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

Chillin' in George Bush

(the airport, that is)

So while the trains were a total wash (HA!) the planes ain't looking so hot either.  I was supposed to be on a plane that was leaving Houston for Denver over an hour and a half late and was also oversold by THIRTY people.  That means they had thirty more people than seats - and that's people confirmed for seats, checked in, seat assignments, everything, NOT including standby. Thirty!  Evidently they wound up with a smaller plane than they were supposed to have.  As you can surely imagine, there were a whole slew of really, really unhappy people.  I volunteered to get bumped (three hundred bucks and it looked like I would miss my connection anyway) which meant I was at the front of that line of really unhappy people.  I actually felt guilty - not just because I was so much less miserable than everybody else, but also because I think my net impact was negative.  I mean, one person got a seat on that plane because I volunteered, but it took the dude rescheduling me so long to do it that I felt like I was holding up the whole line. I think I ended up inspiring more fury than relief.

Next plane's delayed, too.  Who knows when I'll get to Montana?  If I had taken the train then I'd - hopefully - be somewhere between Chicago and Minneapolis right now, but I'd be on my own after Minneapolis.  Currently in Houston... well, we'll see.  I have 45 minutes of wifi, which is better than OH SPEAKING OF HAVING TO PAY FOR THINGS, Continental's got this "upgrade" where you can watch live DirecTV during the flight.  Which sounds great, except the tv shows were all utter crap while I was going to be on the plane, and of course you had to pay for it, AND that was the ONLY entertainment option - no free movies and NOT EVEN ANY RADIO!!!

I just took it for granted there would be a movie on a three-hour flight, so I didn't pull my book or crossword puzzles out of my big bag.  And then I saw they were running a preview for that one where the world tries to convince Liam Neeson he's crazy, and I was like, "sweet!" And then they told me I would have to pay $8 for it!!!  I'm sorry, your screen is about five inches across.  And you want to charge big-screen prices? And tell me it's for "DirecTV" and automatically that is awesome?  NO I don't want to watch ESPN or crappy HGTV shows, I just want to watch a freaking movie while I'm stuck in your rattly metal tube for hours.  And if you don't have movies, at least give me some radio!  Okay, I'm done complaining about it.  I am.  I prom - but seriously, what will they do next, charge you for oxygen?? - I promise.

A tour of downtown Jakin

On the left: the Jakin fire department.
On the right: the Jakin courthouse.

The Jakin City Clerk's office. Open at least two afternoons a week.

On the left side of the road, the old Mosely storefront. No longer a store. On the right... a shed?

The Jakin library and museum.

The original Mosely storefront.

And that, my friends, concludes this tour.

How the Regans Came to America

"So... what are you actually DOING?"


Well, here's an example.  In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly.  The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales.  Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details.  And then I added a bit... I think this all happened.  But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history.  Call it what it is: a story.



How the Regans Came to America

Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew.  He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War.   Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.

Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber.  He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees.  His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family.  Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.

Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown.  She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War.  Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves.  Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices.  But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers.  Such is the misfortune of having daughters.

Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich.  Maybe he just had too many children.  While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around.  So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.

Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.

Part Two

A little rain never hurt anybody...

(Probably what Noah's neighbors all told each other)

So my TransAmerican Train Trip is undergoing a little revision, thanks to the weather in Montana.  A phone call around noon informed me that there was no way - not by the power of heaven or hell, let alone earthly forces - that Amtrak would be dropping me off in Wolf Point, Montana.  Flooding has devastated a few parts of Montana, and put Amtrak's tracks underwater, which - who knew? - is apparently bad news for trains.

People coming east can get from Seattle to Havre, Montana (though they have to take them by bus for part of it), and people going west can get from Chicago to Minneapolis - but between Minneapolis and Havre, YOU SHALL NOT PASS, says Conductor Gandalf.  I looked up a few options and all the buses would have got me to Montana later than I wanted (and that's IF the trains ran on time to get me to the bus stops, which, given that the schedule is now all messed up, is highly doubtful) and among the flights it was cheapest to go from NY.

Absurd, isn't it?  Three separate flights, totally almost 3,000 miles, and it's CHEAPER than a tiny little puddle-jumper out of Minneapolis.  Oh airline pricing.

So now, instead of sitting on a train headed for Chicago, I'm hanging out in NYC for a little longer - crashing with the BEST ROOMMATE FROM NYC* EVER, thanks Natasha!!!- and flying out of La Guardia in the morning.  And I won't be able to say that I looped the country by train... but I tried!  Rain, man.  Whatcha gonna do.


