apparent in a reproduction, and all of it — in addition to its physical dimensions — are essential to its meaning.
And by meaning, I don’t refer to its symbology. That is language. I mean the experience of it. Vermilion or ultramarine are experiences not conveyed in ink or pixel, and that experience is meaning.
If you walk through the Louvre, another famous art history painting you find will be Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana. Another wallop in the gut. It is 22 feet high and 33 feet from side to side.
If you think of it as a biblical subject, and believe you are “getting” the painting by naming the people pictured, you have missed the central experience of the work.
Even more ordinary size paintings depend, in part, on their dimensions and how you relate to them. A life-size portrait can mimic meeting the person himself. In the Renaissance, one ideal was that a painting should be like a window through which you are looking, and so a window-size canvas was part of the experience.
A giant head is another thing altogether, like the famous head of Emperor Constantine or one of the Olmec colossal stone heads from Mexico. Their size makes you take notice. The same shape, but the size of a cantaloupe, would hardly carry the power of these monuments. I remember the first time, as a boy, I saw the Olmec head at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the memory of it stuck to my psyche for decades after. Still does.
The same for the huge portrait heads of Chuck Close.
The word often used to describe such larger-than-life art is “heroic.” They have an effect very like that of Achilles in the Iliad or Ahab in Moby Dick. It is a word often used to describe the large paintings of the Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and through the 1950s. These were painters of utter seriousness of intent. The last gasp of a non-ironic age, after which came the deluge of meta.
There are artists who use mere size to impart meaning to their work, Anish Kapoor, for instance, in his huge shiny bean called Cloudgate, or the rusted steel curtains by Richard Serra that are best experienced by walking through. But notice that the giant bean is also ironic. It’s a bean, after all, raised to heroic proportions.
But those cigarette-smoking, heavy-drinking and blue-collar wearing guys at mid-century were dead serious. Jackson Pollock painted his first large painting, called Mural, in the mid-’40s. It is 8 feet by 20 feet and meant to be installed in the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim. It led to the later drip paintings that made Pollock famous — in 1949, Life magazine asked “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
Pollock made paintings in various sizes, but it is his large canvases that hold the emotional power that still resonates today. I visited the huge Pollock retrospective at MoMA in 1998 and was blown away by the variety of the paintings, and got a chance, finally, to see Blue Poles, a large 1952 canvas sold to a gallery in Australia in 1973 and unavailable to American audiences since then. It was given pride of place in the exhibition and deserved it, in the center of the room, on a wall of its own. It was lit like a jewel, but a jewel 16 feet across.
Most of the Abstract Expressionist gang trafficked in scale. Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still — all found now in museums taking up whole walls by themselves.
In the 1970s, I wandered through commercial galleries in New York and came across a back room storage of Newman paintings, being arranged for a show, and a group of them were almost two stories tall — monumental. These men (and they were almost all men) took their heroic calling seriously.
After them, the deluge. Even Motherwell turned to irony; the self-importance of the first generation could not be sustained, or even taken seriously anymore. And although Robert Rauschenberg is sometimes classed among the Abstract Expressionists, his work always played with irony.
All that was left after that was Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. Art took a different turn.
When the Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in 1997, I was an art critic in Phoenix, Ariz., and given the assignment of covering the event. I met with Robert Irwin, who designed the landscaping for the Getty, and had a concurrent museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. In a hallway, away from the main work in the exhibit, were a series of early paintings he made. Irwin was a thoughtful artist and his eyes glistened as he discussed those small, early canvases.
“I was thinking about the heroic nature of those Abstract Expressionist paintings,” he said. “And I wondered if they could still work if they were small.” And so, he painted a line of tiny canvases, usually no more than a foot square, with similar abstract imagery on them. Did they work? Were they still heroic? Do you have to ask?
I was born in the upper right corner of New Jersey, just to the west of the Hudson River and a few miles south of the New York state line and the Rockland State Hospital, an asylum famous for once housing Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon.
That corner of the map is Bergen County, the most populous county in the state and where I spent the first 17 years of my life, before I managed to escape. It is unrelentingly suburban and, to my young sensibility, numbingly banal. In my senescence, six decades later, I have moderated my disdain and now recognize it as my hatchery — and a part of my psyche that I cannot ever fully extirpate. Like Quentin Compson speaking about his native Mississippi, I can say of my own native state, “I don’t hate it. I don’t. I don’t hate it.”
The Hackensack River
Bergen County is split by two rivers, the Hackensack and the Passaic. The later forms part of the western border of the county and the Hackensack ran through the town where I was raised and drained, finally, into Newark Bay to the south, between Newark and Jersey City, two old cities that show their age.
To the east of the Hackensack, the land rises abruptly until it reaches an edge high above the Hudson River, called the Palisades, a 20-mile long series of basalt cliffs that rise to 500 feet above the water. This bit of America, from Paterson to Manhattan is the landscape of my Umwelt — etched into my psyche.
Since I grew up there and knew no better, I assumed that all rivers must be as wide as the Hudson, and when I first came South to go to college, was less than impressed with what passes for a river there. The Deep River, near my Guilford College, I could have jumped across. That’s not a river, that’s a brook (or, in Southern parlance, a creek).
But the Hudson was noble, wide and impressive. Historically, it ran through the home land of the Lenape Indians and the county is filled with towns and rivers given versions of their Indian names, including my home town, Old Tappan, which was named for the Tappan tribe of Lenape people, which may mean “cold water.” All of New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York were originally Lenape lands.
Other Bergen County Native American names, however twisted by the ears of the early colonists, include: Hackensack; Ho-Ho-Kus; Mahwah Moonachie; Paramus; Teaneck; and Wyckoff.
Names can get quite twisted. In central Jersey the name of Cheesequake was originally the Lenape name Chiskhakink, which meant “cleared land.” Other New Jersey names, some harder to pronounce than others, at least for non-native Jerseyites, include Hoboken, Hopatcong, Manahawkin, Mantoloking, Metuchen, Neshanic, Netcong, Pahaquarry, Parsippany, Pequannock, Piscataway, Ramapo, Secaucus, Squankum, Succasunna, Weehawken, Wickatunk. And that doesn’t count the lakes, rivers and creeks: Absecon; Assunpink; Assiscunk; Hakihokake; Hockhockson; Kittatinny; Luppatatong; Machesautauxen; Metedeconk; Muksukemuk; Musconetcong; Picatinny; Pohandusing; Rancocas; Shabakunk; Waackaack; Wawayanda; Wickecheoke — and that’s about 10 percent of the list. I believe I’ve heard my cat say “Waackaack” at times.
If you’re from there, these names roll easily off the tongue, if not, well — I once heard a newscaster pronounce Parsippany as “par-suh-PAN-ee.”
