Alone?

"Alone?" they ask me, incredulous, concerned.  Not alone, I want to say.  I travel surrounded by ghosts.  The echoing whispers of their lives roll down these tracks and weave through the air, a constant murmur in the back of my mind that says "you are not the first."   My great-grandmother rode this train to New Mexico with a trunk full of beautiful clothes, and somehow this knowledge has changed the shape of my backpack; my great-great-grandmother followed this road when it was a path cut through the prairie and the wheels of our car must be pressing down on her ancient footprints; my great-great-great-grandfather picked his way down these country lanes on mule and buggy and I can smell that journey in the air, muleshit and sweat.  These empty deserts are full of cowboys and these industrial backwaters have known a thousand laborers.  None of us are alone.

Besides, I want to say, even without these accompanying shades, company abounds.  My mother texts, my boyfriend calls, my cell phone shows my twitter updates and who messaged me on Facebook.  Every time I step off the train I walk towards family, towards a world where the quiet corners of my brain must be twisted into a socially-acceptable shape, where at dinner I am polite instead of moody and warm instead of cold.  The most basic duties we take on when we decide to live with other people - I take them for granted until I visit my grandfather, who has dropped these duties (and others) in the dirt of his past.  Seeing him reminds me that I do not ever live alone.  And in my bags I carry letters, cards, loaned books, little bits of other people.  In the seats next to me and the rooms across the hall sit strangers and we ask each other "Where ya headed?" and share our stories.  Even in the middle of an endless desert, in a little steel-and-glass shell slipping between canyon walls, there's no alone.

But I know that's not really what they're asking me.  They're asking, "Aren't you afraid?"  And to answer I return to ghosts: my great-grandmother came out here when the west was lawless and Las Vegas a place where the sins were deadly, not sexy.  My grandfather barely spoke English when he crossed this country in the colored sections of these trains.  My great-grandfather hopped freight trains with hobos in the great depression, fleeing along the dark and dirty edges of a civilization that seemed to be crumbling away.  And I've got a cell phone and credit cards, the internet at my fingertips, friends in every state, and the kind of face policemen look kindly upon.  

This isn't scary.  If anything, it's too easy.

But I don't say any of this.  I smile and say last summer I traveled alone in the Philippines, and that this is far less scary - deflecting their concern to a trip safely in the past, one I clearly survived.  To one woman, with a friendly smile and precocious children, I dare to tell a bit of the truth - that traveling "just one, please" is easier, less stressful, because there's only me to deal with.  When something goes wrong, it's just me to fix it.  When the nights are uncomfortable and the mornings weary, there's no snappy arguments because there's nobody to fight with.  When the days are long and slow there's nobody to keep entertained - just me, and I stretch my arms and yawn and open my netbook and I know that I'm fine.  There's no negotiations over when to stop and where to eat and who needs what and how we get it.  When it's just me, traveling is easy.  She nods like she understands and her son’s green eyes are watching me and they remind me of myself, when I was ten years old, and really believed in adventures.

But I don't tell anybody that I'm not alone at all.  When I was in the Philippines I rode down a mountain on the back of a stranger's motorcycle and felt a single, pure moment of ecstasy.   I realized that no one in the world knew where I was, except for Jun-jun, my ride - and he didn't know who I was.  For this brief moment I existed only with and for and in myself.  And yet I knew I was riding this motorcycle, the quick way down the mountain, because I had promises to keep, and miles to go and so on, and that there were people waiting for me just around the corner of my life, and I could not disappear.  One moment behind the curtains, but the show goes on.  The web that ties me to the people in my life is stronger than the distances I test it with, far stronger than these teasing absences.  

Sometimes I have the face of a girl who is careful and does not make mistakes, the kind of girl who savors quiet adventures and plans a responsible career and makes clever small talk and will laugh at your jokes, and this is the face I wear to dinner on the train.  I lost my nose ring in California, I brush my hair each morning, I work on my laptop, I do not flirt with strangers, I do not drink, I do not curse, I do not argue.  I would trust me to watch my laptop.  I would let me talk to my children.  And this is the person strangers fear to see alone in the world, the person other people's parents reach for with concern.  

I am as vulnerable as they need me to be, obligingly nodded my head like a wide-eyed ingenue as they warn me that New Orleans isn't the world's safest place.  Strangers surround me with compassionate concern everywhere I turn, every time I return a glance.  And yet they think I am alone?  

In the dining car, surrounded by the noise of wheels on track and engine through air and wind through sagebrush and knives clattering on plastic, I sit by the window.  I sip coffee from a plastic cup.  I cannot see the other passengers; I'm staring out towards distant mountains as the sunlight turns golden on the sagebrush, watching two delicate deer, ears up high.  I only look alone.

Southern Gothic

I first met Southern Gothic in an old copy of Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge, a library cast-off with a broken binding.  I was in my first years of high school - or maybe I was even still in middle school. In those days I binged on books, sat down with them on lonely afternoons and curled up, barely moving until I turned the back cover and stretched cramped limbs.

So I started in on this book I'd chosen for its interesting title and the charm of its deterioration - no deeper planning, no name recognition.  I liked the eponymous story for its biting depiction of race relations, didn't get the title, gave up trying to.  I read the second pulled along by the tension, the same way I read mysteries, skipping chunks of narration for the plot.  And then I hit the third story, "A View of the Woods."  

I had slowed down a bit by now - the book was making me nervous.  I preferred my dystopias to be clearly delineated alternate worlds, not this just-twisted, recognizable planet.  At that age, I might have never heard of southern gothic, and was definitely not prepared for this.  As the grandfather and girl sniped at each I wondered whether there was a point to this interminable fighting, worried a little, wished it would end.  I was enough of an innocent that when the murder finally happened, written so bluntly, so sparingly - "then he brought it down twice more" - I was truly and deeply shocked.  

I closed the book, only three stories in, and fled to the kitchen.

Since then I've grew a little more of a taste for southern gothic - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in the form of another battered secondhand book, stands in the part of my bookshelf reserved for rereading - and I've also grown more careful about what exactly I choose to binge on.  But I never finished that particular O'Connor collection.

And I think sometimes that I'm still just as innocent.  Gathering stories in the South, I did not expect or imagine that real life would imitate fiction, in content or in style.  Southern gothic is just a genre, the grotesque turn a plot element, right?  But family stories every now and again took a twist to the horrific.  The grotesque writ large - "So they hunted him down and hung him in the woods" - or small:

But listen, I’d do anything my daddy told me. 

(My great-uncle Sid is in story-telling mode, an old man with a smoker's cough and a sly look in his eyes.)

I don't care what it was, I believed him. Lemme tell you what I did one time. I wanted a knife so bad. I was a little boy. I’d see these little knives they had about thaaaat long, closed up, little penknife things, and I wanted one so badly but mama was scared of me having one because she thought I’d cut myself. So I never could get one. I tried and tried and tried. Finally I got one, don’t remember how exactly I got it but I got one and boy, I was so happy to have that little knife. And I was just carrying it around and showing it to everybody and talking about that little knife. I was probably about three, four, maybe. 

Daddy came in and I had to show it to him. He said "man, that's a fine knife." He said, "Now, I tell you what you do." He said, "You go out into the edge of the field and plant this knife like that, and it'll come up and make a whole tree full of knives, and you'll just have a whole treefull." Well, see, I knew they planted corn and beans and stuff and it would come up and make all that stuff, so I believed him! 

I went out to the edge of the field and planted a knife. Well the next day I thought about it and I went out to see if a tree came up and I couldn't see a thing. I couldn’t figure out where it was. I couldn’t find my knife. And daddy had got what he wanted all the time, get rid of the knife. But see, I believed him. 

He told me one time when I caught a crow, I caught a crow one time, and I was going to make a pet out of it. And I bought it home and I told him, see, I’m going to make a pet out of this crow. He said, "Aw, you can't make no pet out of that crow." I said "Mmm, yeah I am, I’m gonna pet it, pet it." And he said, "well, if you wanna make him talk, you take a knife and split his tongue. And he'll talk."  I said," Ohhh, that's a good idea."  

