"Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

They came in from the north,
A war party, or an advance guard.
Their palominos were weary though;
I pointed them to the trough.

The thirsty find the water,
And water gathers them in.
The rhinos knew it, and crowded
A drying hole until they fell —

Horn and hoof gone to agate,
A bone bed under the bunchgrass,
A plow's depth down. The land
Was keeping score before I came.

Red Cloud, back again,
His people proud and free,
And me, just running cattle,
Calling the deed my history.

Nomads of the West, 
Ordered to be still,
The least that I could do
Each summer was open up the gate.

Let them water and gather
Above that older herd
That also came, and drank,
And stayed within the earth.

James Cook owned the Agate Springs Ranch, land that the Oglala Lakota had traveled through for centuries. Instead of fencing it off, he befriended their chief, Red Cloud, and for several generations, the Lakota would return in the summer and stay at Agate Springs in friendship. The bulk of the land is now the Agate Fossil Beds National Park and well worth a visit.

You can read more about this site at my latest episode of “Manifest Detour.”

On a hot July afternoon in 1852, Lydia Allen Rudd stood at the base of Chimney Rock and studied the names carved into the soft sandstone. Later she wrote in her diary that there were “a million names.” Out of that maze one stood out: Harry Rudd, 1849.

Shortly after they married, Harry had gone west alone to see whether the country might hold a future for them. Now Lydia was following with him, bound for Oregon. After the steep descent at Ash Hollow the trail flattened, and for days the single pale spire of Chimney Rock held its shape on the horizon. It and Scotts Bluff, another thirty miles on, served as a kind of Gibraltar of the plains. The mountains lay ahead.

I was thinking about the Rudds as I loaded Bandit into the car in the town of Scottsbluff. We had planned an easy day—local miles only. Today we are unbearably reachable. I cannot imagine crossing a continent in search of a better life without the ability to send a simple “Safely in the hotel” at night. We have grown so used to frictionless contact that silence of even a few hours can feel like an emergency. For most of human history distance meant something closer to silence. You left. The
people you loved did not know whether you had arrived, survived, or changed your mind for weeks or months or years. Faith, not information, carried you across the gap. Had Harry never returned, and had Lydia later remarried and come west herself, the sight of his name on that rock would have been a different kind of shock.

Their story ended well enough. Harry died in Albany, Oregon, in 1892. He had lived another forty years in the land he had gone looking for. The couple raised three children. They got the life they had risked everything for.

We drove out to Chimney Rock, covering in an hour the ground that took emigrant wagons the better part of a week. It is hard to overstate how large this single spire looms in the trail literature. More diarists mentioned it than any other landmark on the entire route west. Almost every entry comes with an argument. Nobody could agree how tall it was. Estimates ran from two hundred feet to five hundred—guesses made by people staring across miles of flat prairie with no reliable way to judge
scale, watching a needle of pale rock hold its shape against the sky for days before they ever reached its base.

That disagreement is its own kind of history. Chimney Rock was not just a landmark. It was a test of the imagination, a shape distinct enough that thousands of people independently felt compelled to measure it and none of them agreed. It marked something psychological as much as geographical: the first unmistakable sign that the
monotonous plains were giving way to something stranger. And for Lydia Rudd it
was something more—a place where the trail’s isolation briefly cracked open and
let someone reach backward across years and be found.

After walking the short trails around the rock we returned to Scottsbluff, bought sandwiches at a Which Wich (a temporary defection from our usual run of Jimmy John’s and Jersey Mike’s), and turned north toward Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. We had hoped to reach Fort Robinson, where Crazy Horse was killed in 1877, but the Sage Valley fire was still burning hard—the same smoke we had seen the day before from Ash Hollow. Agate did not disappoint. In a few dozen miles we stepped from the 1850s into the Miocene.

Agate Fossil Beds is not on the Oregon Trail. No emigrant diary mentions it. It began as a working cattle ranch. James H. Cook settled on the upper Niobrara in the 1880s after marrying into the land. Sometime in those years he began noticing bone fragments scattered across the property. Alongside the bones he found strange corkscrew columns of solid rock rising from the sandstone bluffs—some ten feet tall,
twisted like a drill bit driven into the earth. The Oglala Lakota, who had known the valley long before Cook arrived, understood the scattered bones as the remains of “thunder horses.” No one yet had a name for the corkscrews.

Cook invited University of Nebraska geologist Erwin Barbour to the ranch. In 1892 Barbour became the first scientist to study the site formally. The formations—soon called Devil’s Corkscrews, or Daemonelix—became one of the genuine scientific mysteries of the era. For more than a decade paleontologists argued over them.
Fossilized roots of some giant prehistoric plant? Ancient freshwater sponges? The question was not settled until 1904, when Olaf Peterson, working for the Carnegie Museum, found actual skeletal remains preserved inside one of the spirals. The corkscrews were burrows—the fossilized dens of Palaeocastor, a small land-dwelling beaver that had tunneled into the Miocene soil roughly twenty million years earlier, leaving behind a spiral staircase to nowhere that science took thirty years to read correctly.

Once the news spread, the quiet ranch became a scramble. Teams from the American Museum of Natural History, Yale, Amherst, and the University of Nebraska descended on Agate Springs. Barbour, working the rivalry as much as the rock, named two of the richest sites Carnegie Hill and University Hill—an act of institutional turf-marking still printed on the map. What they were fighting over was worth the fight. Unlike most fossil localities that yield only fragments, Agate produced whole, articulated skeletons: the rhinoceros-like Menoceras, the clawed browser Moropus, the enormous pig-like Dinohyus. For the first time paleontologists could assemble something close to a complete portrait of a Miocene savanna.

A quieter story ran alongside the fossil rush. As his ranch filled with scientists, Cook built a lasting friendship with Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota. The relationship lasted decades and produced a remarkable collection of gifts and personal items that Cook
eventually donated. Every summer he allowed the Lakota to camp on the ranch, a small continuity with a way of life already disappearing from the open range. Standing there I felt the weight of that arrangement—the same weight the Little Prince understood when he tamed the fox. Responsibility cuts both ways. The Lakota had not asked to be tamed.

By the time we looped back through Scottsbluff that evening the road to the top of Scotts Bluff National Monument was closed. That climb would wait for morning. We bought a few supplies and returned to the hotel. The day had covered a strange amount of ground without covering much distance at all—a rock no one could agree on the height of, a lunch that belonged to no particular century, and a ranch sitting on twenty million years of buried savanna. Somewhere underneath it all was Lydia Rudd’s
name carved in stone, and the old reminder that the hardest part of any crossing may not have been the distance, but the not knowing.

As I drifted off, images of prairie grass and the long Nebraska plain still moving behind my eyes, I thought again of the little prince’s words:

“What makes the desert beautiful,” he said, “is that somewhere it hides a well.”

This is the continuation of a Series that began here: Manifest Detour Part 1

"Manifest Destiny did not countenance geographical gaps and untidy voids — it was an all-or-nothing concept tied to the free flow of an envisioned commerce."
— Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder

At sundown Mitchell’s order came
Given like a sentence, all an order is.
A few words with a man's rank behind them:
Fire the prairie, every station down the line,
From Ft. Kearny to Denver,
A long three hundred miles.

He had his reasons. Julesburg still smoked.
Fourteen soldiers under the snow.
And behind that, Sand Creek — the militia's work,
The lodges of people who thought they were safe.
Out here nothing is a first cause.
Every fire is an answer to a fire.

The line lit all at once, obedient.
That was the last obedient thing it did.