Then, there’s Kinderkamack Road, which sounds like it should be among the many Dutch names in the area, but is really a version of the Lenape for “Place of the Ceremonial Dance.” But you would be forgiven for mistaking it. After the Native Americans came the Dutch, with their own names for things, such as Kill van Kull, Polifly, Paulus Hook, Schraalenburgh, and Tenafly.
There’s a lot of history in New Jersey, although most Jerseyites pay little attention to it. Not only Native American and Dutch history, but New Jersey was once a slave state. My county, Bergen, was the largest holder of enslaved people in New Jersey, with 20 percent of its population in bondage in 1800. New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to outlaw slavery. At the end of the Civil War, there were about a dozen slaves still owned in the state, eventually freed by the 13th Amendment. By the way, the state voted against Abraham Lincoln both in 1860 and in 1864.
When my father was clearing land in our back yard in Old Tappan, he dug up an old brick foundation that a local historian identified as the remains of an 18th century slave quarters.
The stony ground of the state has seen a lot of history. One of the most famous and consequential battles of the Revolutionary War was fought in Jersey, as George Washington crossed the Delaware River in the winter of 1776 and surprised British forces at Trenton. He did it again a year later.
During the Gilded Age, New Jersey was a comfortable home for corporate monopolies. Before being broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1911, Standard Oil of New Jersey had controlled nearly 90 percent of refined oil in the United States.
Oh, New Jersey. Wikipedia lists more than 50 New Jersey politicians convicted of crimes and corruption, most famously in recent years, Sen. Bob Menendez, who was found guilty of taking bribes after investigators found Menendez had illegally received a Mercedes-Benz car, 13 gold bars, and $486,461 in cash.
The Chin
In my own home town of Old Tappan, Mafia boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante had a house a little more than a hundred yards from where I grew up. I didn’t know that at the time, but imagine my surprise when, at college in 1970, I turned on the radio one morning and heard the NPR announcer say that the entire police force of Old Tappan had been arrested for taking cash from Gigante’s wife, Olympia.
Other high points in New Jersey history:
It was the home, in Menlo Park, to Thomas Edison’s research laboratory, later moved to West Orange.
New Jersey was the first state to ratify Prohibition.
In 1927, the Holland Tunnel connected NJ to Manhattan, followed by the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937.
In 1932, the baby of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow was kidnapped from their home in Hopewell, NJ., and later found dead. A nation-wide manhunt eventually led to the arrest two years later of Bruno Hauptmann, who was convicted of and executed for the crime.
The dirigible airship Hindenburg, a German Zeppelin, exploded in flames upon landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in 1937, killing 13 passengers and 22 crewmen. “Oh, the humanity!”
In the infamous Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, Orson Welles claimed that Martians had landed in Grovers Mill, NJ.
And on Sept. 23, 1949, Bruce Springsteen was born, in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore.
The state tends to get divided into three parts, Northern Jersey, Central and South Jerseys. The north is all suburbs of New York City; the south is oriented to Philadelphia and Central Jersey is orphaned between.
But really, there is another way of splitting up the map that is more reflective of the cultural realities. There is suburban and industrial New Jersey, which is a ribbon running from the northeastern part of the state and cuts diagonally across to the southwest, near Philly. This includes not only my Bergen County, but also Newark, Trenton, Camden, and the Oranges — pronounced locally as Onch, East Onch, South Onch, and West Onch. There is no Nawt Onch.
The second part might be considered Appalachian New Jersey and is in the northwest, largely rural and wooded, with the Kittatinny Mountains and the Delaware Water Gap. My summer Boy Scout camp was there, where I was first camper and later camp counselor.
The third part of the state might be called Confederate New Jersey, technically below the Mason-Dixon Line and composed of farm land, swamps and the infamous Pine Barrens, supposed home to the Jersey Devil, a legendary flying demon, said to have been born in 1735 as the 13th child of local woman Deborah Leeds. The child, though born normally. immediately grew wings, tail, and claws and flew out to the Pine Barrens, where, like Big Foot, it is occasionally claimed to have been spotted.
South Jerseyites can even speak with a drawl, separating them culturally from those farther north. The familiar Joisey accent has a pronounced rising “dawg” while in the south, they are closer to a descending “doag.” (The North Jersey accent is quite distinct. We once had a plumber come to fix our “terlet.”)
There is a fourth important component to the state. Some consider it part of South Jersey, but it is distinct enough — and famous enough — to warrant its own regional name. It runs down the eastern margin of the state, from Sandy Hook to Cape May and it is the Jersey Shore. It is not like any other section of the state and has gained notoriety for the empty-brained drunkenness and pointlessness of the MTV “reality” television program. The less said, the better.
The broad stripe that runs diagonally down the center of the state is the heart of what people think of as being New Jersey. Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Union, Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties and parts of others, are both the suburban and industrial centers of the state, and the source of most of the enduring cliches.
But it is the center filet that has all the housing developments, mcmansions, oil refineries and chemical plants — to say nothing of the Pulaski Skyway and the single most trenchant metaphor for the state: The NJ Turnpike. (“Where do you live?” “Exit Four.”)
When I left New Jersey as a teenager headed off to college in North Carolina, I shook the dust off my sandals and said good riddance. I despised the bourgeois banality of it all and couldn’t wait to get to the “real” stuff that higher education would show me: art and poetry and music, and — well, beer and sex. But over the years I came to realize both that New Jersey was not exceptional in its inanity — that was everywhere — and also more importantly, I had to accept that New Jersey had built my insides.
The pace, the smells, the population density, the architectural styles, the speech, the ethnic and religious diversity I had known had all become the universal norms by which I judged the world.
It came as a shock, for instance, that there were so many churches and so few synagogues in the South. In Old Tappan, there was one Protestant church and one Catholic church and the nearest synagogue was in Closter. Here in my neighborhood in Asheville, there are three churches all in walking distance. Oy.
The Trinity Reformed Church in Old Tappan was presided over by the soft-spoken Louis Springsteen whose basic message to the congregation was that good is better than evil because it’s nicer. No brimstone, no hellfire. My Catholic friends went to St. Pius X at the other end of Cripplebush Road. Some of them went to parochial school and were taught by nuns. It was all just normal, and built that normal into me. Religion made no more difference to me or my friends than hair color or freckles.
I remember my father, raised in Cliffside Park, NJ, telling us that when he was drafted at the beginning of World War II and shipped off to Camp Wheeler in Georgia, he was shocked to find out the camp was segregated. The idea had never occurred to him.