So I got my knife and split his tongue. The next morning he was dead.  

That's what daddy wanted all the time. Again he got me. He'd get me all the time.

(Uncle Sidney laughs.  And because every gothic tale needs an innocent, I sit at his kitchen table, swallowing hard, eyes wide, trying to chuckle.)

good news/bad news

so the good news is i got a great night's sleep last night!

the bad news is i missed my train...

the good news is i was a responsible kid and did not go out and get crazy because it was dark, i was alone, i didn't know where i was going and i wanted to be sure to wake up early and catch my train.

the bad news is i MISSED MY TRAIN ANYWAY, WTF IS WRONG WITH ME

ummm the good news is i get a little longer in new orleans!

but seeing as how i somehow thought that a single cell phone alarm set to vibrate would wake my tired ass up at 4 a.m, the bad news is that i'm an idiot!!



i've got a flight home tonight, using the voucher i got when continental screwed things up when i had to get a flight because north dakota flooded and blocked the train tracks. and now i'm screwing things up, and the train is running without me in it, and i suppose everything is running full circle. except the fact that i'm an idiot. that's just me on a straight line into idiotville.

just breathe (a love story, a lung story)

So far we've had a robbery and a death.  Who's ready for a love story?


First, the setting.  We're not in the backwoods farms of Georgia anymore, or the wide plains of Canada and  Montana.  Instead, we start with young Mary Elizabeth in Knoxville, Tennesse, from a well-heeled and respected family - the Gleasons.  Wealthy from a family beer distributorship and renowned for James A. Gleason's military success, the family lived in the lap of luxury.  But Mary's home life was hardly idyllic.  Her father was a strict taskmaster; he taught his children how to swim by throwing them into a pond and watching as they figured out how to save themselves.   Mary's mother had died when she was young and her father, before he remarried, passed the care of his children on to his mother.

Because Mary's two brothers were quite the handful for their grandmother, Mary was sent away to boarding school to make life a little easier at home.  To top it off, she'd always been a sickly child, always seeing doctors and at one point needing treatment from the Mayo Clinic.  Half-orphaned and often ill, Mary nevertheless did very well at her boarding school, graduating with honors and excelling at the piano.  She was a kind girl, soft-spoken and with the genteel southern manners expected of a young woman of her station.  Devout, obedient and with a subdued, modest beauty, Mary had become the perfect Southern belle.

Meanwhile, six hundred miles away in Philadelphia, James Larkins was growing up in a working-class family.  He, too, had lost a parent; in fact, he was an orphan, raised by a cousin's family.  His relatives worked as horse colliers and trolley operators, and Jimmie was enrolled in professional schools before he could finish high school.  He learned shorthand and mechanical drawing - skills that could make him useful at any jobsite.  But before he could make a career for himself, James Larkins was stricken with tuberculosis - the dreaded disease once called consumption.  At the time, the only recognized cure for TB was to move to an arid climate and follow a strict regimen of diet and rest.  So James rode the train out to New Mexico and tried to heal a little.

Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Mary's brother Bernard contracted TB.  Mary herself was fine - no more sickly than usual - but since she'd graduated from the boarding school and wasn't yet married, it made sense for her to travel out west to care for her brother.  After all, caring for men is what women did.  But when the Gleasons arrived at the TB sanitorium, Mary - unsurprisingly, given her delicate constitution - caught TB and became the sickest of them all.

This is where James and Mary's paths crossed: a sanitorum in Silver Springs, New Mexico.  They spent the most thrilling years of the Roaring Twenties far from the cities that were their homes, and along the way they found each other.  Forced to stay outdoors for hours, lying down or engaging in leisurely activities, James and Mary spent day after day together in the sunshine.  In normal society, a working-class Philadelphia boy and a genteel Knoxville belle would never have spent long days having heart to hearts, but the TB sanitorium was its own little world.  The eyes of their families and the rules of East Coast society were a thousand miles away.  He was tall, ambitious and a man of few, well-chosen words; she was charming and friendly and as sweet as iced tea.  And they fell in love.

Eventually, they were both lucky enough to recover - and unlucky enough to have to head their separate ways. For four long years they stayed in touch through letters. He came through Knoxville once to see her, on his way from Philadelphia back out to the west - the dry, sun-soaked land where they'd met and fallen in love, the endless territory that had once been the wild frontier, and then the land of boundless opportunity.  Now that the Great Depression had hit, the west seemed less like a dreamland and more like a desert, but James needed a job.  And he found one, working at a desk running calculations for the men building Boulder Dam.  After long years of illness and unemployment, he had his health, a home, and a job.  There was just one thing missing, and toward the end of 1931 he sent a question back to his sweetheart in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mary had seen him only once in the last four years.

The last day of the year, Mary wired a telegram back.  "HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WITH ME THAT IS YOUR ANSWER I BELIEVE IF YOU STILL FEEL STRONG ENOUGH."  Mary's well-to-do family, of course, were not about to approve of a marriage to a penniless young man from a family they'd never met, particularly a marriage that sent her across the country into wild, unknown territory.  So she didn't tell them: "FAMILY IN IGNORANCE," she informed James.  "DETAILS FOLLOW LOVE MARY"

Mary made copies of their birth certificates and contacts out in Boulder City.  She found a priest who would conduct a Catholic ceremony (although James was not a churchgoer, Mary had no intention of flagging in her faith).  She packed a trunk full of clothes and provisions, and booked her train tickets.  This time there'd be no brother - she would be a young woman crossing the country alone.   Highly unusual at the time.  Still surprises some people now, I'm qualified to say.

Boulder City, at the time Mary arrived, was not much of a city at all - more of a village of tents and makeshift roads.  It was brought into existence to house the throngs of workers building the dam, and its accomodations were - well, "primitive" would be putting it kindly.  Mary arrived in town on the night of the 22nd, and straightaway she could tell that her clothes weren't precisely suitable. She'd brought her finest shoes to wear at her wedding, but Boulder City was built on dust and dirt - no pavement to walk on.  To save the satin for the ceremony, she walked barefoot and carried her shoes in her hand.  Less than 24 hours after she arrived, James and Mary were wed in a temporary Catholic church - the first church wedding in Boulder City.  Her parents found out by telegram... after the marriage was official.

In addition to being Boulder City's first church wedding, James and Mary were another first - the first owners fo a bathtub in town.  Yep, she definitely wasn't in Knoxville anymore.  And while she was adjusting to the change in environments, she also had to learn fast: she'd been raised in a boarding school, and had never learned to cook, clean or keep house.  The first time she went to make an apple pie, she bought two apples.  She was living in a world of rough-and-tumble men and faced a job she'd never been taught how to do.  But she ordered a cookbook, asked for advice, and - just like she had at school - she proved to be a quick learner.

After the dam was finished, Mary followed James across the southwest as he found new employment - in Mexico, in the hills around Southern California, and finally in downtown L.A.  They had two children - one named James and one named Mary.  As an engineer, a hardware salesman and a contractor, James helped build the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles.  He bought land in the desert, an area he loved, where they could build their dream home.  Then Mary got asthma - bad asthma, that sent her to the hospital and sometimes kept her in her bed all day. The doctors said only thing might help: finding a climate that would be easier on her lungs.

So they tried.  They took to the car, driving up to the mountains, out to the desert and down to the coast so Mary could test the air.  James drove, Mary rode shotgun, and the kids fell asleep in the back.  The desert, which had done so well by them in their youth, made it worse; the pollen of vegetated areas caused her agony.  But the coast helped ease the painful sound of her struggling breaths, and a few specific spots, where the fog rolled in off the ocean, made her breathing almost clear.  Every night they'd drive out to the ocean by Redondo Beach and sit, breathing together, as Mary's lungs struggled on.