The flames found the northwest wind
And stopped being his. They took the grass
He meant them to take, and then the grass
He had not thought about, and did not stop —
South across the whole floor of Nebraska,
Three days down the Arkansas,
Into the Texas Panhandle, where no one
Had ordered anything.

An order is a small thing to hold in the mouth.
You can aim it. You cannot call it back.
He wanted the valley emptied for a season
And got a scar the length of a territory,
The game gone, the horses starving,
The people driven north across the Platte —
Alive, which he had not especially intended,
And remembering, which he could not prevent.

The land took longer to forgive than the winter lasted.
Grass came back green over black.
It always does.
That is not the same as mercy.
That is only the land, doing what the fire did:
Going past the reason it was given.

Researching the history of Ft. Kearny and stumbling across this event sent me down a rabbit hole exploring the wars with the Plains Indians. This poem bubbled up from that reading.

On the evening of January 27, 1865, General Robert B. Mitchell stood at Fort Kearny, Nebraska and gave an order that most history books have long since forgotten. He told every ranch, road station, and outpost strung along the Platte River Basin— from the fort all the way west to Denver, three hundred miles of it — to set the prairie on fire at sundown, all at once.

They did. A young officer named Eugene Ware, who was there, put it plainly: “The order was fully carried out. The country was fired for three hundred miles.” The scattered flames found the northwest wind and became a single conflagration. It swept south across the whole belt of Nebraska below the Platte, ran for three days along the Arkansas River through Kansas and Colorado, and did not finally die down until it reached the Texas Panhandle. Mitchell was not clearing brush, and he certainly was not worried about his carbon footprint. This was policy — a scorched-earth answer to the Julesburg raids, meant to burn the grass out from under the Plains tribes and their horses and make the valley uninhabitable to anyone who moved with the seasons.

The Battle of Julesburg and subsequent raids began on January 7, 1865, when a large, allied force of Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota Sioux warriors, some 1,000 strong attacked Camp Rankin drawing out a detachment of Iowa Cavalry that were subsequently ambushed. About 14 soldiers and a handful of civilians were killed. The remnant drew back to Camp Rankin and defended their post. The Indians looted the nearby town of Julesburg, taking large quantities of supplies and money. In the following weeks, leading up to the fire, the same force systematically raided ranches and stage stations all along the South Platte.

Like so many tit for tat engagements in the West, the Julesburg Raids were a response to an unprovoked attack by the Colorado Territory Militia in November 1864 that resulted in the slaughter of around 200 people in the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villages at Sand Creek. All this the result of the burgeoning emigrant population pushing west from the original colonies and states and uprooting the nomadic lifestyle of the plains Indians.

The environmental warfare employed by General Mitchell, combined with steady military pressure, helped push many of the warriors northward across the Platte and up towards the Black Hills, but it was mostly ineffective. It worked the way such things work: the people survived and the land was ruined for a while, and both remembered.

I have been thinking about that fire all morning, because today we would parallel the Platte across the lower spine of Nebraska from Grand Island to Scotts Bluff, roughly two hundred and fifty miles of the Great Platte River Road. This corridor is so worn by everyone who ever wanted to be somewhere else that the ruts are still legible from a hundred and sixty years out. The interstate lays right over the top of the wagon road, which lays right over the top of the buffalo trace. You are never really the first one down this hallway. Mitchell’s fire was just one version, written in ash.

We started where the fire started. Fort Kearny — the frontier one, spelled without the second e that the town of Kearney later picked up by clerical accident — went up in 1848, the year the emigration turned from a trickle into a flood. It was never much to look at: the stockade looked more ornamental than useful, no romantic timber walls, just a scatter of adobe and sod and frame buildings around a parade ground on the south bank of the Platte. We walked the grounds with Bandit with a brisk prairie wind keeping the heat at bay. About a hundred yards from the main part of where the fort was, we found the powder magazine. It was a cool sunken structure, well maintained, and stocked with replicas of what would have been there when the fort was inhabited. Fort Kearny was only barely a military fort – it never came under attack. What it was, was the gate. Every trail worth naming — Oregon, California, Mormon — funneled through here, and the fort sat at the throat of the funnel like a toll booth for the whole westward impulse of a nation.

The numbers still stop me. In the fat weeks of late May, as many as two thousand emigrants and ten thousand oxen could pass this one point in a single day. Two thousand. The fort was three hundred and seventeen miles out from Independence, Missouri, which made it the first real institution most travelers had seen in a month — a place to mail a letter home, buy flour at cost, get a wagon axle looked at, and be told, gently, how very far they still had to go. In 1850 the first regular mail on the trail ran through here. A decade later it was a home station of the Pony Express. And in 1864 and ‘65, as the Indian Wars closed in, the soldiers stopped selling flour and started riding escort.

We grabbed a sandwich up the road in Kearney (with an e) and resumed our westward drive. An hour west, in the town of Gothenburg, (settled by Swedish farmers) there is a squat log building sitting in a city park. In front, a statue of a man riding a fast horse. Inside, a small gift shop and museum with artifacts from the Pony Express. It is a Pony Express station — a real one, or real enough. The Express itself lasted only from April 1860 to October 1861, eighteen months, a financial catastrophe made immortal by sheer romance: a boy, a fast horse, a locked leather mochila of mail, and a chain of stations roughly ten miles apart from Missouri to Sacramento. The telegraph put it out of business almost the instant it opened, Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work.

This particular cabin began its life out on the trail as a fur-trade post and road ranch — one of the low-slung way stations where a rider could swap an exhausted horse for a fresh one in the time it took to breathe. In 1931 it was taken apart log by log, hauled into town, and rebuilt in Ehmen Park, where a couple of local teenagers eventually noticed tourists pressing their faces to the windows and talked the town into opening it up. It has been somebody’s summer job every year since. I liked it enormously — not because it is grand, but because it is honest about what preservation actually is: a thing loved hard enough by enough ordinary people that they refused to let it fall down. The docent working the gift shop – and yes, they have stickers and stamps – told us there was a second station, Midway, still standing out on the original trace south of town on a private ranch. We did not go looking for it. Some things should stay where they were left.

From Gothenburg, we continued west. We moved in direction and time, because at our next stop the twentieth century arrived all at once. In North Platte, Union Pacific runs Bailey Yard, and Bailey Yard is not like other rail yards the way the ocean is not like other ponds. It is the largest railroad classification yard on earth — Guinness has said so since 1995 — and the statistics read like a tall tale someone forgot to make believable. Twenty-eight hundred and fifty acres. Three hundred and fifteen miles of track inside a single facility. Eight miles long, two miles wide. More than fourteen thousand rail cars moving through every twenty-four hours; some eighty-five hundred locomotives serviced a month. Trains are pulled apart and reassembled by rolling single cars over two artificial hills — “humps” — and letting gravity sort them, four cars a minute, into a fan of a hundred and fourteen bowl tracks.

You watch all of this from the Golden Spike Tower, eight stories up, one floor glassed-in and one open to the wind. And here is the thing that got me, standing up there with the whole steel prairie humming below: it is the same job. The Platte valley has been a machine for moving things east and west for as long as there have been things to move — buffalo, then wagons, then the Express rider with his ten-mile horses, then the transcontinental rails whose golden spike gives the tower its name, and now this, gravity and diesel sorting the American economy by the trainload. Different century, identical instinct. Bandit waited in the car – the prairie wind keeping the temperature comfortable, besides, she has little interest in supply chains, unless her food is involved.

