Florida Trip - Part 4

Odds and ends of the trip are still bouncing around in my head so I’ll have to empty them out on this keyboard. I looked in a mirror when we got home to see if the water I drank from the Fountain of Youth had had any effect. Unfortunately, the only change I could see was a little more flab jiggling on my neck. I think the guide there fibbed when he said he was 256 years old. That water didn’t even taste very good!

One of the last coffee stops we made was at Clear Lake, Iowa. Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died there in that plane crash “the day the music died” while they were en route to Moorhead, MN for a concert. I wonder how many times Waylon Jennings thought about it. He gave up his seat on the plane for one of the others who wasn’t feeling well.

In the visitor’s center at Stone Mountain we visited with one of the employees whom we learned to be a grandniece of Bill Langer. Our discussion reminded me of the book in our library THE DAKOTA MAVERICK authored by Agnes Geelan, and now I intend to reread it.

Plains, GA was not very big so we could not miss seeing Brother Billy Carter’s gas station where he and some of the good ole boys hung out. It doesn’t seem that long ago when television cameras focused on Billy and made him out to be a big buffoon. I wonder if he really was or was he just dumb like a fox? Loads of peanuts sat waiting to be unloaded just down the street. Across the street in a little country store we ate peanut flavored ice cream that was very good, and at the Carter farmsite we picked pecans off the ground and ate a few.

In St. Augustine at the Lightner Museum we saw a great collection of artifacts and antiques. One of the items I studied closely was a carved mirror frame hanging near the entrance. It was done by one of the recognized masters of woodcarving, Grinling Gibbons. A high-end art studio sat in one of the outer hallways. I thought it looked too uppity for me to even enter and look. The manager happened to have the door open and heard me express my misgivings. She said in a British accent, “Oh, bring your bloody wallet and get in here!” She was fun to visit with, but I didn’t dare touch anything. One of the paintings carried a $15,000 price tag. I think they went much higher than that. Her expected sales pitch, “Art has done much better than the stock market.”

One of the couples on our tour found themselves second-in-line to a bank robber. They stood in line behind some guy who handed over a bag to a teller and told her to put the money in it. The teller walked away and left the robber and the couple standing there. The would-be robber realized his bag would stay empty and took off. I don’t think our fellow travelers got their banking business done either. A few minutes later we saw cops all over the area. I wonder if they ever found the bad guy.

I think I can write the last line about our trip and shift my thoughts to other matters. We traveled with a busload of genial folks and saw a good deal of new country. I’m already looking forward to next year’s trip to the southwest. Mary sent the deposit in yesterday.

Florida Trip - Part 3

One thing is very clear: wherever large crowds of people gather there occurs a flood of concrete and asphalt to cover the land. Maybe if I’d have listened more closely I would have heard how many acres are covered over by Disney World, MGM Studios, Epcot Center, and Sea World. The loss of the natural world is the price we pay. I see it occurring every time I pass through a growing Fargo where some of the richest farmland in the world disappears under that hard blanket. (Today’s Bismarck Tribune carries an article about the burgeoning price of farmland.) At the Epcot Center it was gratifying to see soil scientists experimenting with different methods of food production.

I marvel at the architecture of the Arch in St. Louis and the method used to build it. I wondered out loud how they found workmen to work on its dizzy heights and dangerous conditions and heard a response from one of my trip mates, “There’s always someone willing to work for wages.” I’m uncomfortable at the top; my claustrophobia really kicks in up there, but I never want to miss the experience. I think of the NE trip when Dick Huebner and I happened to look from the small window atop the Washington Monument and saw the President’s helicopter land on the White House lawn. The First Couple got out and walked across the lawn towards a small group applauding their arrival. If I had stayed on the ground, I would have missed that scene.

Beehives and ant colonies have nothing over the John Deere manufacturing plant in Moline, IL. The complexity of making and piecing together all those parts into a functioning, dependable farm machine boggles the mind. In graduate school I learned about system analysts and can imagine that is one place where their talents are used. The costs for this technology grows and is reflected in the prices charged. A showroom featured a large combine and tractor, each priced in the third of a million dollar range.

Anheuser-Busch brews oceans of beer in St. Louis, and it is only one plant. They have others. I quit drinking alcoholic beverages many years ago but still enjoy an occasional bottle of O’Douls, their non-alcoholic version. It’s their stable of beautiful horses that I think of when I hear the name Bud mentioned. While in the stable a couple other trademarks roamed among us looking for pats and scratches, their spotted Dalmatian dogs.

Well blogsters, I’m going to wrap up my impressions of our recent trip with one more blog.

(Florida Trip - Part 4 to follow)

Florida Trip - Part 2

In eighteen days a load of folks on a tour bus can see and experience many things: an Irish pub in Omaha; Truman Library in Independence, MO; the Arch and the Budweiser Brewery in St. Louis; the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson’s home) and Nashville city tour; Stone Mountain in Atlanta; Pres. Carter National Historic Site in Plains, GA; Georgia Agrirama; Disney World; MGM Studios; Epcot Center; Sea World; Arabian Knights dinner theater; Kennedy Space Center; Dayton Beach Speedway; St. Augustine with its museums, old buildings, Spanish fort, museums, and Fountain of Youth; Great Smoky Mountains; Ripley’s Aquarium in Pigeon Forge, TN; Black Bear Jamboree; John Deere plant tour in Moline, IL; Redlin Art Center in Watertown, SD; etc.