So James sold the plot of land in the desert, where they'd hoped to build a home, and bought one in a patch of field by the beach.  They were no longer moving to follow his jobs - they were just trying to save her health.  On the new plot of land, James designed and built a house for Mary, where they lived for the rest of their lives

Today the house is gone - torn down to free up the prime real estate, now surrounded by mansions instead of fields.  But as I stood where it once was I could taste the air - cool, clean, fresh.  I tried to imagine harsh desert winds, or the stifling heat of Tennessee.  I tried to think about finding a job in the Great Depression, or learning how to cook from a terse, unillustrated book.  I worried about the audacity of turning lives into neatly packaged stories.  But a new ocean breeze washed all those thoughts out of my mind as it brushed through the branches of the jacaranda trees.  Instead I thought of a car, perched by the sand, and these winds rushing in off the ocean, as sweet and pure then as they are today.  Don't think so much, don't worry, I told myself.  Just breathe.

ARRRRGH, or On Writing On People

I am terrified of writing about people.  Even in my journal, where I write without fear of being read - because, really, how many people can decipher my handwriting? - my descriptions of others are filled with scratched-out  lines and (maybe?)s and (I think)s and the occasional despairing ARRRGGH!

More specifically, I am terrified of getting people wrong.  Like the fear of dying, this is fear of a guaranteed fact - and therefore a fear both pointless and inescapable.  Obviously I will get it wrong.  Of course I will get it wrong.  Writing about people, to use an overwrought simile, is like trying to make a sketch of the entire earth by jumping up really high and drawing while you're in the air.  There's too much to cover in too little time, and you can never see nearly enough.

Or to put it another way: all I ever know about people is the tiny portion of themselves they show me, and even that is too much to write down.  So I have to choose fragments of detail from a fragment of a self.  It's like - here comes another simile - trying to write about the history of America when you only have information about the year 1823, and you can only write about people whose middle name begins with M, and you only have room to write two pages.  Hopelessly limited, in other words.

So there's no way to get it right, and that's terrifying.  These are real people with real feelings; I don't want to be wrong about them.  It gets even worse when I write outside my journal, because I try to write as though the people I write about will read anything I post with a critical, mistrustful eye.  I do this based on a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and one in which I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel or critical.  Being wrong, however you're wrong, can be as bad as being mean.  And I do hate being mean.  And I know I'm going to be wrong.

It's just overall hopeless, in other words.

But say that I try... When you write you turn people into characters.  And real people aren't characters any more than characters are real people.  This act of alchemy carries an intimidating sense of responsibility.  What kind of character do you turn them into?  What details do you pick and what shape do you give their personality?  How much room do you give them to breathe - how much do you let them speak for themselves, and how much do you let their bodies and their homes and their friends speak for them?  When do you let them use their own words, and when do you dive into guessing at their emotions?  If you can't get it right, how can you get it less wrong?



My great-great aunt drinks scotch and soda out of a Playboy glass.  She walks slowly around her house, muttering "I'm getting so damned old," but you'd never guess her real age - almost 90.  And, believe it or not, she still works full-time!  "People tell me I should stop working, and they're probably right," she says in a slyly subversive voice.  "But what would I do?  I don't play golf.  I don't play bridge.  I suppose I could do volunteer work, but I say, why not get paid for it?" She cackles and drinks more scotch.  Her niece told me that my great-great-aunt keeps her husband's ashes in a cabinet, so that when she gets angry at something she can open the door and yell at him, which makes her feel much better.

My great-great-aunt lives up a windy tree-lined road, on the edge of a golf course.  Her house is large and breezy, a gentle green on the outside and pale beige on the inside.  It's filled with Japanese paper screens and elegant artwork, plush pillows and soft colors and fresh flowers.  In an old woman's wavery voice, says she probably spends more money on flowers than on food - she just doesn't feel right if she doesn't have flowers in the house.  She walks slowly around her house, tidying up, arranging flowers and carefully slicing vegetables for dinner.

My great-great-aunt grew up herding cattle from a shetland pony, back when she was too small to ride a horse, in a windswept land where the winters dropped to thirty below.  Headstrong and independent, she later followed her sister out to Seattle, and she hated it.  "The weather was just awful," she said.  "The first day I got there it was beautiful," she said in an expressive voice, "the sunlight shining silvery off of everything.  And then I didn't see the sun for six months."  It just wouldn't do, so without the slightest idea how she'd make a living, she moved down to California.  Here the sun shines more often and the winters aren't so cold, and no cattle called her out into the cold.  Here she stayed.  As she walks slowly around her house, she looks out her wide windows at the blue sky and green grass, and she smiles, victorious.

My great-great-aunt goes to the farmer's market every friday morning for fresh local fruits and vegetables.  She walks slowly around her kitchen gathering together ingredients, and when I offer to help her she laughs. For dinner she makes broiled fish, smashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and a salad, served in a wooden bowl.  It's all very healthy, elegant, delicious, local.  Very California.

My great-great-aunt's bookshelves are impressively well-stocked: the guest bedroom alone features well-read copies of almost everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, a lot of Salman Rushdie's work, some Milan Kundera, some Italo Calvino, lots of Toni Morrison, some Nin, some Mailer, a little Pynchon, and all of the James Bond books.  A massive dictionary sits on a stand near her reading chairs.

My great-great-aunt never went to college.  She left her frontier hometown when she was young and went to work at the naval shipyards. Later she worked at a jeweler's shop, then ran a drive-in restaurant, and now - at the age of almost 90 - she still works full-time in retail.  She's been a diligent, hard-working and focused woman all her life.

A raunchy spitfire?  An elegant matriarch? A determined sun-lover? A California foodie? An intellectual? A dedicated worker?

All these things, maybe, or none of these things.  And then I don't know a thing about her as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a grandmother.  I don't know what she was like when she was 15 or 50. I was with her for only half a day.  And I am audacious enough to want to write about her?

Even after an attempt at thorough fairness, I'm left with an inevitable lie of omission - and a niggling doubt.  What if these best-guesses, these attempts at accurate and generous and multi-layered portrayals, are just plain wrong?

It's terrifying.  It's just terrifying.

A question

"Do you believe in God?"

It was a gut-clenchingly direct question, a kind that I wasn't really used to.  I suppose for believers of any kind this is an entirely familiar question, one asked and answered on a regular basis, the affirmation a matter of habit: the Shahada, the Nicene creed, the Shema... devout atheists, too, have a ready answer.

But for me it was entirely unusual and unexpected and alarming.  I had to scout around for an answer.  "Yes" didn't feel true.  "No" didn't feel honest.  "I don't know" seemed inadequate, even lazy.    "That's a difficult question" felt too evasive.  "None of your business" was combative.

And he wasn't be rude or aggressive, this young man with the carefully sideswept hair and the gentle, limpid eyes.  Just very direct.  Avoiding the issue wasn't really an option.  We were in the middle of a busy intersection on the island of Puerto Princesa, I was perched on the back of his scooter, and he was looking straight at me like we weren't moving until I answered.

"Sometimes," I said.  I'm not sure if it was an accurate answer.  I don't go around gauging my belief in God like diabetics measure their blood sugar, and I suspect that if I did, results would generally be negative.  But it felt like a good answer to give him.  And it wasn't entirely untrue - there have been times in my life when I thought I believed in God.  That all those moments were years ago felt, in the tropical sunlight and the softness of his gaze, rather beside the point.

Tha was almost exactly a year ago.  It was the last time, I believe, anybody has asked me in so many words where I sit with God.  But in trying to explore my family's history, God - like poverty, like wealth, like racism, like violence, like love and deception - is woven deep into the fabric of the story.  I have seen miracles of human impulse that have given me a deep respect for the power of money and hatred and passion and lies; the power of faith is a mystery to me.  So the question sits, not like an accusation, but like a test.


"Do you go to church?"  A second cousin in Georgia, smiling warmly, opening her house in hospitality.  The same question came from almost every relative I met in the Philippines.  Maybe that's one point where my grandparents' very different backgrounds converged - they came from worlds of deep devotion.