West of Ogallala the land finally stops pretending to be flat, and the trail does the most dramatic thing it does in all of Nebraska. To get from the South Platte over to the North Platte, the emigrants had to climb out of one valley and drop into the other — and the dropping was the problem. Windlass Hill is a slope of about twenty-five degrees, which does not sound like much until you imagine a two-ton wagon on it with nothing but wooden brakes and a downhill full of gravity. They locked the wheels so they would skid instead of roll, and even then, wagons ran away and broke apart. The name is a folk memory of a machine that was probably never actually there — a windlass to lower the wagons by rope — but the ruts are no folklore at all. They are gouged five parallel channels deep into the hillside, and you can walk right up them on a paved path today, which feels a little like being allowed to walk up someone’s exhaustion.

At the bottom of Windlass Hill came the reward: Ash Hollow. After weeks on a treeless, dust-blown plateau where firewood meant buffalo chips and water meant whatever the Platte grudgingly allowed, the emigrants came down into a green pocket of ash and dwarf cedar with a cold clear spring running through it. Real trees. Real water. Shade. Grass for the stock. There is a cave here that sheltered people for fifteen hundred years before a single wagon squealed down Windlass Hill — the valley was an oasis long before it was a landmark. The diaries turn almost tender at Ash Hollow. It is the closest thing the trail has to a held breath being let out.

One of the striking things about our visit to Ash Hollow was a large forest fire that was burning to the north. The fire itself was miles away, but the smoke came right up to the crest at Windlass Hill. Looking north and west towards the setting sun, the land was in a smoky fog. Turning the other direction, clear, crystal blue as far as the eye could see. A hundred and sixty years after Mitchell gave his order, the valley was on fire again, and once more it was the wind, not the map, that decided how far it would go.

We rolled into the last stretch with the light going long and gold, and there it was on the horizon doing what it has done to travelers for two hundred years — Scotts Bluff, standing up out of the plain like the plain had a door in it. To the wagon trains it meant they had cleared the flat country and the mountains were coming. To us, at the end of a day spent driving a fire line laid down by a general who wanted this valley emptied, it meant something a little different. Mitchell burned three hundred miles of it to make it uninhabitable, and here we are, and here the town of Kearney is, and Gothenburg with its beloved little cabin, and North Platte moving the freight of a continent, and the ash trees still holding the good water at the bottom of the bad hill. The land remembered the fire. It just declined to be ended by it.

After checking into our hotel, we headed downtown to another excellent brew pub, the Flyover Brewing Company…might as well own what those coastal elites think of you! The beer was excellent, the food delicious and as the three of us sat out on the pet friendly patio in the late glow of sunset, we could hear a local band playing an outdoor venue a block away. The street was alive with couples and families headed to and fro, just heartwarmingly American.

We returned to the hotel, walked Bandit for her evening constitutional, and sat down for our night cap. In 1853, Amelia Stewart Knight kept a diary of her journey on the Oregon Trail. On June 26, she wrote: “All hands come into camp tired and out of heart. Husband and myself sick. No feed for the stock.” As I turned off the light, I could not help but think how much easier we have it now, and how bold those people were.

This series began here: Part 1

The story continues here: Part 6

One of my favorite brunch spots in Nashville is in the historic Edgefield Neighborhood on the East Bank of the Cumberland. Sky Blue Café offers up a smorgasbord of benedicts and burritos and one of the best Southwest omelets outside of the Southwest. Around the corner and slightly east is 711 Fatherland Street. An unassuming mid-19^th century house that has been restored after nearly being demolished in 1983. From late 1876 to early 1881, J.D. Howard lived here. He was a quiet man, raised and raced horses. He and his wife were blessed with a daughter, Mary, during their tenure here. J.D. was originally from Missouri and in the Spring of 1881, he elected to return there, settling in St. Joseph, along the banks of the Missouri River. On April 3, 1882, J.D., now “Thomas Howard,” was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford. Robert did it to earn a reward and a pardon from then Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden. The act has gone down in folk music as “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard,” and the song is known as “The Ballad of Jesse James.” Ford had been a member of the James-Younger Gang, a collection of former Confederate guerrillas who robbed a string of banks in the Midwest from the 1860’s concluding their run with the botched Northfield, Minnesota bank raid that got several members killed and captured. The two gang leaders were the brothers Jesse and Frank James, AKA “J.D. Howard” and “B.J. Woodson.” Jesse (Thomas Howard) died on the spot, Frank James surrendered shortly thereafter, was tried and acquitted and lived until 1915.

I was humming “Jesse James” as I packed the car to get underway for Day 3 of our expedition. The plan was to visit the World War I Memorial in downtown Kansas City, tour Kaws Point (a Lewis and Clark Trail spot) and then head up to St. Joseph, Missouri, to see the house James was killed and the starting point of the Pony Express around the corner from the kill house. We would then head into Nebraska, toodle a little in Lincoln and head west to Grand Island to spend the night.

Our first stop was a bust. Some of you might recall that a few weeks ago we had a little soccer tournament going on across this country. (Quick side note – if you have not seen the videos of the Europeans and Japanese being amazed at our great country, take a spin on YouTube – type in something like “Europeans see Bass Pro Shop” and you will get a bunch of them – they are wonderful!) Any rate, we got downtown and the entire plaza and monument area were awash in FIFA banners and large crowds of fans milling about. We will have to see that memorial another time. We headed on to Kaw Point Park.

Kaw Point is not a national monument, it is a city park, but the spot is on the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail designated by the National Park Service. It is a spit of land where the Kansas River (formerly Kaw River) meets the Missouri. The Corps of Discovery reached it on June 26, 1804, and camped there through June 29. It was a rest-and-refit stop. They dried out provisions and gear, made repairs, hunted (deer and bear were plentiful), and Clark took measurements — noting the Kansas River as roughly 230 yards wide at its mouth and the Missouri about 500 yards. Lewis and Clark recorded observations on the land, wildlife, and the local Kansa (Kaw) people the area was named for, though they didn’t encounter them in numbers here.

The stop is also remembered for a discipline episode: on June 29, privates John Collins (on guard duty) and Hugh Hall were court-martialed for tapping into the whiskey barrel. Collins got 100 lashes, Hall 50 — a reminder of how tightly Lewis and Clark ran the expedition. They shoved off and continued up the muscular Missouri, heading west, on June 29.

We walked the grounds of the park for the better part of an hour, observed the flow of the two rivers and their confluence. The Kansas is smaller and less muddy; the Missouri is intimidating. I wondered if the men of the Corps would have been relieved to get above the flow of the Kansas, but looking through the Lewis and Clark Journals, I find no evidence of this. The Kansas is big, but its flow is a fraction of the Missouri. The day-to-day struggles of the Corps would continue as they battled the relentless downstream current, caving banks, shifting sandbars and sawyers that could hole a boat. Those hazards continued unabated for hundreds of miles.

We continued north towards Nebraska but pulled off in St. Joseph, Missouri. Lewis and Clark camped nearby, but the purpose of our visit was to explore the town’s slogan: “Where the Pony Express started and Jesse James ended.” In its heyday, St. Joseph was extraordinarily wealthy for its size. It was a major gateway for westward migration and home to the Midwest’s largest wholesale trade company, Nave & McCord Mercantile. As a result, there is a remarkable stock of Victorian mansions and turn of the 19^th Century commercial architecture. Sadly, it is a town in decline, and that stock of buildings is decaying. I have done some historic building repurposing in my career, and I was envious of some of the buildings we spied as we drove around, but without jobs and industry, I couldn’t see how you would ever get a project like that financed.