Historical sites always rest highest on my list of attractions. I believe our stop at the Truman Library was my fourth, but each time I see and remember something different. This time it was the brief, simple note in a display case which Truman hand wrote approving of the use of the atom bomb. I confess to feeling a bit emotionally overwhelmed and had to linger in front of that world-changing decision scrawled on a yellowing piece of paper; such a simply worded note had unleashed so much destructive power. With each visit, I find humor with his mother-in-law’s thinking that Truman was not good enough for her daughter to marry.

Truman’s humble beginnings are matched by Jimmy Carter’s. A tour of his boyhood farm home and the town where he was raised proves that point to me. And, even after rising to the top, he has never forgotten his roots since he still resides in Plains. Local residents told us he spends 75-80 percent of his time there and said the day before our arrival he had ridden his bicycle downtown to eat lunch. He was scheduled to teach Sunday school the next day. I kept looking down the street hoping he would ride in again.

I got an entirely different feeling at Andrew Jackson’s home. While I have little or no knowledge of Jackson’s boyhood beginnings, the Hermitage and its grounds spoke of wealth. In a history book, I found this passage regarding him, “Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history.”

The same author, Howard Zinn, also said, “Jackson was the first President to master the liberal rhetoric — to speak for the common man.” At any rate, he did permit the burial of his favorite slave near, but not in, the Jackson family plot.

(Florida trip - part 3 to follow)

Florida Trip - Part 1

I’ve just experienced the blur of 18 days rushing past me. Was I gone that long or was it just a dream, maybe a time-warp? Assuming it really happened, I’ll have to tell the tale. I think I’ll begin with the last: our group’s stop at the Redlin Art Center in Watertown, SD. We’ve visited there previously, but a comment Redlin made in his center’s introductory film struck me for the first time, something I experienced when I first started writing this blog. He said, “When you first start out you’re embarrassed at baring your soul.” I, too, was embarrassed at first but have gotten over that since I like to tell the story as I see it.

We’ve become fond of bus trips with 40 other people and the Farmers Union with its “Willer Way” of conducting them. If we were to drive to all the sites we have visited these past several years, we never would have gotten there. Always, the historical sites are the biggest draw for me, and one stood out because I’d been thinking about something a few weeks before I was reacquainted with it. An attraction in Georgia called Agrirama featured lots of century-old machines, buildings, costumes, etc. At the entrance stood a “Road Patrol” which was a small road grader that we would use for smoothing out the washboards on our roads. I had written a poem (with my usual seven-syllable line) about my experience with one, and when I saw it sitting there I had to step on its platform and reminisce.

The Road Patrol

The Greene Township road grader,
scaled small enough for horses
to pull, sat rusting in trees
until someone searched it out
and hooked a tractor to it.

Here’s where I enter the scene:
driver, pulling straight-away
while Dad stood on rear platform
working blade angle and depth
to smooth the washboard bumps

that banged and chattered a car’s
chassis so hard your teeth shook
and made you wish for a rain
to fall and soften the road bed
so that the little grader

blade could grab some bite and cut
the rough grade to a smooth shave.
The times cried, “Do-it-yourself
if you want to change your world.
No one will do it for you!”

(Florida Trip - Part 2 to follow)

Adios (for awhile)

We have finally suffered through the first of the presidential caucuses as witnessed through the fuzzy filtering gaze of the media. It is good these pundits and critics of the system give themselves something to do, but they surely get in each other’s way when they take their carnival acts out on the road. When they run out of topics of substance to view under their microscopes, they start in on how the candidates dress, comb their hair, treat their spouses, etc. A point in history draws quite a contrast between these times: few people in the country even knew that FDR was wheelchair bound during his presidency. Reporters did not intrude or trespass on the man’s right to keep this one part of his life private. Maybe there was some implicit threat to any media source who “spilled these beans,” but surely some muckraker would have delighted in purveying this information. It was a different time. No one concerned himself with such information.

I will be absent from this keyboard for a time since we will soon travel to Florida (where the temps have dipped below freezing and stiff iguanas fell out of trees). Last year we froze in Texas while the weather remained quite mild here in good ole North Dakota. I have never been in the southeastern part of the U.S. and look forward to seeing new territory. I'll be back in about three weeks.

Haircuts

We keep getting ready for our big trip to Florida. I just returned from the barber shop where I had him shear off a lot of hair. It was just another detail on our list of to-do’s. For some reason I was reminded of other haircuts, ones that I gave. The deed took place in the Wind River country of Wyoming. One evening we sat around visiting in a home, and the discussion came around to haircuts. For some reason, I stated I could cut hair (I must have been thinking about sheep shearing) and the two gentlemen both thought a little trim would be in their best interest. Bravado brought on by beer must have made me do it, but there I was pretending to be the barber. Everything seemed to be all right when I finished. We probably celebrated by opening another can of beer.

This was in the time that I was the high school principal. The next morning I sat in my office doing something at my desk when in walked one of the men accompanied by his wife. Words were not exchanged. Their reason for coming in was for display purposes only. He was nicked up pretty good! The wife who normally wielded a sharp tongue said nothing; he said nothing; they walked out. Never have I experienced a more poignant conversation where no words were spoken! I did not have to confront my other victim since he taught in another small town’s school. A few days later when I saw him I realized he had suffered the same fate. Fortunately, I did keep their friendship for the duration of our stay, but this subject was never broached.

Now, this afternoon, I’m going to the dentist...