To this question, a more common and more manageable one than I'd faced on the back of that scooter, I had the same answer as always: "Um, well, not really."  Very eloquent, I am.

"Well, what matters is your relationship with God.  I'm not going to preach, I'm just saying."  Briskly she changes the topic without asking, and I breathe out a sigh I hadn't known I'd been holding.

"I'm going to skip church and go out to breakfast with you," another Southern relative says generously.  I stutter.  Now my irreligious presence is disrupting the faith of others.  Do I respond with guilt or with gratitude?  Somehow I need to figure out how to write about these communities.  But for them belief in God and sin and hell is the solid fertile ground beneath their feet.  For me, it's like their humidity, invisible but oppressive.  I'm afraid that I'm entirely the wrong storyteller for this family.


On the other hand, there's my Montana family, who weren't the same kind of religious.  I only heard one story about churches; the little fact that my Montanan great-grandfather went sometimes to his mother's church, where they preached in German.  He did not, as far as anyone can tell, speak German.  What does that mean?  Can I try to understand that fact without understanding faith - can I see it as an act of familial devotion, or of habit?  Or do I need to try to know what it would mean to believe in words you cannot understand?

But for the most part, it seems, my Montana ancestors did not wrap their lives around religion.  Aside from my great-great-grandmother's immigrant congregation, churches appear very rarely in their narratives.  They put their faith in their mules, in their labor, in the curing power of kerosene.  When the rains stopped they turned to gambling or the Communist party, not to prayer.

But I am hesitant to say I understand this.  Perhaps their lives were built on a belief in God so basic, so foundational, so taken for granted, that it needed no discussion or sermons or prayers.  What matters, as my relatives have told me, is your relationship to God.  And since I can't ask them what they thought about God, I can't assume that their churchlessness was anything like mine.

What I know, I can't understand; what I think I can understand, I can't know.

(There's another answer)

One story

You need to start somewhere.  Why not with Adam?

There's only one picture of my great-great-great-grandfather Adam Huffman, a slim and handsome man with a tidy moustache.  And there's only one story about him: the story of how he died so young,

They say he died of cancer.  And back at the turn of the century, cancer was a word spoken in whispers, a disease too terrible to think about, something to be treated like leprosy, or the plague.  Who knew how you could catch it?  So when he was sick, he lived in a hut behind his family's house in what we now call Saskatchewan, Canada.  A diseased man, dying alone, his wife took him meals three times a day - and aside from that, he saw no one.  And then he was dead.  And since then, in every generation, the youngest of each family's children has been struck with cancer before their time.  Many of them, like him, died before they ever saw their grandchildren.  It's a toxic inheritance and even now -

But no.  That's not right.  It wasn't cancer that he died of.  That's something they said to keep face.  It was the alcohol.  He was uncommonly sensitive to alcohol.  Allergic to it, they think.  And he had a little too much alcohol and it poisoned him -

But no, that's not right.  He wasn't allergic.  That's something they said to keep face.  He was an alcoholic, through and through, and he drank himself to death.  And left her, just like that, with two kids to raise.  And ever since then the Huffman children have had this weakness, just like he did - they've taken a little strong to the drink.  But Minerva Huffman, who was Adam's wife, she made her son Harry promise her he wouldn't drink, because of how his father had gone.  She made him promise it before she'd let him have the land she'd homesteaded.  And he promised, and since then he never drank.  Oh, he'd  have a drink, but that was it - he never drank like his father did, who drank himself to -

But no, that's not right.  It wasn't drinking that Harry promised to swear off.  It was the gambling.  So maybe it was the cancer that killed his father after all.  See, at 17 Harry was already a gambler, and his mother sensed trouble.  So she made him promise to stop gambling, and he promised, but he didn't stop - just traveled farther away to do it.  He stopped gambling in Montana, went all the way to Minneapolis for the sake of his mother's peace of mind.  And then when he saved his sister's farm with his poker winnings, she gave up fighting, and let him gamble closer to home -

But no, that's not right.  Harry'd always gambled in town.  He dealt cards in Plentywood, he got into scrapes in Dooley. So he couldn't have promised his mother he wouldn't gamble, because he never stopped at all - and nobody's called Harry a liar.  And he rarely lost, either, so why would she complain in the first place?  So it must have been the drinking he swore off, because it's true he never was a drunk.  And so it must have been his father was a drinker.  Unless -

Oh, who's to say.  Great-great-great-great-grandpa Huffman died youn.  Maybe of cancer.  Maybe of the drink.

Nobody knows for sure.

End of story?

those were the days...

The stories I'm collecting are set in a time without cars, jet airplanes, odwalla bars or lazy quests for a wifi signal.  They feature horses and mules and trolley cars, hand-plucked chickens and penny candy, hand-written letters and congratulatory telegraphs.  All of this seems wonderfully romantic.  I have to stop and forcibly remind myself that this was not a misty-edged technicolor past of soft sighs and swelling piano music; it was all probably rather awful.

To make things harder, everyone keeps insisting that I'm wrong.  Things weren't terrible at all.  "I don't remember it being cold," says a relative who grew up in a land where winters were thirty below.  "We had to scrape together pennies to survive, but you know, we all worked together," says another, wistfully.  "It was a hard life, but it was a good life," says just about everybody - and that, in itself, sounds so romantic, with its promise of hard-earned exhaustion and quiet satisfaction, that once again I have to fight to quell a surge of absurd nostalgia.

Outhouses, I tell myself.  Droughts.  Milking cows at 5 a.m.  Laundry taking all day.  What's so great about riding behind a team of mules?

(wistful sigh...)

Snapshots

In the observation car, ringed by picture windows, an Indian couple sits leaning forward like they're ready devour the mountainsides.  The woman, in an orange sari that brings a bit of color to the train's blue and white retro aesthetic, holds a video camera at chest level.  Every now and again they look down to make sure the camera is pointed in generally the right direction, and then they stare forward again, back out of the windows, camera rolling and entirely disregarded.

I think about the sunset I saw while heading west on the Empire Builder.  Swirling clouds, the roiling pinks and yellows, the reflection in a perfectly smooth pool - you know the type.  I whipped out a camera and snapped one shot, two, three, messing with the settings to try to get one striking one - and then I turned the camera off and set my forehead against the window.  The photos never turn out well with the glass in the way.

Who knows why we take these pictures?  To prove we were here, to make our friends and family jealous, to remind ourselves later?  We record these visions like its an obligation, something to get out of the way before we get back to the real work of staring. And staring.  And staring.

We won't print these pictures out and put them on our wall.  We won't turn to them in times of trouble or nostalgia.  We'll pack them away, and barely ever look at them again.  The photos are like stones we drop to mark our way - someday in the future, if we need to retrace our steps, these small and otherwise worthless artifacts will be there to show the path we followed.  For now we take snapshots, Hansel with a digital camera - snap, snap, snap, here's where we went - but keep our eyes, restless, on the tracks before us.

Views Re-Viewed

It's true that it's almost impossible to say anything new about these landscapes.  The trees are green, the lakes are blue, the mountains are high.  You've seen the pictures, watched the movies, hiked these peaks or flown over top of them or seen them in Google Maps' satellite view.  There really aren't any surprises here.  Sunlight and blue skies are lovely, stormy cloud masses are imposing, riding by a sawmill really spoils the view.

You've seen it all before, but that doesn't mean you stop looking.  The views are unsurprising but - somehow - still astonishing. It's a reminder that novelty does not run the world.  Seeing some things once just isn't enough; you can't check a beautiful view off your bucket list.

The shaking, whirring mechanism of the train propels us forward in time, leaving monotony on the tracks behind us, and we get sucked into a pattern of endless appreciation that doesn't feel repetitive.  I think I could run this route on a loop and never get bored.  I've seen the crew gaze out at the mountain range with the same slack-faced calm as the rest of us.

Why are we fascinated by these well-known views?  Is this E.O. Wilson's biophilia?  I don't know.  All I know is that it's kind of irrelevant that there's nothing new to say about these mountains.  After all, it's not something new we're chasing with our eager gazing - it's something very, very old.  And it may not be novel, but that doesn't mean it's always the same.