The Jesse James house originally stood at 1318 Lafayette Street in St. Joseph, but it has been moved a couple of times in the interest of increasing tourism…not sure it’s done much, at least from what I saw. In 1977 it was moved to its current location next door to the Patee House Hotel and Museum at 12^th and Mitchell, about two blocks from its starting point. It’s not much to look at and the museum was closed when we arrived. Perhaps fitting, perhaps we should not be fascinated with outlaws, especially murderous ones.

That fascination is real surrounding characters like James…consider all the stories and songs about Billy the Kid. For decades after his death, imposters claimed to be Jesse James – most famously a man named J. Frank Dalton, who insisted he was the real outlaw who had faked his death in 1882 and lived to be over 100. Rumors of this nature circulated until 1995, when James’s great grandson, James Randal Ross, a Superior Court Judge in Orange County, California had Jesse’s body exhumed and a mitochondrial DNA test was done to confirm once and for all that the man that “dirty little coward” shot was indeed Jesse James. In a bit of irony, James’ only surviving son, Jesse Edwards James became a lawyer in Kansas City – the first in the direct male line of the outlaw that kept producing attorneys.

The Patee House was built as a luxury hotel in 1858 and served as the headquarters of the Pony Express. The freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell ran the operations from an office on the ground floor of the hotel. Today it is an ill-lit and unimpressive museum for the Pony Express. The Pony Express began operations on April 3, 1860 – a year and nine days before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter. St. Joseph was chosen as its eastern terminus for good reason: it was the westernmost point in the country you could reach by railroad and telegraph. The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad connected it to the eastern rail and wire networks, so mail and messages could travel by train and telegraph to St. Joe. Then the mail would transfer to horseback for the roughly 1,900-mile dash across the plains, mountains, and deserts to Sacramento, California.

That first westbound rider left from the Pikes Peak Stables in St. Joseph. There’s a well-worn legend that a cannon was fired and a crowd gathered to see the first rider off, though accounts differ on the rider’s identity (Johnny Fry is the name most often given). The service worked as a relay. Riders — young, lightweight men on fast horses — covered stretches of 75 to 100 miles, swapping to a fresh horse every 10 to 15 miles at relay stations. The mail rode in a special lightweight saddle cover called a mochila that could be flipped from one horse to the next in seconds. The trip that had taken weeks by stagecoach was cut to about ten days.

The most famous run came with Lincoln’s inaugural address in March 1861, carried west in a record of roughly seven days and 17 hours.

But the Pony Express was short-lived. It ran only about 18 months. The completion of the transcontinental telegraph in October 1861 made it instantly obsolete — a message that took ten days by horse now crossed the country in minutes — and the company folded, having lost a great deal of money. Its brief, romantic run left an outsized mark on American mythology and gave us the iconic man on horseback image of the American west.

Completing our visit to St. Joseph, we returned to I-29 heading north, through the southwest corner of Iowa towards Omaha. We hung a left on to I-80 in Omaha and headed towards Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska. The Missouri River continues north out of Omaha and naturally, the Lewis and Clark Trail follows along. So at that junction, we bid adieu to The Corps of Discovery and continued west along the floor of Nebraska, following the trails that paralleled the Platte River. The westward turn took us away from the scenery of a lush river and out onto the flat and windy prarie.

The corridor along the “floor” of Nebraska was home to the route of the Pony Express, the first Transcontinental Railroad, and the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails. A target rich environment for history buffs like me!

We arrived in Lincoln about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and pulled off the interstate in search of the state capitol and caffeine. Lincoln is a growing town of about 300,000, making it Nebraska’s second-largest city (after Omaha).

Its name is a political twist. The town was originally called Lancaster, settled because of nearby salt flats. When Nebraska became a state in 1867 and legislators fought over where to put the capital, those who wanted it to stay in Omaha renamed the proposed site “Lincoln” — after the just-assassinated Union president — betting that southern-sympathizing lawmakers would refuse to put the capital in a town named for Abraham Lincoln. The gambit backfired: the name stuck and so did the capital.

It’s the seat of the only unicameral state legislature in the country. Nebraska’s officially nonpartisan legislature — championed by Senator George Norris in the 1930s — is unique among the 50 states. The State Capitol is quite distinctive: a 400-foot Art Deco tower nicknamed the “Tower on the Plains,” topped by a bronze statue called “The Sower.” Like our capitol in Nashville, it broke from the usual domed-capitol mold entirely.

Predictably, we found a Starbucks not far from the capitol. Lawmakers need those grande lattes to do their dealings. We ordered our usual fare, found a nearby gas station, filled up and returned to the highway headed west toward Grand Island.

Grand Island is a pleasant and very clean town of a little over 54,000 souls. The name came from French fur trappers, who called a nearby large island in the Platte River “La Grande Île,” the Grand Island. It sits in the heart of one of North America’s great wildlife spectacles: every spring, hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes stop over along the Central Platte during their migration. The city celebrates “Wings Over the Platte,” and birdwatchers from around the world travel here to see the event firsthand.

On the night of June 3, 1980, seven tornadoes slammed into the town killing five people and injuring around 200. It was part of a larger two-day outbreak across seven states that produced 29 tornadoes in all, killing six and injuring over 400. The event entered contemporary pop culture with Ivy Ruckman’s book “Night of the Twisters,” which was made into a movie for TV in 1996.

Grand Island is the birthplace of Henry Fonda (1905) and has a well maintained and decorative downtown adorned with cantina lights, which is where our final stop was for the day: dinner at McKinney’s Pub in historic downtown Grand Island – another BringFido recommendation. Advertised for having “authentic Irish and American fare” and “22 beers on tap and 45 different Irish Whiskeys to enjoy,” it seemed like the place to be for the evening and the food and service were excellent.

Another great day on the road, we walked around the downtown after supper and then returned to the hotel. A nightcap of Writer’s Tears, Irish whiskey and it was time for our sleeping caps.

This is a continuation of a series…the last episode is here - the next episode is here.

Hammer and anvil open the day.
Oxen shift; bells talk low.
Canvas smells of new oil and rain.
Children lean from the dark mouths of wagons,
Faces bright as unspent coins.

The street is one long argument of wheels.
Men shout the names of captains.
Women fold the last letter from home
Into a trunk that will never open the same.

Then the square empties westward.
Grass begins.
The last house drops behind like a struck match.
The prairie leans open, and the long white line of schooners
Fills with wind.

I think the urge to venture into the unkown is central to the American character.

In the winter of 1803/1804, the Corps of Discovery made winter camp at Camp River Dubois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis. There was a muddy collection of huts surrounded by a stockade, where they made their final preparations to proceed up the Missouri, the brown and ice-choked river that fed into the Mississippi across from their camp. The keelboat and pirogues were drawn up, supplies stowed in, a ragged discipline was maintained despite the heavy use of alcohol in the Corps.

Across the river in St. Louis, the Spanish garrison watched nervously, wondering what the Americans were up to. Even though St. Louis was founded by the French, it had been secretly ceded to Spain under the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762 and the Spanish had been administering Upper Louisiana since then. Spain ceded the territory back to France in the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800, but the French never really took the reins, and France sold it all to the Americans in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

The French took control in what is remembered as Three Flags Day on March 9-10, 1804, in what we in the real estate business would call a “simultaneous close.” Spain handed it all to France on March 9 and on March 10, France transferred it to the United States. On May 14, 1804, Clark recorded in his journal: “I set out at 4 oClock P.M. in the presence of many of the neighboring inhabitants and proceeded on under a gentle brease.” The Corps of Discovery was underway.