And when I was at college a group of us decided to crash a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Liberty, NC, where the main speaker was the sheriff of Forsyth County, and I was surprised to find out that among the enemies they despised were not just Black folk, but Catholics and Methodists as well. Huh? Humanity never seemed such a narrow concept where I came from.
My Boy Scout troop was presided over by Paul Weinstein and his two assistants, Vern Riportella and Arch Curry. Basically, one of each.
It all, good and bad, became the unexamined bedrock of my personality. I remain somehow in New Jersey, even though I haven’t lived there in 60 years.
The highways I knew in Paramus seemed the normal highways; the shopping malls the size of Delaware were the norms; the traffic was normal; the oil refineries burning off their excess in the night sky was normal; the bus service, the delicatessens, the pizza, were all the baselines I took elsewhere with me.
I mean, come on — you call that a pastrami sandwich?
And New Jersey set the inner tick-tock of my sense of time, a quicker pace. As I’ve aged, the clock has slowed a bit, and living in the South for the majority of my life has moderated the tempo, but it still moves too fast for some. My Anne complains that I talk too fast, according to her North Carolina metronome.
Perhaps it is because my New Jersey innards prompts me more to favor efficiency than courtliness.
And while I grew up thinking of my home state as intellectually stultified, I have to grant that there are random points of light. I hesitate to include James Fenimore Cooper among them, after reading Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” — “Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” — but New Jersey was also the adopted home of Walt Whitman and the very subject and marrow of the poems of William Carlos Williams. There were also Stephen Crane, John Ciardi, Joyce Kilmer, Philip Roth, Amira Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), George R.R. Martin, to say nothing of the Ginsbergs, père et fils. The Jersey Shore town of Long Branch alone has given us Springsteen, Norman Mailer, Robert Pinsky, and Dorothy Parker.
Springsteen, Pinsky, Mailer, Parker
New Jersey gave birth to, or was home to George Antheil, Gerard Schwarz, Astrid Varnay, Eileen Farrell, Dorothy Kirsten, Jerome Hines, Sherrill Milnes, Michael Tree, Stephen Paulus, Judith LeClair, and one-third of the Beaux Arts Trio. And that’s not even counting Count Basie or Frank Sinatra.
And visual artists: Charles Addams, John Held Jr., George Platt Lynes, Robert Smithson, Reginald Marsh, George Segal, Tony Smith, Irving Penn, Marion Post Walcott, Cindy Sherman, George Tice, and, most famously, Alfred Stieglitz.
So, there is a serious element in the state, past the saltwater taffy, Miss America contests and Giants football in the Meadowlands. I’ve read work by all the authors, listened to music by all the singers and instrumentalists, either live or on recordings, and seen and often written about the visual artists. I hope that has also seeped in to the brainbox.
After all, maybe I don’t despise New Jersey like I used to, and perhaps I am not alone in having ambivalent feelings about the places that gave us birth and nurtured us. After all, Henry Thoreau complained about the torpor of Concord farmers and townspeople at a time when that village was also home to Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts. Hmm. Might make for a good sonata.
The American Southwest is the landscape of John Ford Westerns, Roadrunner cartoons and, of course George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. It is a landscape I know very well, writing about it often for The Arizona Republic when wearing my hat as travel writer. And while I can’t say I miss big-city Phoenix, I do sometimes feel quite homesick for the desert and the canyons. There is a special sense of space there, of horizons bordered not by trees or homes, but by the curve of the earth.
But there was a time before that landscape and I became intimate, when my wife and I were teachers in Virginia and first planned a summer vacation trip to the half of the country on the other side of the Mississippi River. We were unprepared, back in 1981, for what we found, having been conditioned primarily by movies, television and the occasional Arizona Highways magazine Christmas edition.
Driving west on I-40 across the Panhandle of Texas, through Amarillo, the earth was as flat as a billiard table, but at the exact border between Texas and New Mexico, the bottom dropped out of the land and the highway sloped down onto a landscape with buttes and mesas. This is the West, we thought. Finally here.
On the border between Texas and New Mexico
Carole had always been interested in Indians, and one of the goals of the trip was to visit Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Reservation. In our Eastern ignorance, we pictured the canyon as these steep walls of rock rising up from the land on either side of us. At least, that’s what the photographs looked like.
Canyon de Chelly by Edward S. Curtis, 1904
But we had it backwards. Canyons are not cliffs rising up, but great holes dug below the surface.
We were lucky, we approached Canyon de Chelly from the east. Most people arrive through the town of Chinle, to the immediate west of the canyon. Chinle is a tourist trap of motels and souvenirs. But coming to it, as we did, there was nothing but pine covered mountains and rocky wilderness. We drove in on an unpaved road — Navajo Route 7 through Sawmill — from New Mexico and coming up to an unmarked fork in the road, we saw a Navajo man sitting next to his pickup truck, which was piled with firewood. We asked him the way to the canyon. He said nothing but turned his head and lifted his chin to point the way. We continued down a wooded hill into a low scrub land, looking across the plain, and I noticed a darker spot in the sun-splashed land. When we pulled over and parked and walked to that spot, it was 400 feet straight down to the bottom of the canyon. It was somewhat like viewing a negative instead of a photograph: It was all backward. It was down, not up. It was Bat Canyon, one of the side shoots of Monument Canyon, one of the many side canyons to the main event.
Of course, we slapped our foreheads (figuratively), because, of course, a canyon is an empty space, not a mountain range. Later as we continued on and found Chinle, and a motel for the night, we realized also how lucky we were to have found the canyon for ourselves, and not through the tourist muck. We had that side canyon all to ourselves. We sat alone on the rim looking down into the abyss for hours, listening to the breeze and the birds, before another car even drove by.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument covers 131 square miles in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Seen from the air or on a map, it is a chicken-foot shape of multiple canyon systems that runs for about 24 miles toward the east and the Chuska Mountains.
Most tourists in Arizona head straight for the Grand Canyon, which is vastly larger and more immediately impressive. “Most famous places are always at least a little disappointing when you finally get there,” my brother once said, “but not the Grand Canyon. You just gawk at it, bigger than you had ever imagined.”
But some of us love the human size of Canyon de Chelly even more than the Grand Canyon. Many days you can pick a corner and have it all to yourself.
We went back many times, after we moved to Arizona, and Canyon de Chelly became a kind of talisman for us. One summer, probably 1998, we decided to hire a Native guide and ride horses into the canyon’s further reaches. We found Dave Wilson, who arranged for us to go up Canyon del Muerto on horses. His teen sons Delbert and Delmar came along, too.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument is divided into two main forks, the southerly one is Canyon de Chelly itself, the more northern is Canyon del Muerto. The national monument’s name is a redundancy, like “Table Mesa” or “Glendale,” since its name derives from the Navajo word for “canyon” — Tsegi — turned by quasi-French transliteration into Chelly, pronounced “Shay.” (There is also a Tsegi Canyon on the Navajo Reservation, near Kayenta, further complicating matters).