Incidentally, I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but the two stations I was going to visit in Montana were Wolf Point and West Glacier.  I think that pretty well sums up what you can find in Montana - things that want to eat you and giant blocks of ice.  Doesn't it make you want to build a tiny little house in the middle of an empty field and live throughsome  -40 degree winters?

Me neither!!!

Which really makes me wonder... just how awful was life in Prussia?  Must've been pretty much terrible if frontier Montana seemed like a good deal.  But then again, maybe they just didn't know what they were getting into...

I'm super behind on blog posts.  Let's see what I can do.

*see, Emily, no insult!

the journey part one: Into the South

Riding a train down south, from Charlottesville to Atlanta, I didn't do an awful lot of thinking.  Mostly I slept - from mid Virginia to the bottom edge of South Carolina I stayed fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train.  And when I woke up, to a South Carolina landscape of fields and kudzu-covered forests, all coated in the golden light of a sunrise, I stared out the window in sleepy admiration.  And promptly fell back asleep.

But when I woke up again, well and truly in the deep South, I did start thinking, train-centered thoughts, about three things: cotton, textiles, and Petersburg.  Trains traveling from the South loaded down with raw cotton, trains traveling to the South bearing freshly-milled textiles, trains at the center of a bitter Civil War seige.

Then I chided myself for riding into the South and thinking like I was traveling into the past.  Such a stereotype, to associate a lower latitude with an earlier era.  Of course the South is not a time machine, no more than any other place with a history - off the train, driving through seemingly endless stacks of interstates, it was easy to remember.  But now, as I go deeper and deeper into the country, I realize I might have had it all wrong.  It's not that the South is a time machine, not that I'm traveling into the past.  It's that no matter where you are, the past can be a slippery thing, and it doesn't always know to stay put.  I wasn't driving back in time so much as driving into a place where the past lingers on like a mule-stubborn ghost.

Until ten years ago, the houses on these country lanes didn't have numbers.  Letters were sent to a name on "Route 1" or "Route 4," and the mailmen knew everybody's name.  The recently-invented addresses - "911 numbers," they call them, since they put them in for the ambulances - don't show up on my GPS, and I have to rely on an older kind of directions:

"Go down the road aways until you see a red brick church on the right - that's the church where your Aunt Judith's family is buried, you know, they were Baptists - and then the highway turns to the left, but you want to make sure you keep going straight.  Go about three miles, and look for the sign that says "Hay for sale..."

It's not that Jakin looks like a scrap of the past.  Sure, there are tiny old buildings on a quaint, ghosttown-like main street, but shiny cars and giant combines roll down that asphalt.  The more I learn about this place's history, the farther away the past looks.  Then, these roads were lined with tiny subsistence farms - now, farming is a multimillion dollar business.  Homemade wooden kitchens have been replaced with granite countertops, dirt floors with smooth-paved roads, and seemingly endless forests of longleaf pine with massive fields of cash crops.

But even if the houses and the landscape look very different than they once did, sometimes it feels like the past hangs thick and heavy in the air, so close I can almost smell it, sour and stale.  It smells like old smokehouses, hickory-scented, with a tinge of rancid meat.  It smells like lye soap and sweat.  Like pone bread straight out of a wood stove, fresh fish sizzling on a skillet, homemade sausages and just-picked corn on the cob.  Like mule shit, and houses burning down in the night, and bodies rotting on ropes.

And at dinner, as the farmer comes in from the fields and his wife pulls pone bread from the oven, and talks about how awful she thought it was of their neighbor to bulldoze that old slave graveyard into the ground, the past feels like it's right behind my shoulder, ducking away when I turn my head, leaving only the ghost of a smell to remind us it has never really left.

Chasing places, chasing the past

In my senior year of high school, for my pick-yer-topic college application essay, I wrote about Home - how I'd long felt like I didn't have a Home, a Hometown, a Homeplace, a Back Home.  I hadn't moved all that often, relatively speaking - I wasn't a military kid or anything like that - but often enough that where I was born, and where I was a little kid, and where I  grew up, and where I started to feel grown-up, were all different places.  Where were my roots?

A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry.  That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg.  Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending.  Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.

I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places.  This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though.  I'm looking back a little farther, to the  deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines.  We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race.  Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that?  Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?