We arrived at the Lewis and Clark State Historic Site at Camp River Dubois about 9AM and it was already sweltering hot and humid. We took turns running into the Visitor Center as doggoes are not allowed inside. The museum is quite well done with a full-size keel boat that is cut away at the back to show how it would have been packed. We then took a short trail out to the recreated Camp structures. Quick rant: we need to preserve our history better than this! From afar, it looked like a pioneer camp with a part of a stockade. Up close, it was falling apart. In fairness, the real site of the camp was further west and slightly north on state park grounds, but outside of the Visitor’s Center, the site is not well maintained. We returned to the car and drove up the Lewis and Clark Trail closer to the spot where the camp was. All of it was overgrown and the displays with information were barely legible, but we did get to a spot where we could see across the Mississippi and see the browner Missouri pouring in. I could not help but wonder what the men who were manning the oars on the boats must have thought as they approached that watery monster with a current so strong it was visible across the Mississippi.

Our next stop was to visit the grave of William Clark in Bellefontaine Cemetery, across the river in St. Louis. In preparing for the trip, I had read that William Tecumseh Sherman and Tennessee Williams were buried there along with Adolphus Busch and a number of brewing barons, senators and steamboat men. But upon arrival and retrieving a cemetery guide, we found William Clark and Mr. Busch, but no Sherman or Williams. We quickly realized that while on a Google Map, the cemetery appears as one, it is actually two. Bellefontaine is a nonsectarian and Calvary, immediately next door, is Catholic. The architecture of the two could not be more different either. How strange, this giant city of the dead, lying immobile, fence-to-fence, sorted by a creed line. The Protestant side featured large mausoleums, obelisks in a Greek Revival style, a garden of individual achievement. The Catholic side, sacramental, replete with crosses and religious symbols…consecrated ground echoing the theology of the resurrection of the body. The Catholic side subordinates the individual to the sacrament; the Protestant side sanctifies the striving spirit of the individual. We drove through Bellefontaine first, paid our respects to Captain Clark and several other prominent people, then we exited, turned right and headed into Calvary.

As a son of the Confederacy who remembered boyhood trips through South Georgia on our way to my grandmother’s house in North Florida, I wasn’t sure how I would respond to seeing Sherman’s final resting place. I still remember seeing “Sherman’s Sentinels,” the twin chimneys that would have been on each end of a large house. The structure in the middle burned to the ground by Sherman’s boys who were “just a little careless with matches.” But, like Grant, Sherman understood the cold calculus of war. Grant grasped the arithmetic of manpower — the Union could replace its losses and the Confederacy could not, so he kept pressing where earlier generals had flinched. Sherman understood that an army needed food and clothing and if you rip that away from them, they will lose their will to fight. As I grew older, my disdain for Sherman turned to a grudging respect. His actions probably shortened the war and reduced the casualties inflicted on both sides.

What I didn’t know was that he was a Catholic. Not sure how much he practiced. What is known is that he died in New York and his devout wife Ellen’s family had him returned to St. Louis to be buried alongside her and their children. The Ewings were devout Catholics and had raised the orphaned Sherman. Ellen died in November of 1888, a little over two years before Sherman met his maker in February of 1891.

A couple of other surprises on the Calvary side were Tennessee Williams and Dred Scott. Williams actually wanted to be cremated and buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico, near where the poet Hart Crane — one of his literary heroes — had leapt to his death. Instead his brother Dakin, himself a convert to Catholicism, overrode those wishes and buried him here at Calvary, in the very city Williams had spent a lifetime loathing. Dred Scott wasn’t Catholic either. He was originally buried in a Methodist cemetery (Wesleyan), but when Henry Taylor Blow — whose family had once enslaved Scott and who had himself converted to Catholicism — learned that Wesleyan was about to close, he had Scott’s remains removed and reinterred at Calvary, near the Blow family.

We left St. Louis heading west along I-70 towards Independence, Missouri. We made a couple of short stops along the way in Boonville, MO and Arrow Rock. The former was a stop on Lewis and Clark Trail, but didn’t find much there outside of the Katy Trail, the longest rails-to-trails project in the country. We got Bandit out to stretch her legs and ours with a short excursion on the Katy. Arrow Rock was an 1800s settlement on the Missouri and an important crossing on the Santa Fe Trail.

We made it to Independence about 5PM and walked around Harry Truman’s Summer White House. The Frontier Museum had closed, so we put that down as a to-do next time. Independence was the trailhead from the 1830s through the 1850s, the first big push westward, of the Oregon, the California and the Santa Fe trails. The town square would have been a churn of Conestoga and lighter emigrant wagons, ox and mule teams. The more seasoned overlanders preferred oxen — they were cheaper, hardier and less prone to being stolen. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, provisioners weighing out flour, bacon, coffee, powder. Departures were determined by grass and weather — you couldn’t leave until spring growth fed the animals but leave too late and the Sierra snows killed you (the Donner lesson, 1846). Cholera moving up from the river. A Babel of Missourians, New Englanders, Germans, played-out farmers, gold-fevered clerks. All of them quitting something else, all of them in the quintessential American spirit of knowing that something better was over the horizon.

In 1843, at the start of the “Great Migration” over a thousand emigrants rolled out of Independence for Oregon in one season. We would follow their footsteps across Nebraska over the next few days, but for this night, we were headed to Kansas City.

That evening we headed to the famous Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que. Bring Fido said they were pet friendly, I called to confirm, so we bundled Bandit up and drove over. Unfortunately, the pet friendly patio was closed with the furniture stacked. I went in and protested to the Manager, a big burly Kansan. He came outside, looked at Bandit and told us to come on in. Bandit is better behaved than most of the children we saw running around the tables. We perched out on the edge of the restaurant, grateful to be in the air conditioning as it was still toasty outside. We dined on pulled pork sandwiches, mac and cheese and onion rings washed down with a couple of Joe’s KC 180 lagers, the local brew.

Joe’s is good, but I am going to show my bias. I would put three of our local establishments up against Joe’s any day: Martin’s BBQ, Edley’s BBQ and my favorite, Peg Leg Porker. These establishments take the smoking of meat up to a heavenly level. But again, Joe’s is very good, we are just spoiled here in Tennessee.

We returned to the hotel and got back into the routine of the road. I journaled the day’s notes and checked navigation for the next day. My bride prepared a couple of cups of green tea — an excellent complement to a bourbon night cap. We walked the pup one last time, then we rested. As I drifted off to sleep, I was still in awe of the men and women who left everything to head out into what Fitzgerald called “the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

This is a continuation of a story that began here.

He stood at the bottom staring up at the stairs climbing into the blue air.
Knees wavering, he closed his eyes and then could hear the plaza’s roar.
The smell of the cooking fires, the drums, the city noises of ten thousand
Living in the river’s crook, the flat black earth of Illinois pressed hard
By feet that knew this was the center of the world.

Basket by basket, they had lifted the earth and clay from the borrow pits,
The open mouths of the Underworld.
Basket by basket, they had carried their load and stacked it higher and
Higher, reaching for the Upperworld.
He stood there where the three worlds touched, in the present day,
Knowing only that he had to climb out of the smoke and drums
To see the new world over the horizon.

He began to climb the steps and as the plaza noise fell away,
The voices thinned, the drums grew soft as a pulse,
The smoke unspooled into the Cosmos.
He thought how each step up was a century of baskets
Underfoot, a century of a people believing that the
Great Sun God would reward them for their work.
Still higher he climbed – the cedar posts that caught
The Solstice first before the city woke – higher still
Till the sound and smoke ran out.

At the summit he found the silence they built for us to find.
Not peace, but altitude, the lonely height the prairie grants,
A quiet raised by hand that stands where the temple stood.
On this high terrace, the Sun was greeted, the thunder addressed,
The ancestors rising up through the pressed earth.
A voice spoken here could be heard in the plaza below,
As if the Cosmos itself had stooped to listen.