The same green, the same blue, the same tall peaks, same white clouds, yes.  But the light changes as the sun sets lower.  The rolling range fades away into temporary flatlands and then an ice-topped volcanic mountain rises from the earth.  It's the same view, but everytime you look, it seems to have gained a shadow or lost a curve.  Who needs a new horizon when the old one is so teasingly out of reach, so temptingly shifting?

Cascades of Green

Climbing in the Cascades, the train plunges into disorienting darkness and emerges back into mountains again and again and again.  Between tunnels, the view shifts by the second.  The peaks are layered like theater sets, stacked on top of each other and sliding across the horizon at different speeds, like they are pulled by husky stagehands with enormous ropes.

The distance must be an illusion.  How could there be this much wilderness left?  We're connecting major cities here - how could it be possible to look in either direction and see endless, uninterrupted woodland? Our steel-and-glass presence is the only disruption to the pine forests and the curving, tree-topped mountains.  And that seems peculiar.


"The Cascades" is a good name for them. They tumble over each other, flowing like waves, layered like sheets of water, like tiers of tumbling ivy. They look softer than they are, with the fierce pointy edges of the Rockies traded for the deceptively alluring curves of a waterfall.  Then a dormant volcano soars to the sky, a rock amidst the green waters.  I have approximately a lifetime's worth of transcription to work on, but it sits in my lap almost untouched.

I read somewhere that the human eye can discern more variations in the color green than any other color, which is why night-vision goggles show the world in tints of green. Possibly a trick evolutionarily acquired  to help tell plants apart more and separate poison from food. Maybe, I think as I stare out the window, I'm practicing. I'm training my eyes to tell these leaves apart, burning the slight changes in color deep into my retinas.  The dark green of old hemlock needles, the toxic-bright green of new ones; the yellow-green of maple leaves, the silver-green of spruces, the blue-green off old pines, the brown-green of maples.  The gray-green, the black-green, the cold-green, the warm-green, the gold-sunlit-green, the burnt-shadowed-green of the distant mountains.  The orange-green of moss.  The burning green of what might be poplar leaves.

And then the sudden black of another tunnel.  A flash of bright light, new colors of green, rock walls and then, for three seconds, a waterfall.  Thin and white, it splashes so clearly that I imagine I can hear it over the quiet rumbling of the train, although I'm sure that's not really possible.  Another instant and the last glimpse of white is visible through sturdy pine trunks.  Then it's gone, and we're in another tunnel.  I gaze deep into the dark, and it seems to carry fleeting hints of green.

Freight and Passengers

A freight train stops the traffic in Jakin, GA.  "The traffic" = me.

When I was first planning this trip and decided that I wanted to travel around by train, I thought that there was a connection, if somewhat tenuous, between my subject matter and my method of transportation.  Trains, after all, used to be the primary form of long-distance transportation.  It seemed reasonable that, as I tried to think about family history and the importance of place, trains would feature prominantly as a way to get to those places that became home.

To a certain degree that's true, and more recently than I had expected - my great-grandfather rode the rails during the Great Depression, and during WWII my grandfather and great-aunt rode trains back to Montana, for instance.

But that's mostly irrelevant.  I had it all wrong.  Trains weren't important because they were methods of transportation.  People got around however they could - mule, horse and wagon, car, truck, bus, hitch-hiking, trains, boats, walking... Trains made certain parts of the country easier to get to, but so did roads and canals.  New forms of transportation didn't really revolutionize the art of getting around.   There was always first class and coach, always some ways that were quicker and some that were slower, some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, some people who could afford to travel and lots who couldn't.

Trains are important to my family history because trains brought money.  I was thinking about passenger trains; I should have thought freight.

When the railroad came to southwest Georgia, my great-great-grandfather, Bill Regan (the stingy one) convinced the company to build an extension of the tracks that reached onto his property.  He could shear his sheep and load the wool directly onto freight cars.  Having his own railroad tracks brought him lots of money and proved that he was a big-time businessman.  Meanwhile the presence of the main railroad allowed the creation of the sawmills, which turned acres of virgin timber into cash and provided jobs to the local young men.  What had been subsistence farming communities were suddenly swimming in cash.

I don't have any evidence that my great-great-grandmother Ida Huffman (a Montana farmer) ever rode a train.  But she would drive a team of mules, carrying a wagon full of wheat, to the Dooley grain elevators and turn that wheat into money.  As time went on the farm bought tractors and trucks, and four wheels and gasoline became their primary form of transportation.  Trains stopped passing through Dooley and the grain elevators moved to other tracks.  But the grain still went onto trains - and today, the massive farms of that region still make money by transmuting streams of golden wheat into dollar bills by way of a freight car.

I'm headed for California now, the end of the push for western expansion, and the end of the line for that first transcontinental railroad.  And I bet there, too, what mattered about trains wasn't that people had the freedom to carry themselves to California in a matter of days - it was that freight could make it back to the East Coast quick enough for the fruit to stay fresh and cheaply enough for everybody to turn a profit.  It wasn't that it made it easier to get to California, it's that it gave people a reason to go.  Profit whispers more loudly than the call of adventure.

Money, money, money.  Follow the money. Follow the train tracks.

Ruminations on Ruins

Looking at the ruins of a Chinese city, Paul Thereux wrote: "Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city... It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies - only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world.  Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities." (239)

I have to agree with him, partly.  Stepping through the dusty remains of Dooley is not like looking at the ruins of a dead city, or fallen statues of a once-great civilization.  It doesn't inspire any mournful thoughts about the futility of human effort - quite the opposite.  It puts human effort into an entirely different perspective. 

The last human inhabitant of Dooley left twenty years ago, and for thirty years before that the town was essentially abandoned.  Fifty short years were all it took for the prairie to reclaim what once was a town.  And in that time a thousand towns continued on, hunkered down in this windswept land, waiting out each freezing winter and holding their houses up against the snow, thunderstorms and floods.  Dooley is what happens when everybody moves out.  Dooley is what would happen if the people who lived in this prairie gave up and stopped trying.  Dooley is proof that human willpower and constant work holds towns together - not masonry and certainly not inertia.  Human hands are the only reason every town in Montana doesn't look like Dooley.

The Crow Indians lived off this land for five thousand years.  Without stone foundations, their abandoned settlements must have vanished even more quickly and more surely than Dooley.  Their homes would have blown away in a year if not for human hands constantly fixing rips, rebuilding fires, gathering more wood, killing more buffalo, curing more skins, making more shelters  - the constant labor to hang on to the ground more fiercely than the wind could blow.  Build a home, keep it warm, keep it stocked with food, survive.  And then the Europeans came, bringing with them broken promises and slaughter.  The Crow were torn away from their land by guns stronger than the winds had been, and the U.S. government opened up these lands for homesteaders.  Once again, small settlements were waiting out storms and fighting to hold on to their lives.  Families built small houses and kept them together, kept them warm, kept them stocked with food.  A hundred years later people are still doing the same.

The earth can reclaim its territory quickly, at least in this part of the world, where the freezing winters crack wood and stone and the winds rip trees and houses straight off from the ground.  Everything we've built would crumble into dust if not for our constant effort.    Does that make human lives seem small and meaningless, or admirably powerful?

(Or pernicious, like a parasite?  Where are the woolly mammoths, the herds of wild buffalo, the endless prairie like an ocean? Our houses might vanish but some damage can't be wiped away by time.  There are many ways to put human effort into perspective - as easily indelibly catastrophic as doomed in its glory or noble in its determination.)

Dooley

Once upon a time, Dooley was a ghost town - empty storefronts, sagging buildings, prairie wind whipping down a Main Street no one traveled any more.  But today even the ghost is gone.  Dooley is just a place where a town used to be.