Mummy Cave
Canyon de Muerto, or “Canyon of the Dead” got its name in 1882, when topographical engineer James Stevenson discovered two prehistoric mummified bodies in a rock shelter ruin, now known as Mummy Cave, and then named the north branch of the place Canyon de los Muertos, now shortened to Canyon del Muerto.
It could have been named for other reasons. Humans have lived in Canyon de Chelly for about 5,000 years. Long before the Navajo arrived, the prehistoric Anasazi peoples lived in the area and in Canyon de Chelly had built cliff dwellings to protect them from various warring groups. Those ruins are still to be seen in the canyons. And even after the Athabascan-speaking peoples, now called Navajo, arrived, sometime around 1700, the canyon continued to provide shelter from raids and wars with other tribes. It’s a long history of wars, battles and skirmishes, but two occasions stand out more recently.
First, in 1805, Spanish forces, under Antonio Narbona trapped about 150 Navajo in a cave high on the walls of the canyon. In his report Narbona stated “They entrenched themselves in an almost inaccessible spot, and fortified beforehand, we succeeded after having battled all day long with the greatest ardor and effort, in taking it the morning after and that our arms had the result of 90 dead warriors, 25 women and children and as prisoners three warriors, eight women and 22 boys and girls.” That cave is now called Massacre Cave.
Massacre Cave
Then, in 1863, the American Army began an attempt to bring the Navajo to a new reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, and Col. Christopher (“Kit”) Carson was tasked with rounding the Indians up to march them 300 miles to their new home. He had been given orders to destroy their crops and livestock, and the famous peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly. By March of 1864, some 2,400 Navajo had been collected and marched to New Mexico in the “Long Walk.” Thousands followed in later roundups.
And so, there has been plenty of muerto in Canyon del Muertos.
It might be a good place here to discuss Navajo superstitions and taboos. The canyon is filled with Anasazi ruins — good sturdy brick homes that just need a bit of sprucing up and new roofs. But taboos keep the Navajo from using them, or even entering them. Death is a principle taboo. A person’s name who has died should not be uttered. If someone dies in a hogan, traditionally, you move out and no one ever lives in it again.
There are many more — a list of them could make a book. One online posting names more than 200 such superstitions. Do not look at lightning in a mirror or it will strike your hogan. Do not watch clouds moving in the sky or you will become a slow runner. If you see a shooting star, you have to blow at it or you will receive bad luck. Do not put salt on a piñon nut or it will snow. Do not kill grasshoppers or it will give you a nosebleed.
We already encountered one, when the Navajo man with the pickup indicated the road to take by pointing with his chin and pooched lips. Pointing with a finger is considered aggressive.
In 1993, I went to visit famous Navajo painter Jimmy Toddy in his home in Wide Ruins, on the Reservation. Unlike the hogans he had grown up in, or the ranch houses that pass for government housing on the Reservation, in 1947, he built a two-story frame house with a stone foundation. I parked in the dust of his front yard and entered through a front door that was off its hinges. “I never fixed it,” he told me. “There are bees that made a hive there and it would bring bad luck if I didn’t let them fly anywhere inside or outside.”
At the newspaper where I worked, I became friends with Betty Reid, a Navajo reporter. She asked me to help her copy edit a proposal for a book she was planning.
“Yuhzhee is my Navajo name,” she said. “It means ‘short,’ or ‘small’ in English.” She spoke only Navajo until she was seven and her family, who raised sheep, lived near the edge of the Grand Canyon at a place called Bii Daa. “I’m a middle-age journalist who walked away from a traditional life to write for newspapers,” she said. “The two worlds are very different.”
I once asked her about the superstitions. “Yes, we are very superstitious.” “Do you believe in them still?” I asked. “Oh, no. Very few younger Navajos still hold on to such things. They make no sense.”
She paused a beat. “I still do them, though.”
But back to 1998. My wife, Carole, had been fascinated by Indians and Indian culture since she was a little girl and collected arrowheads turned up by North Carolina farmers plowing their fields. She had always wanted to ride horses with Indians, and now she was getting her chance with Dave Wilson.
We drove to his home, on a bluff just above the entrance to the canyons. His wife invited us in as Dave got the horses ready. It seemed like a very ordinary ranch house with modest furnishings, except that it had a dirt floor and just by the front door was a TV console with its tube removed, letting it serve as a home for a few chickens.
I had never ridden a horse before, if you don’t count a pony ride at the state fair when I was a little boy. Dave assured us his horses were used to beginners and it would be easy. Just follow him.
We mounted the horses and followed Dave and his two sons, each on his own horse. He didn’t lead us down a road, but straight down the side of the hill, at a precipitous angle. I had to lean back so far in the saddle, my head rested on my horse’s rump. Luckily, the horse knew what he was doing. I certainly didn’t. Their hooves slid and kicked up gravel the whole way down.
At the bottom of the hill, it flattened out and we rode into the canyon mouth, turning left into Canyon del Muerto. My horse was balking. It lagged behind the rest and they had to stop so I could catch up. At one point the horse, apparently impatient, began to trot after the others and I feared I would fall off. New Jersey boys make poor cowboys.
What can I say? Not only was I a poor equestrian, but my body was not built for the saddle. One sees bow-legged cowpokes in the movies, who have long acclimatized to the barrel-shaped body of a horse, but my straight legs were agonizingly twisted to the stirrups, feeling like my knee cartilage was being torn sideways from my leg bones. It was a form of Medieval torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Carole, on the other hand, was in horse heaven. I tried to last through the first few miles, but eventually, I had to get off and let my legs assume their normal lines. I limped around my sturdy mount, trying to regain the use of my knee joints.
Dave had, no doubt, come across such greenhorns before and kindly offered to continue our tour of the canyon by car, and sent one of his sons back out of the canyon to bring back his station wagon. About 20 minutes later, it arrived and we all got in and began the tour again. The older son led the horses back home.
But then, the car got a flat tire. Neither Dave, nor his remaining son, Delbert, cussed or fumed, but acted as if this were just a normal course of events. We got out and waited. Dave took out the spare, but it was flat, too. He never expressed any emotion about it all. It’s just normal.
Carole on horseback; Delbert Wilson drawing; me, standing
Other tour cars passed us, other horse tours. But Dave never said a word to any of them, never asked for help. We sat in the sand for perhaps two hours. Delbert began drawing in the wet sand with a stick, to the delight of Carole, who was an art teacher. The sun went behind the canyon walls and it began to darken.