He opened his eyes, returned to the present, and surveyed the
Grassy terrace and haziness of the Mississippi River late afternoon.
Then out of the haze, the Sun struck the Gateway Arch.
Another vertical claim across the same river, another attempt to make
The horizon answer.  Between this old mound and the new steel curve
The silence and secrets hold.  The silence is not an answer – it is
A question with the questioner gone.

It is said that they once buried a man here on a bed of shells,
Twenty thousand beads spread into wings flown wide, a
Falcon made of the dead, aimed at the sun.
Now a curve of steel repeats the falcon’s arc.
It catches the same light the cedar posts once caught.
Gateway, we call it, a door open to the vastness of the west,
As if the land began the day we named it, as if no one
Ever stood so high before, or wore wings, or hurled
Themselves at heaven only to stoop and carry up
Another basket of the world.

I wrote the first day of the travelogue earlier this week, Manifest Detour Part 2, documenting our trip to the Cahokia Mounds. A good friend commented that he could not understand why they built the mounds. I don’t know if this is an answer, but hopefully it points in the right direction.

In between podcasts and prayers, between Jimmy Buffett and Bach’s cello suites, long drives bring about meditative states for both of us. Well, all three if you count Bandit the beagle, but her meditation takes the form of long naps. Kentucky and Southern Illinois are densely forested with periodic breaks of small agricultural towns between the larger cities. I was thinking about Meriwether Lewis and his final resting site at Grinders Stand near Hohenwald, Tennessee, just south of Nashville. Immersed in the lush recently rained on canopy of Northwest Kentucky, I couldn’t help but wonder if the short sight lines of the eastern forests ate at Lewis, having seen the grand vistas of the Plains and Rockies. Jefferson observed that “Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections” (what we today call depression) and apparently it was hereditary. He further observed that “During his Western expedition the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body & mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment at St. Louis in sedentary occupations, they returned upon him with redoubled vigor, and began seriously to alarm his friends.” (Founders.archives) Famously, after Lewis’s apparent suicide, Jefferson would say: “Of courage undaunted; possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction;” the phrase that gave birth to Stephen Ambrose’s spectacular history of the Expedition: “Undaunted Courage.”

We arrived at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park at about 4:15. The site protects 2,200 acres (about 3.5 square miles) centered on the Collinsville Road. There are roughly 75 surviving mounds, down a bit from the roughly 4,000-acre city that featured over 120 earthen mounds and a population of close to 20,000 people…but that was in 1100AD. That population though was larger than the city of London at the time. The city was centered around the largest mound, called “Monks Mound” – more on that later. Monks Mound alone covers 14 acres and rises roughly 100 feet, larger at its base than the pyramid of Cheops.

We drove around the southern complex of smaller mounds then crossed Collinsville Road and parked near Monks Mound. Funny thing about traveling in air conditioning… it is no bueno when you get out into a bright sunlit day near a grassy field that just had a lot of rain. The combination of heat and humidity made it difficult to breathe! I have not so fun memories of traveling across country in the 1960’s, pre-air conditioning, with the windows rolled down, sitting in the back on a vinyl seat that stuck to your legs, arms and back. That experience was somewhere between how Lewis and Clark traveled and today’s sojourners.

We got Bandit out of the back and headed first up a short trail to a stockade wall that had been preserved. The Mississippian culture would erect wooden stockade fences, like you see in the forts of the old westerns but would then add a clay stucco mix to that to make it more difficult to penetrate. We turned and headed toward Monks Mound and the impressive stairs to the top. I had wondered if the Lewis and Clark team had found this site and what they thought of it, but digging through their journals, the only reference from that time comes from Clark. In an entry dated to early January 1804, he describes going out with Private John Collins — ostensibly to follow up on a stolen-hog investigation — and crossing a frozen prairie to climb a second riverbank. There he came upon what he took for an Indian fortification: nine mounds arranged in a circle, two of them rising about seven feet above the plain. The site sat a couple of miles from the woods and roughly the same distance from the high ground, with large quantities of pottery shards and flint scattered around it. About half a mile to the north he spotted a grave situated on a rise. The outing ended after the men broke through pond ice, and Clark got his feet wet enough that his shoes froze to them on the walk back.

The editorial note attached to this entry (from Gary Moulton’s journals edition) identifies the location precisely: Clark had reached the northwest edge of the Cahokia Mounds complex, near present-day Mitchell in Madison County, Illinois, about eight miles north of Cahokia itself.

The Euro-American documentation of the central mound complex did not happen till 1811, when a St. Louis lawyer, amateur historian, and friend of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Marie Brackenridge, walked up Cahokia Creek in search of the mounds he’d heard about from French trappers. He was not the first westerner to see them; by the time he visited, a small community of French Trappist monks had settled at the base of the mound, thus giving its name.

It is unclear why the Indians built these mounds. It required moving millions of cubic feet of earth, basket-load by basket-load over generations. This level of organization points to a centralized authority - some believe a “Great Sun” godlike figure that would be capable of directing such a workforce. So they were simultaneously religious architecture, political statements of power and legitimacy, possibly burial monuments. But together they knitted a settlement together that was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, north of Mexico.

We got to the top of the mound and in the clear afternoon sun, we could see last year’s first stop, the Gateway Arch, and the city of St. Louis. We were drenched and retreated down the stairs to the welcome embrace of the Mazda’s air conditioning.

A quick observation about the condition of this state park: Illinois, you need to up your game. The fields were not mowed, the trash bins were all full, the guide from the visitor’s center looked like it was printed on early ‘70’s mimeograph paper. The educational displays were in poor shape – faded and difficult to read. In all, it is a spectacular site, but it needs some TLC.

After checking into our hotel, the BringFido app directed us to a nearby restaurant in downtown Collinsville, the Old Herald Brewery and Distillery. The meal was quite good and the service lovely. We sat on the patio with Bandit as the sun set. I spied a Route 66 sign at the last turn before we parked at the restaurant and a quick check confirmed that we were indeed on that road. A quick check of Atlas Obscura led to the discovery that we were within walking distance of the “world’s largest catsup bottle.” You really must embrace the kitsch of Route 66, so after supper we headed over to check out the oversized water tower that was made to look like a catsup bottle.

We got back to the hotel; I pulled up the plan for the next day and double-checked the mileages. It was going to be a long pull with a lot of small stops, but that’s what we were here for. After a night cap, I climbed into bed and in the words of Dylan Thomas, “said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.”

The first part of this series is here. The journey continues here.

Last walk around the house before setting out.
Window by window I twirl the blinds that fold
Down like tired eyelids.
Thermostat up a tad, the empty rooms will like
The warmth. Timers set on lamps, a coordinated
Ruse to ward off unwelcome visitors.

The beagle dances at my feet, tail whirling like a propeller.
She awaits her car coat, which I slide on with a jingle of tags
And buckles. She prances, impatient for the open road,
Nose already tasting miles of new grass and highway wind.
The key turns in the lock like a bone setting.

The first miles are always the hardest, each one a small
Betrayal of the garden I watered at dusk; each one further
From the chair that knows the exact curve of my back.
But something older than mortgages or memory stirs:
The same pull that dragged Powell down the Colorado,
Into the jagged unknown, under a pitch
Black night punctuated with indifferent stars.

Home will wait. It always does.
The car picks up speed as we merge onto the river
Of Interstate, heading west. Ahead, past the
Fields, past the gleaming cities, the road
Goes white where it meets the sky.