It still shows up on Montana state maps: neat type and a small white circle squeezed about as far northeast as you can go and still be in Montana.  Ten miles from Canada, fifteen miles from North Dakota, a hundred miles from anything you could call a city.  On the county map it shows up with an asterisk - "Currently no residents."  If you travel the bumpy gravel roads to the place marked on the maps, only a single church, slowly decaying, marks Dooley as different from the sea of farms.

When my great-grandfather was in high school, he went to Dooley. He played on the basketball team, and lived in "the shack" with other students from the countryside who lived in town during the week.  He graduated in 1934.  We still have his diploma, the green ribbon wrapped around it looking as shiny as if it were new.  When he was here, Dooley had a saloon, a blacksmith, a sheriff, a store, dances on the weekends, a heartbeat, a pulse.  The livery stable could fit a hundred horses.  Three hundred people lived in town, and farmers from across the countryside poured in for school, shopping, dances.  

A farmer's son, my great-grandfather married a farmer's daughter, and both of them watched the family farms go to brothers.  Farmers without farms can't do much, especially in the Great Depression.  So my great-grandparents left town.  A fire, a flood, a bigger railroad to the south - soon the whole town left town.

As we stand staring at the memorial, beside a pond that once was a basement, my father tells me that I've been here before.  When my mother was pregnant, my great-grandfather brought my parents out to see the old town.  "That so doesn't count," I tell him, and he laughs.  Back then the wooden beams, now floating beside the ducks in the little pond, were raised up and you could see the frame of the house.  Across the street stood a row of other buildings.  I turn around and see nothing but grass.

The grass is full of foundations I can't see until I step on them, feeling old pebbly cement instead of spongy dirt beneath my feet.  I pace them out, walking on the narrow strips of concrete that trace out squares and rectangles, unfathomably small rooms.  There must have been a half-dozen dirt roads around these buildings, but those haven't left a trace.  If my great-grandfather were still alive, he could point out what stood where.  Without him, I'd need an archaeologist's talents to figure it out.  But I doubt archaeologists will ever be interested in Dooley.

We climb back in the car to drive the invisible blocks to the church.  Springsteen's on the radio - "Glory Days" - but the signal is fading, and the song keeps cutting out to static. We park the car in the road and wade back into the knee-high prairie grass, decorated with fallen bits of wooden siding and shingles.  From the side, we can see straight through the church's empty window frames, the bright blues and greens of the landscape framed by the darkness of the wood.

It's absurdly beautiful outside.  Northeast Montana is never supposed to look like this.  The record-breaking rains that flooded Minot and are pushing dams toward their breaking points sank deep into this dry soil, and fields that normally range from yellow to brown are the vibrant green you'd expect to see in Ireland.  A warm summer sun shines, fluffy white clouds breeze across the sky, and a cool breeze slips from one horizon to the other.  Pheasants fly overhead when we startle them. 

The church lost its stairs long ago, so we clutch the doorway as we haul ourselves up to the threshold.  The main door is stuck mostly-open, dirt trapped where the wind flung it between the wall and the door.  Somebody used the doorknob for target practice.  Of the double doors into the main sanctuary, half of one door remains - but the hinges still work.

Inside, the floor is covered with bits of wooden ceiling and scraps of plaster, yellow paint still clinging to it.  An old stove is bolted to one wall, and otherwise the room is empty - dim, but not dark.  Sunlight punches through a hundred tiny holes in the ceiling, painting lacework onto the walls and floor.   On the back wall, enough plaster clings to the frame that you can see the simple floral pattern, white and yellow, that once decorated the walls. 

For a moment I can almost imagine what the church looked like whole - cozy, cheery, canary-yellow, full of simple pews and country prayers.  But the illusion vanishes as soon as I shift a foot through the rubble coating the floor.  My imagination's just not strong enough.

The church smells like nothing - like fresh air and grass and an endless blue sky, like empty prairie.  The silence is unbroken until the breeze brings a rustle through the grass, my camera's shutter whirrs, or I take a careful step.  I'm listening for ghosts, but I don't hear a sound.

As I jump down from the threshold of the church, my father points to the grass to the side of the church: beaten down almost flat.  "Deer," he says.  A half-dozen lightfooted deer, of the kind we've seen leaping away from the road as we noisily encroach on their territory, have been bedding down in the windbreak provided by this church, leaving the shape of their bodies imprinted in the grass.  I  take the long way around.  I don't want to leave traces of my presence to disturb the last inhabitants of Dooley when they return for the night.

On our way out of town we stop by the railroad tracks so I can take a picture of the Dooley sign, which looks bizarrely new in this abandoned place.  The railroad itself is stuck out of the normal passage of time - the wooden ties and gravel, the shiny RR XING sign, they all look new or just-repaired, but the gravel road has covered the tracks completely.  The railroad is kept in working condition, but clearly never used.

The dirt beside the tracks, soaked by recent rain, is less like land and more like quicksand, and we quickly get trapped in the mud, tires spinning uselessly.  We pick up old squares of steel from a discard pile beside the railroad tracks, using them to dig out tires and build little ramps for traction.  There is no cell phone service in Dooley, and for the twenty-five minutes it takes to wrench ourselves free of the mud, we laugh at our stupidity.  Stuck in the mud in a dead town in the middle of nowhere, forced to borrow trash from the past to dig ourselves out.  

And then, because we are late for dinner, we fly over the gravel roads away from Dooley.  We leave ruts in the mud and footprints in the grass, and put Dooley far behind us.

Tony Regan's Locks

Part One  Part Two  Part Three

After Bill Regan died, Tony Regan kept on living in that old house, all by himself, and he never married.  They said all of the first batch of Regans, the children of William B. and Julia, were a little peculiar, on account of Bill and Julia being cousins.  Tony Regan was the most peculiar of the lot.  He hummed, tunelessly and loud, as he walked around the perimeter of his property, compulsively weeding his fences.  Tony hummed so loud that the black folks who lived across the street were straight scared of him, wondering what on earth was wrong with a man who would make so much noise.  Though he was a friendly man who would talk to anybody for an hour, he lived a little bit like a hermit - tucked away inside his father's old house, not so good about bathing or cleaning, rarely venturing off his own property.  Chief among his peculiarities was Uncle Tony's obsession with locks.  He put locks on everything - on all the doors to his house, on the door to his smokehouse, on the gates on all his fences - and he would never just lock them once.  After he locked a gate or a door, he would walk about twenty feet, then turn around and just look at that lock.  And then he'd go back, and unlock it and lock it again, and then he'd stand there and pat that lock - just like you'd pat a pet.  And if you asked, he'd say he was making sure he was safe, and nobody would come and steal him and Granddaddy Regan's money again.  That money was safe for sure now.

But if there was any of that money left, nobody ever saw it.  Tony sure never spent it on anything, wearing his clothes out until they were rags.  Most folks though Tony had gone out of his mind, and was guarding money that was lost forever years ago.  If there were a few whispers that Old Man Regan had a second stash of cash - one he never told a soul about for fear it would be stolen, too - and that Tony wasn't quite as crazy as he looked, and was guarding that last little scrap of the Regans' "dead money" - well, most people just dismissed that as the nonsense it was.  That money was as gone as Old Man Bill.

What about the rest of the family? In the last years of his life, Bill Regan finally let his children own the 180 acres they had each been farming for him.   Most of the fourteen Regans kept living on their land, borrowing money to plant it with crops and hoping to earn enough at harvest to pay back their debts, and maybe keep a few hundred dollars on a good year.  A couple of children moved into town and made a slightly better living buying and selling cattle... with weighted scales, to earn a little extra bit of profit.  They were prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-owners, often poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but not rich like their father was.  Those children's children, Bill's grandchildren, bought up enough farmland for 20th-century farming businesses, or went to school, or joined the military, or found themselves city jobs.  Today most of them have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

One of those children lives today in his great-grandfather's house, old William B.'s, the one Tony guarded for so many years.  Old Tony never had any children, and passed his property to a nephew, and it kept being passed down son to son.  The old house looks a little different now, surrounded by modern detritus, but if you squint real close you can see the ancient wood barely holding up the porch roof.  The Regan there today is a bit of a recluse, and heavy on the drink, so he doesn't get many visitors.  The angry german shepherds in his yard are as good as any lock at keeping strangers and would-be cattle buyers off the property.