It must have been about 7 p.m. when another car arrived, driven by Dave’s wife. We all got in and drove back out the canyon and up to Dave’s house (taking the road this time), where they apologized for the cock-up. They offered to feed us supper, but Carole wanted to get back to our motel. Dave’s wife gave Carole a gift of a small necklace and we all smiled and thanked one another.
The impassivity that Dave showed with the problems we faced, we came to know as one of the cultural characteristics of the Navajo — which we learned over time with the many other Navajos we came to know and become friends with. I don’t know what Dave was feeling inside, but outwardly, it was all the same to him.
When we got back to Phoenix, we mailed a box of presents up to the Wilsons.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument is situated on land owned by the Navajo nation, and travel in the park is open only to tribal members or those accompanied by authorized Navajo guides, such as Dave Wilson. The only exception to that is a public trail from the cliff edge down to the White House Ruins, about five miles up from the canyon mouth. You walk down a steep path, 600 feet down through switchbacks and tunnels to the canyon floor. The trail is about 2.5 miles long and leaves you at the foot of White House Ruins, an Anasazi cliff dwelling, first built around A.D. 1060.
The pueblo originally had an estimated 80 rooms, on two levels, with some featuring a light plaster, which led to the Navajo name for the site, Kinii’ ni gai — which means “White House.”
White House ruins by O’Sullivan, Gilpin, Adams, and me
The cliffs above the ruins are streaked with desert varnish, a mix of iron and manganese oxide, that makes a visual scene that is absolute catnip to photographers. The first photo of the ruins and the varnish was made in 1873 by Timothy O’Sullivan, but a parade of others have followed, including Laura Gilpin in 1930, Ansel Adams in 1950 (having made an almost identical photo in 1942), and me in 1981. Gilpin visited and studied the Navajos and the land they occupy and published, in 1968, the classic book, The Enduring Navajo. It is still in print.
The scene absolutely frames itself, which means that hosts of images are basically repeats.
Photos by Tad Nichols, 1931; Jerry Jacka, 1976; Don Whitebread, 2009; Patrick McBride, 2012; Richard Boutwell, 2017
It’s a highly tempting subject and I’m sure that many other tourists have made the same picture, now with their iPhones.
Without getting down into the canyon, you can drive along its rim, both along the south branch and the north, with overlooks at such famous vistas as Spider Rock and Massacre Cave.
You stand at the rim of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation and look down to the braided stream at the bottom that scoured this great hole out of the sandstone and wonder how long it must have taken. Then you see the tiny Anasazi relics built into the walls of the rock and realize how long people have been living here, and then you see the sandstone itself an think about how much longer ago — exponentially longer — that ancient river deltas deposited the silt that later became that stone.
We visited Canyon de Chelly many times, and at one point, Carole applied for a teaching job on the Reservation. We drove up for an interview, but the terms of the employment contract would have made it difficult to ever afford to live there — the 10-month contract came with a 10-month lease on a home, meaning we would have to leave with all our belongings during the summer months. It was clear they would rather have a Navajo teacher than a bilagáana. We couldn’t begrudge them that.
I have traveled more widely than most, I believe. I was a travel writer for my newspaper (among other things). But even outside of vocational duties, travel has been central to my life. My late wife and I have been on the move considerably, visiting each of the 48 contiguous states many times, and gone outside the country when we could. In the summer of 1981, for instance, we put 10,000 miles on the car while driving around the country. We were both teachers and the summer gave us the chance to wander.
There are places, however, that I have gone back to, over and over, throughout my life, not through mere happenstance, but because they have been meaningful. They are destinations for non-religious pilgrimages.
Meaning can be hard to define. On first thought, one thinks “meaning” implies a second message: “This” means “that.” “I know what he said, but what did he mean?” That sort of thing.
But meaning has a more personal existence, a psychological one. Something can have meaning even if you don’t know what it means. I suppose you might otherwise call this significance. And there are places I visit over and over because they bear the weight of personal significance. They have meaning. And I go back to them.
Bodhgaya
It isn’t just me. The world is full of such places, some personal, some cultural, some religious or spiritual. They can be sacred spaces or holy ground. They have accrued some emotional hold on those for whom this kind of significance has meaning. It can be the Buddhist bo tree, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, Independence Hall. For a few of us, the list would include Fenway Park. These are places of social significance and people will make the hajj to see them out of devotion or just to absorb the numinous halo surrounding them. Life is empty without meaning, although what we call meaning and where we might discover it is personal.
Meaningful places needn’t be so to groups, or to have religious importance. I have no belief in ghosts, spirits or ouija boards and I don’t believe that the past hangs on to the present to make itself palpable. But I have several times experienced a kind of emotional resonance when visiting certain famous sites.
Normandy beach
The thought re-emerged recently while watching the recent commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. I have visited those beaches and had an overwhelming rush of intense sadness. It was inevitable to imagine the thousands of soldiers rushing up the sands into hellish gunfire, to imagine a thousand ships in the now calm waters I saw on a sunny day, to feel the presence in the concrete bunkers of the German soldiers fated to die there manning their guns.
The effect is entirely psychological, of course. If some child with no historical knowledge of the events that took place there were to walk the wide beach, he would no doubt think only of the waves and water and, perhaps, the sand castles to be formed from the sand. There is no eerie presence hanging in the salt air. The planet does not record, or for that matter, much note, the miseries humans inflict on each other, and have done for millennia. But for those who have a historical sense, the misery reasserts itself. Imagination brings to mind the whole of human agony.
Perhaps I should not say that the earth does not remember. It can, in certain ways. Visiting the woods of Verdun in France, site of a horrendous battle in World War I, I saw the uneven forest floor, where time has only partially filled in the shell craters. Once the trees were flattened by artillery, leaving a moonscape littered with corpses. The trees have grown back, but the craters are still discernible in the wavy forest floor. The same child who thought of sand castles in Normandy might well think the churned land at Verdun merely a quirk of geology, but the land itself bears its scars.
The presence of the dead was overwhelming at Antietam, site of the bloodiest battle during America’s Civil War. In one spot alone, a 200-yard stretch called Bloody Lane, 5,000 men were blown apart in a few short hours.
Before Sept. 17, 1862, the brief dirt drive was called the Sunken Road, and it was a shortcut between two farm roads near Sharpsburg, Md. All around were cornfields rolling up and down on the hilly Appalachian landscape.
The narrow dirt road, depressed into the ground like a cattle chute, now seems more like a mass grave than a road. And it was just that when Confederate soldiers mowed down the advancing Federals and were in turn mowed down. The slaughter was unimaginable.