As excited as I get to hit the open road, there is a bit of melancholy in leaving. The photo above was taken on the road to Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. I keep a similar photo on my desk just to remind me of how vast this land is.

In the middle of May I got serious about what we would set out to do in June. Ever since our third granddaughter was born in Los Angeles four years ago, my wife and I have been traveling out to LA and back. Shortly after her birth, we flew out. After a few days getting acquainted with our little darling and helping around the apartment, we called an audible and decided to drive back. Our middle daughter was still living at home, taking care of our beagle, Bandit, in our absence.

On that first transit, we visited some Route 66 stops, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Parks, and other scenic places not too far off I-40 as we worked our way back east to Nashville. This is when the bug bit us. Later that summer, our youngest announced she was moving to LA, so I completed the “out-and-back” with her.

The next year, some complications with life kept us closer to home, but for the last three years we have made this round-trip to the West Coast and back. In 2024, we took a southerly route, picking up several of the Southwest National Parks along with a visit to the unusual town of Roswell, New Mexico, in search of aliens. Last year was a more middle-of-the-country route, though it still picked up eight National Parks and a handful of National Monuments. I documented that trip in these pages under the series titled “All Roads Lead to Roam.”

I had been sketching route ideas since the beginning of the year, but in May I committed. I had reread Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” and decided we would head on a more northerly course, following a section of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Trail. Following that trail for too long was pushing us further north than I wanted to go, so after reaching Kansas City and Kaw Point, at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, we turned north into Nebraska and picked up several trails that once traversed the southern edge of the state. We would visit Oregon and California Trail sites, jumping-off points for the Santa Fe Trail, Pony Express stations, and several places where the Mormon Trail converged with the Oregon and California trails. The Mormons paralleled the other trails until Utah but stayed on the north side of the Platte River while everyone else stayed on the south.

My last active-duty job in the Navy was Navigator aboard the destroyer USS Stump (DD-978), and I never lost that training of plotting and planning my voyages. I spent a couple of weeks poring over paper atlases, Google Maps, Atlas Obscura, and the like, configuring a route that would get us to as many National Monuments, Historic Sites, and Parks as possible. My goal was to drive no more than six hours a day. Once I had my targets, I looked at dog-friendly hotels and restaurants in the towns we would stop in—Miss Bandit is our wonderful traveling companion—and used the Bring Fido app to do the heavy lifting.

Then, this year, I added a layer. I fed each leg into one of my AI engines—I have been using Claude and Grok—and posed two questions: What is interesting along this route, and how could I improve it? Working with these tools, I dialed in the final plan and produced what I told my wife was my “Term Paper”: a 14-page document with the route, planned stops, and reading material and history about each of the trails and expeditions. Along the way I picked up several state parks that would prove to be stunners, as well as stops to honor the John Wesley Powell expedition into the “great unknown” of the Colorado River basin, and both the Golden Spike Tower and the Golden Spike National Historic Site—one is in Nebraska, the other in Utah.

All these forces moving west, a young nation on the move, so many dreams on these trails. It was this combined sense of exploration and westward expansion that inspired the title for the series: Manifest Destiny. The phrase was coined—or at least popularized—by journalist and Democratic Party-aligned editor John L. O’Sullivan in 1845. In an essay titled “Annexation” in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, he argued for incorporating the independent Republic of Texas, writing of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” We weren’t into empire building, but we were headed into the west along the avenues that built the country, and we planned to wander a bit. So “Manifest Detour” was born.

One thing the navigator had to do was make sure we were on station in Los Angeles in time for our granddaughter’s ballet recital. I have been to more recitals than your average bear: my sister was a ballerina, all three of my daughters danced from early childhood through to professional positions, and now all three of my granddaughters are involved with dance. I remember a Nutcracker performance some years ago when a weary father beside me said, “This has to be my fifth or sixth Nutcracker.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that such a low number was below amateur status. After double-checking my calculations, I reassured my bride that we would be there with several days to spare for our children.

When we make this trip, we rent from Hertz; I have no desire to put that kind of strain on the vehicles resting in the garage adjacent to my office. This year’s steed was a Mazda CX-50. It had ample space for our two suitcases and the “beagle barn” (Bandit’s crate) in the trunk, room in the backseat for Bandit’s hammock and odds and ends, and a comfortable cabin up front. We had some trouble connecting our phones, but it was a sound ride—decent power, so-so acceleration. We travel with a large cooler for cold water, a few snacks, and a few beers for nightfall, plus a backup bag of snacks in case we can’t find a Jimmy John’s or Jersey Mike’s along the way.

The single most important thing I forgot this year was my hardcover atlas. Like all of you, I use Waze and Apple and Google Maps, but when the signal is gone—or you have the Bluetooth issues we did—the hard copy is nice to have for comfort. It is a little unnerving to be 50 miles out of North Platte, Nebraska, with a quarter tank and watch the nav screen go dark. First world problems. We survived.

This one was going to take three weeks, and by early June I was itching to go. I don’t entirely know why. Friends I’ve told about our journeys react somewhere between horror—“how could you spend so much time in a car?”—and jealousy—“I’d like to do that sometime.” It helps to have a travel companion of like mind. My wife loves exploring and loves the long hours on the road, where we talk, listen to music and podcasts, pray, and generally enjoy each other’s company. And life is even better when you travel with a beagle. In his 1982 classic “Blue Highways,” William Least Heat-Moon observed of the journey: “Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.”

Monday morning, June 8, arrived. The sky was overcast and the air actually cool for this time of year. Rain was forecast along our route. Our target was Collinsville, Illinois, and the Cahokia Indian Mounds. I packed the car as Bandit circled nervously; once her barn and bed went in, she settled. She loves these trips—both her humans in one place, the pack together, and sometimes a treat or two scored from the lunch stops. We watered the indoor plants, checked the alarms, secured the doors, turned the thermostat up a little and the water heater down a little. We got in the car and ran through our final pre-flight checklist. I put the car into drive, and we were on our way.

The 14th-century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta is quoted as saying, “Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” This will be our story.

Continued here.

Immaturus obi: sed tu felicior annos Vive meos, Bona Republica!
“I died too soon—but you, live out my years, Good Republic!”
-Epitaph on Meriwether Lewis’s grave

I have stood here several times in the quiet cedar brake off the Natchez Trace,
The obelisk’s shaft broken clean – a promising life cut short.
One cannot comprehend why two cracks split the autumn dark at Grinder’s Stand:
Pistol fire that stilled the courage undaunted of young Meriwether Lewis.

Meriwether - son of rivers wild and western prairie wind, who chased the Pacific’s
Edge with Clark and mapped the unknown with compass, courage and ink.
Yet something haunted him on the journey, something he could never relent,
And here in Tennessee he lies and we grieve for a life so early spent.

The broken column defies the forest’s green reclaim, a sentinel for all who
Journey and do not return the same; the question that trails explorers into
The dark – what price the map, what cost the dawn unclaimed?
I listen for the footsteps faint, the Corps of Discovery’s echo fading.

Yet, there is a strange arithmetic in graves: what closed for him at this
Column, opened for me.  I read the broken stone like the head of the trail,
Not the end of one.  I turned west toward the Missouri, across the plains and 
Into the Rockies; because a man died here and showed me the way.

It’s a haunting place, the Meriwether Lewis National Memorial. It’s about 40-miles south of Nashville on the Natchez Trace Parkway and I have driven there and cycled there several times. I think it is why Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” hit me so hard, but it also inspired me to take time each summer and follow sections of the Lewis and Clark Expedition trail. When you are out there in the “great unknown” as John Wesley Powell called the unexplored spaces he pursued, you cannot help but admire the giants that came before us. What haunted Lewis and drove him to suicide (the consensus of historians) we will never know. But, if you get the chance, it’s worth the visit to pay that young man some respect.