The Regan fortune's gone, of course, that's for sure.  But if it wasn't gone... If any cash was still around, it'd be locked up inside that junked old house, inaccessible to the world, rotting away in a secret compartment somewhere.  It wouldn't be doing anybody any good.  And since everyone knows the money must be gone, no jealous neighbors would ever think of whispering to thieves in the night.

No, the money isn't there.  But if it were, it would be utterly useless, and forever safe.  Just how Bill Regan, my great-great-grandfather, would have liked.

The Night That Broke Bill Regan's Heart

Part One  Part Two

In the dead of winter, when the Georgia air was biting cold and the ground was dusted with snow, a car drove up to Bill Regan's place.  They arrived soon after nightfall, when the little house was surrounded by darkness and empty woods.  Uncle Bill sent his son Tony to answer the door, and Tony - about thirty years old by then - pulled it open to face three men he'd never seen before.  These men smiled at the two Regans. b "We're looking to buy some cattle," said one.  "At a real generous price," added another.  Old Man Regan saw dollar bills dancing as soon as he heard those words, and he invited them into his house to talk business.

They sat by the fireplace, built up real high for some warmth on that cold night, and the men sat for a while chatting about cattle. They started to barter, real friendly-like.  And the three strangers tried not to stare at the safe, sitting plain as could be in the corner of that big square room.  They talked and talked until Bill Regan looked right at ease, and then one of the men said, "Could I fetch a cup of water, do you think?"  Bill Regan pointed at the door, towards the pump outside, nothing but profit on his mind.  He didn't watch as the man walked past the pump and straight to the trunk of his car.  When that stranger came back in, he carried a gun in his hand.

The friendly smiles on the three men's faces had flown away, replaced by hard stares and cruel grins.  The men pinned down Tony, hog-tied him, and threw him on a bed, then turned to Bill, elderly and weak, and told him, "Old man, you're going to open that safe."

But William loved his money too much to hand it over, even with a gun in his face.  "I can't remember the combination," he lied.  Tony lay on the bed, tied up and helpless.  "I just can't remember it."

The men looked at each other, as calm as could be.  Then they looked at the iron beside the fire, waiting to help press some shirts, because Bill Regan was a neat and well-dressed man.  They placed that iron right on the coals of that big, hot fire.

"Well," the men told Bill.  "We'll just have to make you remember."  And they pulled off his shoes, and waited until that iron got hot.  Old Bill saw the iron glowing bright red, saw the looks on these men's faces, and by firelight he could just make out the terror in the eyes of his son Tony, but he didn't give in.  "I don't remember," he said, while Tony tried to shout around the rope in his mouth.  "I just don't."  So the men shrugged, and they sat on William's small frame to pin him down.  They waited another long second, to see if the old man would come to his senses, and then they pressed that iron firm against the soles of William's feet.  The crackling of the fire was drowned out by Bill Regan's screams, but outside the house, the empty woods and cold winter night swallowed up the sounds.  Soon the pain grew stronger than Bill's love of money.  "I remember," Bill Regan gasped.  "I remember, for the love of mercy, I'll open it!"  Was the agony in his voice from the pain in his feet, or from the thought of saying goodbye to those beautiful stacks of bills?

On his hands and knees, sobbing, pathetic, old Bill crawled to his safe and slowly dialed in the combination.  But despite his pain and his fear, Bill was still thinking of his money.  When he opened the door, h grabbed one bag of cash and tried to hide it underneath the safe.   But the men saw, and they grabbed a stick and beat old Bill for trying to cheat them like that.  Then they hog-tied Bill Regan and threw him on the bed next to Tony, and carried all the bags of money out into their car.  Laughing, they drove away to the north.

It took hours before Tony wriggled out of the ropes tying him down, and then he ran as fast as he could to the closest farm, banging on the door and hollering for help.  They went to town and roused the sheriff, and the very next day the sheriff started asking around about the strangers.  It was more than two years before they found them, scattered across the country from Chicago to New York, and they never did find a penny of the money.  They brought the men back to Early County to prosecute them, and they stood before an even older Bill, whose feet had healed but whose pride never had.  "I'm sure you had a real good time with all my money," Bill snarled.

"Nah," said the men, cruelly.  "It wasn't that much."

When they went to prosecute those men, the court didn't give them hardly any time in jail, because people said the money they stole hardly counted as money - "Dead money," they called it, like they always had.  "Dead money.  The old man wasn't using it anyway - it was barely a crime."

After the robbery, William Brown Regan wasted away until he died.  He never was the same again - he didn't care about a thing.  Folks said he died of grief over losing that money, which he'd loved so much more than he should have.  And while Bill Regan may have had fourteen children, it didn't do him much good when he was dying.  See, he'd had more children than he had love and kindness for them; he was as stingy with his heart as he was with his money. And when William lost his fortune and grew old, and weak, and needed to be cared for like a baby, his children remembered what a tight-fisted and unloving father he had been.  All that land, and he wouldn't pass it down properly to his grown children - he made them work it for halves, like sharecroppers.  No, they didn't look at him with kindness - not even Tony.  Only one of all his fourteen children would agree to take him in - and that was his son John Howard, the same son Bill had turned away when John Howard came begging for a little syrup for his starving children.

John Howard was a generous as Bill was stingy, and he shared his food with anybody, family or stranger, who was hungry, and he opened his home to the old and infirm when nobody else would take them in.  In the final years of his life, Bill Regan, the proud man who wouldn't give a penny to anybody, found himself flat broke, depending on another man's generosity to keep him alive.  And that's what we call irony.

soo behind

So as you can see I'm pretty far behind on actually putting up blog posts, and the order is getting all mixed up.  Sorry bout that. I've got a giant text document full of "blog posts to post" and it's all a mess.  And that's even without thinking about all the photos...

My travel-blogger-license should be revoked.

Why on earth do people move?

Traveling, even for just a little time and with just a little stuff, is a terrible nuisance.  There are floods that halt trains, computer errors that cancel planes, storms that bring the interstate to a bare crawl; even when those things go right, you'll deal with lost bags, inaccurate maps, rude strangers, uncomfortable sleeping spaces, odd smells, and really terrible food.  Language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, jet lag and exhaustion.  Oh, and everything costs more while you're traveling. Guaranteed.

And when you're moving - all the stuff to cope with, all the expenses involved, the worry, the breaking valuables, the crushed boxes, the pain of downsizing, and then replacing the things you downsized, and the cleaning of the old place and the new, of packing and unpacking, of learning the layout of a new town, finding new jobs, new childcare arrangements, new friends.

And just imagine what it would have been like before we had trains and planes and cars and credit cards and internet reservations and telephones and GPS - heck, cheap accurate maps, even.  The mules would get thirsty, or the cart would break an axle.  The cows would drink poisoned water and die (I'm an expert; I lost many a game of Oregon Trail this way).  The constant weeks on the road would wear on your family.  You'd abandon priceless heirlooms by the roadside.  You'd bury children along the way. You'd live for months packed into the stinking hull of a leaky ship.  You'd freeze at night, roast during the day.  Getting lost would be life-threatening, not just annoying.  With no travel guides or online ratings to check out, every decision about buying food, sleeping somewhere, following directions or stopping in a town would be a perilous judgment call.

So why do it? Why bother at all?

At some point in high school I remember learning that people immigrate for one of two reasons: to seek something good or to flee something awful - or both.  I wonder, though, if we might be able to look at all the reasons we popularly accept as reasons for travel - boredom, longing for adventure, curiousity, wanting to see a new culture, etc - and think of moving as just another kind of travel.  Especially back before travel was a widely available hobby of the middle class.  If you were making a modest living but longed for something exciting, new horizons, new faces, new tastes, you couldn't save up vacation leave and book a flight. Maybe the only way to find those experiences would be to pack up shop, sell some assets and relocate - and the relocation itself would be an exciting adventure.