My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia.  Does that make me 1/4 Southern?  Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland?  Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England?  Or French, because etc.?  More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana.  Does that make me 1/4 Montanan?  Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name?  If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.

My grandmother was born in Southern California.  Her parents were born in Tennessee.  But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too.  So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?

If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too.  Maybe there's not much point to any of this.  Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.

Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does.  Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.

Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten.  Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.

But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating.  Oh, but maybe not.  If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.

I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things.  The first is to prepare really, really well.  After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared.  So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life.  And here I am, trying to figure it out.

I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt.  And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums.  And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.

And that's at least 1/4 of a start.

stop 1: Atlanta

I made it safe and sound (if a little delayed) to Atlanta, Georgia, where giant peaches perch atop buildings and everybody calls me "Sugar."

I'm currently hiding from the sun and hopping on a wifi signal at a Caribou Coffee in downtown Atlanta, and soon I will be taking my rental car down into the depths of rural Georgia.  A certain somebody who will not be named described this region to me as "hot, humid and mean."  Whoohoo!

Seriously, though, I am excited, so I won't spend too long typing up a blog post and I'll try to hit ye old dusty trail pretty soon.  Just a few things to note:

1. One of the conductors on my train had an accent EXACTLY like Kenneth's on 30 Rock.  I always though Kenneth's accent was completely made up, but turns out there is in fact a strain of Southern accent just like that.  File that under things-i-never-knew.

2.  I'd forgotten how surreal the Southern landscape could be.  There were times when the view out the train window looked like it was ripped out of a fantasy novel or a scifi film.  Don't know what I'm talking about? One word: KUDZU.  I didn't snap a picture but I'll see if I can sooner or later - imagine forests so coated in vines that you can't even see the trees underneath.  It's both beautiful and deeply creepy (and an ecological disaster, of course).

3. A caribou coffee employee just came by and offered me free samples of a pineapple coconut smoothie.  And then made me take two, because nobody else was drinking them.  Life is great.

4.  Does travel = freedom? Companies certainly promote the idea - my Hertz folder actually has FREEDOM written across it in giant yellow letters. Do people believe it does?  Is this an American concept?  Travel doesn't have to be linked to freedom - it could be tied to escape, to adventure; it could be seen as a mark of economic prosperity; it could be seen as a duty, or as self-improvement.  My rental car packet screaming "FREEDOM" probably has me biased, but right now I'm feeling like in America, we travel to prove our freedom - we go somewhere to prove that we could go anywhere.  Agree? Disagree? Should I stop with the national identity essentialism?

i'm leaving, on a diesel train...

Is it mandatory, when leaving on a trip, to sing this song? I think it is.

So tonight - TONIGHT! - I depart for Atlanta.  And in Atlanta I pick up a rental car. And then I drive south to the part of Georgia that is almost Alabama, and also almost Florida.  And then I will drive up to the house of my grandmother's niece, give her the regards of all my family, settle into her spare room and start trying to explore my family history and what it means to be rooted in the soil of rural Georgia.

But right now - RIGHT NOW! - I kind of need to pack. Because we're looking at D minus 1 hour, where D is the time I must Depart in order to get to Charlottesville early enough for my travel terror to stay under control.

Travel terror, n. The almost-uncontrollable fear that all of your travel plans will be destroyed because of a traffic jam, a declined credit card, a clerical error, confusion over dates, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, unexpected rebellions, train crashes, lost cell phones, airplane-goose collisions, unscheduled apocalypses, acts of God, acts of man, acts of children, or action-movie-like-explosions.  The only known remedy is to leave your house three or four hours early for everything.

Anyway, I won't write a long post now. I just wanted to let you know that I won't have email access everywhere on my trip - I might not even have it OFTEN on my trip. I make no guarantees of frequent bloggage.  But wherever I have cell phone access, I can tweet (on my 20th-century-phone, lacking a keyboard and any-and-all smartphone capabilities, but texting twitter still works!)

So check my twitter - @camilareads - or look in the sidebar of this blog for frequent assurances that I'm alive.

My bag is calling, so Camila out.

i see an epigraph in here...

The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs
Amy Beeder

Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush,
            something in the silver-tinted background: always
that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked
            those dark men bunched, clutching shovels, indistinct
in coils of smoke, and engines whole...


                                                                        the rumor of America
long-gone & slumbering, that even thus lost rushes on—


Read the rest at VQR online.