You can see it in the photographs made a few days after the battle. The soldiers fill the sunken road like executed Polish Jews. It was so bad, as one Union private said, “You could walk from one end of Bloody Lane to the other on dead soldiers and your feet would never touch the ground.”
It is difficult to stand now in Bloody Lane and not feel that all the soldiers are still there, perhaps not as ghosts, but as a presence under your boot-sole, there, as blood soaked into the dirt.
But it needn’t be horror or blood that gives meaning to a place. It may be achieved through personal association with something we lived through, or through esthetic appreciation — the sudden awareness of sublimity — or through an awareness of a less traumatic history born in a landscape. And I thought about places I have gone back to over and over; places that bear significance to me. I’m sure most of us could make such a list, whether long or short. Here are 10 of my personal pilgrimage sites that I have visited and revisited over a long life.
Walden Pond — I cannot count the number of times I have visited Concord, Mass., or how often I have made the pilgrimage to the glacial kettle lake just outside downtown where Henry David Thoreau built his cabin and lived for two years, and which led him to write his book about the experience.
The most recent visit was only two years ago, passing through on my way to friends in Maine. The site now has a large parking lot and a visitor center (although the parking is primarily for summertime local beachgoers, who use Walden Pond as a swimming hole). When I first saw it, there was not much there but the water and the woods; I had to park alongside the road.
I have circumambulated the pond, a walk of just under two miles, the first time in the early morning when a mist hung over the water and the sun slowly burned through. I have read Walden several times, and own several editions, both cheap and deluxe, and Thoreau’s other books, including his Journals, and eaten up his idiosyncratic style of writing with relish.
Walpi
Hopi Mesas — In northern Arizona, the Hopi have built their towns primarily on three mesas, First, Second, and Third, which are really the southern fingers of the larger Black Mesa. We have visited all three mesas many times, including one snowy Christmas spent with a Hopi family we knew on First Mesa in the village of Walpi. The warmth of the hearthfire in the stone house, and the cookies we were offered, and the smiles on the faces of the children are indelible.
Another time, we were invited to a social dance on Second Mesa in Old Oraibi, and climbed to the roof of one of the houses with the rest of the Hopi to watch and cheer the Kachina dancers. Another time, driving past New Oraibi, at the foot of Second Mesa, we were caught as traffic was halted so the sacred Kachina dancers could cross the road from where they emerged from the kiva and marched toward the plaza. We were not supposed to be there but couldn’t leave, with the Kachina traffic cop in front of us and several cars behind. We apologized profusely, but the angry cop didn’t seem to care. We shouldn’t have been there, but we also couldn’t have known a sacred dance had been scheduled for that day.
You can stand at the cliff edge on First Mesa and look south over the Navajo Reservation, nearly to Flagstaff and marvel at the intense beauty of the Colorado Plateau.
Chartres Cathedral — It wasn’t until our second visit to France that we managed to get to Chartres, but after that we went back over and over. The cathedral is, of course, a World Heritage Site, and a sacred place to many. But it spoke to me less of religion than of history — architecture 800 years old and still functioning for its original purpose.
Most of the cathedrals and basilicas of Northern France have been restored and reworked (Notre Dame, before the fire, was largely re-imagined in the 19th century as it was restored by Viollet-le-Duc) but Chartres is almost entirely original. If you are sensitive to it, you can feel all that passage of time embodied in the stonework and the interior space.
The cathedral sits at the top of a hill at the center of town, and can be seen in the distance from miles around. I have spent hours sitting in the transept meditating over the great north rose window, which remains the single most beautiful manmade object I have ever seen. The entire experience engenders awe.
American Museum of Natural History — I was originally going to list New York City here, but then narrowed it down to Manhattan, but, really, the center of magic for me is the Natural History Museum. I first visited on a third-grade school trip and fell in love with the dinosaurs. But all through my childhood and adolescence I visited the museum as often as I could. I loved the dioramas, the dinosaur bones, the giant stone Olmec head, the huge suspended blue whale — even the “Soil Profiles of New York State.” To say nothing of the room full of chunks of quartz, each with a little typed tag explaining where it was collected.
I could also have mentioned the George Washington Bridge, which my grandfather helped build; he was an engineer working on the bridge in the 1930s. Through most of my life, when living in or visiting New Jersey, I would take the bus to the bridge and walk across the bridge to 178th St. I have walked the bridge too many times to count.
The Outer Banks — I went to Guilford College in North Carolina beginning in 1966 and soon met lifelong friend Alexander and we made annual camping trips to Cape Hatteras, usually in winter when the beaches were empty. Later, my first wife and I spent our honeymoon camped directly under the lighthouse. It was February and the regular campsites were closed, and so we pitched our tent in the dunes.
I have been back over and over, with each succeeding wife or possl-q, although as I got to be old, we tended to sleep in motel rooms. When my brother began teaching in Virginia, he lived at the northernmost bit of the Outer Banks, Sandbridge, and when visiting I often made a side-trip back down to Hatteras and Okracoke.
Once, with Alexander, we went after a huge storm, and parts of the road were washed out just north of the lighthouse. He got out of the car and walked in front, feeling the asphalt under his feet and leading me safely past the overwash. Another time, at night, we walked down to Cape Point with a Coleman lamp projecting our shadows, like giants, up into the misty black sky.
Grand Canyon — My brother once observed that unlike most hyped destinations, where you are always at least a tiny bit disappointed when you finally get there, the Grand Canyon is actually more impressive, more overwhelming, when you actually see it live: It never lets you down. It is 200 miles of vast geology, color, and depth.
We lived in Arizona for 25 years and so I cannot number the times we visited the Canyon, mostly the South Rim, where most of the tourist action happens. But the second time we came, in 1982, we went to the North Rim and when we couldn’t get a room at the hotel there (it is always full), we went out of the park after dusk into the national forest, where it is legal to camp anywhere, and pulled into a side road in the dark. In the morning, we got out of the tent and discovered that if I had backed the car up 10 feet further, we would have tumbled down into the canyon. We were right on the edge.
And once, on assignment from the paper, I drove 60 miles off road to the Toroweap Overlook, also on the North Rim, but in pure wilderness where only a rare person ventures, and camped away from all city lights, where the night sky was neon in intensity.
Hudson River Valley — I grew up in northern New Jersey, in the apotheosis of suburbia. But my father’s family had a rustic house — a “bungalow” — in West Park, N.Y., halfway up the Hudson River, and we spent many summer vacations, and at least one winter ski vacation, at the bungalow. It was the town where the once-famous nature writer John Burroughs lived. There was woods, a swimming hole with a waterfall.
But up and down the river, from Dunderberg through Bear Mountain and the Seven Lakes Drive, it was the escape from the ordinariness of the suburbs. We regularly went swimming in the summer at Lake Welch, or watched ski jumping at Bear Mountain.