It may be accurate to think about migration is as the push-pull of powerful economic, religious and sociopolitical factors, with personal whims and longings privileges immigrants couldn't afford.  Overall, people tend to move away from poverty and war and towards economic opportunities and political stability.  But to think this explains immigration and migration is an extreme oversimplification.

The other day I wrote on this blog that Prussia must have been absolutely awful if Montana seemed like a better deal - unless my ancestors just didn't know what they were getting into.  But when do we ever?

I've been rethinking that offhand statement.  Since I can't ever know their motivations for leaving a known land for an foreign place, obviously I should be careful about my assumptions.  And maybe they were fleeing an untenable situation, or seeking what they had heard was a land of prosperity.  But maybe, just maybe, they wanted something new and different.  The modern era does not have a monopoly on the desire for excitement - I think it would be a mistake to assume past generations were motivated by practicality and self-interest, when our own behavior so often displays impulses best summed up with a shrug and "I don't know, I thought maybe it would be fun."  

Or to put it another way: if the only way you could leave your hometown were to move away from it, would you do it?  Even if you weren't impoverished or repressed, and you had no guarantee of prosperity in a new town?

And if you don't think you would do it, can you think of anybody you know - any restless personality - that would?

I know I do.  The push-pull model of immigration is probably the most accurate way to talk about historical migration patterns, but on the individual level, we should remember to leave room for human impulses and irrational desires.

Without those, who would travel at all?








Seriously, travel is mostly awful.  Especially when half the country seems to be flooded, on fire, thunderstorming, tornado-stricken or all of the above.  If it weren't for restlessness and curiosity I'd be comfortably well-rested at home right now.  AND I'M NOT.

Stupid human impulses and irrational desires.

Back to rural Georgia for a moment of nutty reflection

I know that vineyards are the classic fantasy of blissful, aesthetically pleasing agricultural life - and who doesn't want to make boatloads of money, buy a vineyard in Tuscany and retire to a life of fine wine, blissful landscapes, and great food?  Such a pity that the fantasy conceals all that darned hard work.

But driving through Georgia, I slowed to a stop when I saw my first mature pecan orchard. Don't worry, there wasn't anyone else on the road.  And just like that, the idle fantasy of winery-ownership was replaced by a vision of pecan harvest.  Those old trees, straight and strong, spreading out their arms as they stood in wide-spaced roads - hundreds of them.  And beneath them, I am not making this up, were four or five absolutely beautiful horses grazing blissfully in the tree's shade, undisturbed by the drought and the sun's vicious rays.

I forgot about Tuscany, and started thinking a little closer to Tuskegee.

Just like vineyards, the peaceful vista disguised a real nuisance of nut harvesting and tree maintenance - or so my relatives told me.  But it didn't help - I still kept thinking about the calm beneath the trees. So I went back to take pictures, and alas, the horses were nowhere to be found.

You'll have to add them in yourself.  While you're at it, picture me in there, too, on a rocking chair with a glass of lemonade in one hand - and wine in the other, because I haven't totally given up on vineyards.

New York, New York

In New York City by myself with lots of free time, no map or guideback, and very little cash. What to do? What to do?


Get myself to Central Park, of course! and I only got a LITTLE lost on the subway...

Dear Diary, Today I learned the difference between "Express" and "Local"...

When Natasha collected my poor bewildered soul, the REAL tour of Manhattan started. Here's Park Ave!

The next day, I checked out the Highline, like Tasha said I should. IT WAS SO COOL.

Then I went to the meatpacking district. I bet these two businesses are great neighbors!

Did I go to Chelsea Market? Why yes I did.

Did I wander around Greenwich Village? Yup! Did I take any pictures? Nope!

Did I go back to the highline to play in Rainbow City? Yes I did!

And then did I watch the sun set behind the highline? well, not quite, but almost! It was a pretty good two days in New York... except for the many, many hours I spent talking to Amtrak reps.

But let's focus on the positive!

How Bill Regan Made (and Lost) a Fortune

Part One

William B. Regan was born in 1855 in a log cabin, one of Robinson Regan and Elizabeth Brown's many grandchildren. From his parents he inherited fifty acres of land and an almost unbearably stubborn nature, and from this inheritance little Bill Regan built an empire.

First he gained even more acres of family territory by marrying his cousin, Julia Regan.  They had nine children, all slim and small and stubborn, marked by a double dose of Regan genes - and then Julia died.  So since his cousin had worked out the first time, Bill went ahead and married his dead wife's younger sister, but soon she died, too.  Those days women's work was hard, and childbirth was harder, and women often died young.  So Bill married a third wife, a 17-year-old girl - unrelated - who bore him five more children.  While his wives were birthing and raising that small army of Regans, Bill was very, very busy.

Over eighty years, Bill Regan turned those first fifty acres into well over two thousand acres of Georgia farmland and forest.  Like his grandfather, he knew how to handle a herd, and he had sheep and cattle grazing all across the county.  Every year when the local farmers got together to round up those free-roaming animals, read their markings, and divide them up, he'd sell mountains of sheep's wool and fine beef, awakening envy in his neighbors.  He cut down some of the forest on his land and turned it into farmland, where he grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane.  Other acres he kept as valuable virgin timber, and in these woods he hid a still and turned out gallons of whiskey.  He had barns full of meat, cane syrup, moonshine, and hay, and pretty soon he had a serious fortune saved up in the bank in town.

Little Bill Regan truly was a little man, short and slight, even by Regan standards. But he was a proud man, and when he rode on his horse with his back ramrod-straight, he looked as tall as he seemed to feel.  He was a smart man, for all he'd had no education, and a determined and hard-working man.  But Bill Regan had a problem.  Some men have a drinking problem, some men have a womanizing problem, some men have a gambling problem, but Bill Regan didn't have any of these - he had a money problem.  See, he loved money too damn much.  He loved money more than he loved his wives, more than he loved his children.  He may have loved money even more than he loved his prize horse. He almost loved money more than he loved his life.

In 1929, Bill Regan had $35,000 saved up in the banks, and when the banks started to crash, he pulled that money out and stored it all in a giant safe in the corner of his house.  By then he was an old man, living alone with his grown son, Tony.  And at that time, during the Depression, when folks were desperate for money and there were no jobs to be had, land - good farmland, good timberland - could sell for fifty cents an acre.  If Bill Regan had only spent his money, his children would have grown up to live like kings.  They could have lived like the old plantation owners, like the men who ran the sawmills; they could have entered the legislature.

But Bill Regan wouldn't spend his money for anything.  He wouldn't spend it on his house, wouldn't spend it on his clothes, wouldn't spend it on a car, and certainly not on helping anybody else.  By the time he was an old man, he wouldn't even spend money on land anymore.  He was so tight with his money that when the winter grew hard and one of his sons came asking for a little bit of syrup, for his hungry children - William's grandchildren - William said no.  He had hundreds of gallons of cane syrup stored away, but he would not unlock that barn.  He was a tight man, a stingy man. And everybody knew it.   Everybody knew that William Regan's money rotted away in his safes, that it grew stale and never circulated, that he never shared it when others were in need.

One day in 1930 some strangers came in to town, and started talking to some of Bill Regan's neighbors, and pretty soon they heard that the old man had land and cattle and sheep and was tight-fisted with the money he earned off them.  And his neighbors whispered that the money was "dead money," that "Uncle Bill" never used it for a damn thing, and it was a damn shame he kept it stuck up in that safe, and these strangers pricked their ears up at that.

"What safe?"

And one neighbor, whom Bill had always counted as a friend, narrowed his eyes.  He thought of all of William's wealth, his beautiful horse, his endless acres; thought how if he'd had that wealth, he'd have treated a neighbor with generosity.  And his eyes turned an ill shade of green.  He looked at these strangers, who were all but licking their lips, and he said, "That safe he keeps in his house.  That house, right up the road."

And the men decided to pay old Uncle Bill a visit...

Part Two