In 1986, we drove up Perkins Drive to the top of Bear Mountain, during an outbreak of gypsy moth caterpillars. The tower at the top was covered in a sheath of hairy worms and the ground was gooey with the squashed ’pillars. It was eerie and more than a little stomach churning.
The bungalow at West Park
The Nilsen family drove up Route 9W on summer weekends to visit the bungalow, and the three-lane highway had to curl around Storm King Mountain, a section of road that made my cautious father extremely nervous with a sheer drop down the edge to the river. They are gone now. That portion of 9W has now been re-routed and the treacherous third (middle) lane now long gone. Near Haverstraw, the “Ghost Fleet” of WWII-era liberty ships were moored. They are gone now. So is the bungalow. I am sorry for that.
From the Palisades up through the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River is holy ground, as far as I am concerned. It glows with the inner light of myth.
Schoodic Point — Maine is its own mythology, and like the city of New York, I was going to include the whole state in my list, but likewise, I have narrowed it down to the place that I have been back to over and over for the longest. I first visited Maine as an infant when my parents took a trip there. I can’t say I have any memory of then. But subsequently, I have been there many times, now to visit my friends Alexander and Mary Lou. I’ve traveled the whole state over, camped at Mt. Katahdin, driven round Mooselookmeguntic Lake, reached the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Mt. Desert Island, took the tour of the paper mill in Millinocket — and you can get there from here.
But the mythic center of Maine for me has been the rocky bit of coastline that juts out into Frenchman’s Bay north of Acadia National Park, called Schoodic (with the double “O” pronounced as the “oo” in “good.”) It is one of those windswept romantic landscapes where the spume blows into your face, the waves crash against rock with an explosive boom, and the sky, water, and land still seem of one substance.
Giverny — I’ve been to Monet’s house and gardens three times, once in the spring and twice in the fall. He and his family lived in the small town 50 miles north of Paris, from 1883 until his death in 1926, and many of his greatest works were made there, primarily his extensive series of water lily paintings.
I had become familiar with some of those wide canvases in museums in New York and at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. And I had been inspired to make scores of photographs of waterlilies in imitation of Monet’s paintings.
But the chance to get to see the genuine article in situ, in the grand gardens in Giverny was a pilgrimage from the get-go. One enters, of course, with curiosity, but also with reverence.
Austin house
Rock Castle Creek, Woolwine, Va. — Some of the happiest and unfettered moments of my life have been spent on the porch of the Austin house along Rock Castle Creek in Virginia. I have been back many times, beginning during my college years, when a group of Guilford students hiked the five or so miles up the creek, fording over logs, and reaching the 1916 farmhouse, with its spring house and barn.
With my companion, or with a group, we would break into the house (not recommended, for legal reasons) and roll out our sleeping bags on the floor. At night in the summer, the field in front of the house was a galaxy of blinking lightning bugs.
At the end of Bergman’s film, Wild Strawberries, the old professor Isak Borg, lies in bed after a tumultuous day, full of cares and regrets, and in voice over, says, “If I have been worried or sad during the day, it often calms me to recall childhood memories,” and he thinks of a time he saw his parents together, with his father fishing. It soothes him and he sleeps peacefully. For me, that moment of pure calm happiness that I recall is of sharing a hammock with my beautiful red-headed mate on the second floor porch of the Austin house and watching the sun go down over the creek and meadows beyond. Such moments consecrate a place.
These are all places I have gone back to multiple times. But there are places where I have only ventured once that still have that emotional buzz that signifies a sacralized locale. These may be places set aside by history or by personal experience, or simply by their extraordinary natural setting.
We all have such places, and they while they may be widely shared, such as the World Trade Center, they are just as often special only to one or a few people. Places where we stand in awe, and may not even be able to speak.
From top right: Cape of Good Hope; Gaspe; Montauk; Finisterre
For me, many have been where the land runs out and the seas begin. There is something about the extremity, the sense of the limitations of land and the seeming infinity of the watery horizon. I seek them out, such as the Gaspé Peninsula, Long Island’s Montauk Point, Brittany’s Finisterre, or South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. At my age, I know my existence shall soon run out and the dark infinite void is the horizon, and that I will not likely ever get to visit such places again.
And I have been to Civil War sites where I felt the ghosts in the soil: places such as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Appomattox, Gettysburg, Petersburg, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Five Forks. And important places in the Western expansion: Sand Creek, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, Washita. Japanese internment camps at Manzanar and Poston. And to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was shot; and the slave quarters at the Oakley Plantation in Louisiana. All places where death and suffering are felt in the air breathed there — at least to anyone with an awareness of history.
Mt. Saint Michel
And I could list many less fraught places with their own resonance that I have only visited once, but that have created space in my psyche: Mt. Saint Michel; Big Bend National Park; the catacombs in Paris; the caves at Lascaux; the town of Moosonee on James Bay in Ontario; the Okefenokee swamp in Georgia; Mt. Angeles in Washington’s Olympic Mountains; Hallingskarvet mountains in the spoon of Norway; Chaco Canyon; Taliesin in Wisconsin; Ice Water Springs in the Smokies; the Salton Sea; Glacier Bay in Alaska.
Each of these places has become a part of me. They are my sacred spaces.
I’ve been to the Louvre in Paris a number of times, but no matter how long I spend there, I never feel as if I’ve seen more than two percent of it. It is vast. It is the largest museum in the world, with 782,910 square feet of floor space (topping the No. 2 museum, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, by more than 60,000 sq. feet) and a collection of more than 600,000 pieces.
It’s where you go to find the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo.
It’s one of the oldest museums around, but never seems quite finished. It began as a royal palace in the 12th century, and has been added on to, parts burned down, parts replaced, and even a glass pyramid added to the top.
When Louis XIV moved the court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the building became a warehouse for kingly treasures and much of his art collection. in 1699, the first “open house,” or salon was held, and for a century, the royal academy of art was located there.
The French Revolution ended the monarchy, and all the art once owned by the king became public property, and in 1793, the new government decreed that the Louvre should be open to the citizens as a free art museum.
But soon after, the collection expanded exponentially, as Napoleon Bonaparte conquered half of the continent, and sent back to Paris a good deal of the art from conquered lands. He even had the museum renamed Musée Napoléon. That didn’t last, but neither did Napoleon.
Over the 19th century, the museum collection grew, from bequests, purchases and colonial expropriations. For a while, it included a whole section of Pre-Columbian art from the New World, but that spun out into its own museum, leaving the Louvre for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1887; in 1945, the Louvre’s extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum; and by 1986, all the museum’s art made after 1848, including Impressionist and Modernist work, was transferred to the Musée d’Orsay, a refurbished railways station. It seemed the Louvre kept bursting its seams.
Then came François Mitterrand. Serving as French president from 1981-1995, Mitterrand conjured up the Grand Project to transform the cultural profile of Paris, with additional monuments, buildings, museums, and refurbishment of existing locations. Taxes were raised to accomplish this project, said to be on a scale that only Louis XIV had attempted.
Part of this plan was the Grand Louvre, to remodel and expand the museum, and to regularize (as much as possible) the maze and warren of galleries in the old accretion of palace rooms. The most visible of the changes was the addition of the glass pyramid in the center courtyard of the palace. It was designed by architect I.M. Pei and although it has long become part of the landscape of the museum, it still angers many of the country’s more conservative grouches. In 2017, The American Institute of Architects noted that the pyramid “now rivals the Eiffel Tower as one of France’s most recognizable architectural icons.”
The entire central underground of the courtyard was remodeled to create a new entrance, and to attempt to make sense of the confusion of corridors, rooms, staircases and doorways. It was completed in 1989.
Now, one cannot think of the Louvre without its pyramid, but speaking as a visitor, while the Hall Napoléon (the underground foyer) has made some sense of the confusion, I cannot honestly claim the chaos has been tamed. The museum remains a labyrinth and you can be easily lost.
And, unless you have budgeted a month or more to spelunk the entire museum, you will need to prioritize what you want to see in a visit — or two, or three.
Quick word: Forget the Mona Lisa. It’s a tiny little painting of little artistic note, buried under a Times Square-size crowd of tourists all wanting to see the “most famous painting in the world.” It is what good PR will get you. It may be a historically noteworthy piece as one of the very few paintings Leonardo completed, but there is much better to be seen in the museum. Don’t exhaust yourself in the mêlée.
Seek out the unusual, like Jan Provost’s Sacred Allegory, from about 1490, which I like to call “God’s Bowling Ball;” or The Ascension, by Hans Memling, from the same time, which shows Christ rising into heaven, but shows only his feet dangling from the clouds. There’s some quirky stuff on the walls of the Louvre.
One of the goals of the museum is to collect, preserve, and display the cultural history of the Western world. This is our art, the stuff we have made for more than 3,000 years, from Ancient Sumer and Egypt, through classical Greece and Rome, wizzing past the Middle Ages and brightening with the Renaissance and the centuries that followed. You get the whole panoply and see what tropes have persisted, the ideas that have evolved, the stuff of our psychic landscape.
(See how the fallen soldier in Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women echoes in Picasso’s Guernica. One way of looking at all cultural history is as an extended conversation between the present and the past. The reverberations are loud and clear.)
You can look at the paintings on the wall and see them for the beauty of their colors and brushwork, or the familiar (or not-so-familiar) stories they depict; or you can see them as the physical embodiment of the collective unconscious.
I have always been a museum-goer. From my earliest times as a boy going to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, through my days as an art critic, rambling through the art museums of the U.S. and abroad. There is little I get more pleasure from.
One soaks up the visual patterns, makes connections, recognizes the habits of humankind. Recognizes the shared humanity. The differences between me and Gilgamesh are merely surface tics. When I see the hand of the Roman emperor, it is my hand. I feel kinship with all those whose works and images appear in the galleries.
And so, if it is two percent of the Louvre I have managed to absorb, I know the rest is there, and that it is me, also.
I did many things during my 25 years with The Arizona Republic. Primarily, I was a critic, but I also wrote travel articles and the occasional humor pieces. And for a while, my brief included driving around town in Phoenix, Ariz., looking for odd and ironic signage. I would photograph such things and they would run, say, at the bottom of a page with a short caption.
Things such as a leprechaun who said “Se habla Español,” or a 20-foot high cutout of a baby on I-10 just west of the city. There is irony everywhere, if you are looking for it. The social landscape is brimming with whimsy.
For me, it all began when my wife and I drove around the U.S. in the early 1980s, and we saw oddness all around. Carole kept notebooks, for each trip, and wrote down many of the things that struck us, such as the Elmer Hurlbutt Bridge in northern California. Or Fiery Gizzard in Tennessee.
Or the sign along I-90 in South Dakota that read “Welcome to Kadoka, S.D. Kadoka needs another doctor.” Or in Maine: “Welcome to Kennebunk, the only village so named.”
It became a theme of our travels. The Little Hope Baptist Church. A fast-food stand in Pennsylvania offered “arsonburgers.” A missing neon “Y” in Rising Star, Texas, made its bean-ery the “Old Colon Restaurant.”
In Wolf Point, Mont., we crossed a tiny bridge over a stony dry wash with a sign posted saying, “No diving off bridge.” This is a common sign across the West.
A billboard in El Paso, Texas, tells us a certain car dealership is “three miles west of Lee Trevino.”
And while we were climbing up the Cascade Mountains in Washington, we found a roadsign that said “Flying Rocks 35 mph,” as if it were a speed limit for impatient boulders. It pictured a black blob with little hites trailing behind, on a yellow background. (“Hites” are those speed-lines drawn by cartoonists, as defined by Mort Walker in his Lexicon of Comicana.)
Perhaps my interest in oddness and irony was first touched off when I was a teenager visiting the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where there was an illuminated sign pointing downstairs to “Solar System & Rest Rooms.”
At any rate, there are many fellow travelers who collect these little roadside giblets. They show up on FaceBook and Twitter (I know, “X”), or in videos on YouTube. There is no shortage of misspellings, unnoticed juxtapositions, contradictory instructions, and bad word spacings.
As a former copy editor and headline writer, I am more sensitive than non-journalists to the bad line break. That is when an adjective and noun are split into two lines and leave a misreading likely. Little Hope Baptist Church is one of these. Presumably, there is a Hope Baptist Church nearby, and this is the Little version of it. But that’s not how it reads.
When you are alerted to the issue, bad line breaks are everywhere. It is behind all those signs warning of “Slow Children.”
Then there is just plain irony, as in all those roads to cemeteries that feature “Dead End” signs.
Sometimes, you are meant to read across, sometimes down, and sometimes the sign maker hasn’t seemed to notice.
Some signs seem utterly unnecessary.
Cows are a common theme.
Some signs are self-referential. Without the sign, you wouldn’t need the sign to tell you what’s on the sign.
Surely some street sign makers weren’t paying attention when they put together these.
Some are unintentionally risque.
Aren’t secret sites supposed to be secret?
Some are just head-scratchers.
And what are you supposed to do with these?
Or these?
Or these “water signs?”
Everywhere you go, you find them. Sometimes the world seems like constant entertainment.
Richard Nilsen 