Franklin’s warning to the lady outside of the Constitutional Convention (“a Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”) haunts me anytime I look at the news or check my social media feed. The central question on this auspicious day, it seems to me, is this: “are we going forward or backward.” I look across the pond at England and Europe and see a demographic and dystopian nightmare. Their rulers seem to have adopted the notion that the job of leadership is to manage the decline. And certainly, we have more than our share of similar leaders in this country. My sense is that the idea that we are in decline that must be managed is centered on our two coasts. I just returned from a 3-week 6,250-mile sojourn across this great land. We followed some of the footsteps of Lewis and Clark up through Illinois and Missouri. We picked up the Oregon and California (and Mormon) trails across Nebraska. We reveled in the glorious mountains of Rocky Mountain National Park and the incredible landscapes of Dinosaur National Monument.

We learned about the Pony Express and John Wesley Powell’s voyage into the “great unknown.” We saw the trains meet at Golden Spike National Monument. But we also saw the squalor of downtown Los Angeles and the dismal failure of the Ivanpah Solar Power plant. But these miles informed me that we are in a pretty good spot versus the rest of the world. We have a country full of incredible resources and people, and the spirit of 1776 is very much alive through the flyover country. It is a pioneer spirit, where people are friendly and resourceful. We had car trouble in Death Valley National Park, when our rental Mazda RX-50 started faltering and flashed an “Engine Malfunction” light on the dash

. The nearest mechanic was 200-miles away, but as I examined the black boxes under the hood, the innkeeper stopped by to help and offer advice on how to tackle the problem. The Hertz Assistant folks could not have been better, promptly arranging a swap out at the Las Vegas Airport and standing by with a tow if we had trouble getting there. In Amarillo, I met a lady that worked at the Baymont Hotel who had four kids: two in medical school, one in the Marines and one trying to get into Annapolis. We met people in the National Parks and Monuments that were happy to swap advice and stories, several of whom were on the same quest as us – to try to hit as many National Parks as they can. Yes, the pioneer spirit is alive and well! Here’s the thing about that spirit. It is a spirit of independence, striving to do something better for yourself and your family but also prepared to help your nearest neighbor because you never know when you will need help yourself.

That is the mark of a true citizen versus a subject, the critical difference between what we birthed on this continent versus the long arc of history in Europe. I am reminded of the old joke about an Englishman at the tail end of the 1800’s traveling across the Western states. He encountered a cowboy out fixing his barbed wire fence. The cowboy was hot, dirty and sweaty. The Englishman asked him if “his master was about.” The cowboy responded: “that son of a bitch ain’t been born yet.” I am confident if you asked a young farmer working on a piece of farm equipment the same thing today, you would get a similar answer.

A few years ago, I was sadly convinced that my grandchildren would not live in a country as great as the one I grew up in. I was wrong. We just went to the moon again this year and we will be landing there and building a permanent settlement on the moon inside of 10-years. We have technologies that if used properly will improve our quality of life immeasurably in a few years. We have a military that is the envy of the world, and we continue to be the beacon that draws so many to our shores. This is the place that Rudyard Kipling would recognize: “Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools.”

Do we have problems? Of course. Our debt is terrifying, we are not unified, our legal system is not dispensing justice properly in many places and sadly, we have an education system that has codified teaching our children that our nation is flawed from its inception and that they should be out in the streets protesting. Plenty of things that need to be addressed to be sure. But, in the entire span of history, there has never been a country that has amassed the wealth and power of the United States and used it for the good of so many around the world. A stroll through the cemeteries of Normandy should convince you of that.

So, here on A250, I am optimistic that our best days lie ahead and that my grandchildren will see wonders that I cannot even begin to imagine today. We are nowhere near being in decline, our greatness continues to stretch out before us like so many wonderful highways through the heartland of our nation

.

My curse began with a 3AM phone call six weeks ago with Mother on the other end screaming in pain and their house alarm going off. Dad was unable to disarm it, some things get too confusing, especially at 3AM! Something was amiss with her knee and was causing great pain. The good news was she had not fallen; the bad news was the pain was so intense she was hollering like a coyote after a kill. I had her hang up and call 911. The Gainesville EMTs are quite good, and they whisked her away to North Florida Hospital. Since neither of their children live nearby, we are extremely fortunate to have two lovely ladies that assist them with their “ADL’s” (Adult Daily Living). I was able to contact one of them and was quickly comforted that Dad would not be left alone bewildered and wondering where they took his wife of 72 years.

The diagnosis at the hospital was that they suspected an infection in the painful knee and they proceeded to operate. Mother is the bionic lady – both knees and both hips are replacements of the originals. They opened up the knee in search of an infection but alas found none. They cleaned things up, replaced a few external pieces and zipped her back up. Sedation and surgery are rough on anyone, but at 90+ it can be extremely tricky. After four days in the hospital, she was sent to a rehabilitation center for recovery. My sister and I have been trading trips down here to assist with things and hold down the costs, but it is extremely trying for our own lives and our spouses. Nevertheless, I am trying my Stoic best to “amor fati” (love fate – play the hand you are dealt) and this experience has provided me with some perspective and valuable lessons for me and my family as we age.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that a good quality of life is far superior to a long life. A wise friend once told me that “there are things worse than death,” and I believe if you have faith and confidence in God’s promise, death is not as scary for you compared to someone who lacks that. But getting to the point where you are completely dependent on others for getting dressed, taking a shower, etc etc is, in my mind, sad. So that feeds into the next lesson. How do we prevent that dependence? The obvious answer is maintaining your health. There are so many aspects to that simple statement, but in my mind, the holy trinity of maintaining your health is balance, strength and endurance.

Let’s start with balance. Balance naturally declines with age due to the loss of muscle strength and mass (it is estimated that we lose 3-8% per decade after age 30). As we age, our joint flexibility stiffens and our reflexes slow. Additionally, our vision, inner ear and body position awareness can decline. All of these factors increase the risk of falls, which are the leading cause of injury for people over the age of 65. The good news is that decline is not inevitable. There are plenty of things we can do to maintain and even improve our balance. I’ll leave it to you to look up an activity that bests suits you. For myself, I have several activities that I engage in to help me keep my balance. Yoga poses, especially the tree pose, work the core muscles that are needed to keep good balance, is my “go to” in this arena. I have recently added a slack line board, though I am still getting used to it, I think it has promise.

I mentioned that we lose muscle mass every year we age and strength is the next pillar of aging well. As my running days slowed down several years ago, I gradually increased my hiking and rucking. Rucking is a marvelous sport that combines strength training with building endurance. Basically, rucking (root in “ruck sack” in the military) is strapping a heavy weight to your back and going for a walk. My regular rucks are with a 25- or 35-pound pack and distances ranging from 3-5 miles. I like the ruckplate carrier from goruck.com because the heat in Nashville makes carrying a full pack on your back quite uncomfortable.

Rucking is great for core strength and keeps me well prepared for longer hikes with less weight. A subset of the strength pillar is grip strength. Like all things, grip strength declines with age, but multiple studies have shown that lower grip strength consistently correlates with higher risk of cognitive decline, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. I have watched physical therapists measure my dad’s grip strength and encourage him to do squeezing exercises to maintain a hearty handshake. For year’s I have enjoyed small scale rock climbing, and, in that sport, grip strength is crucial. I developed a routine of dead hangs and farmer’s carries that keeps my hands strong and my putty ball is always in the car to help stem my road rage when I have been wronged by some highwayman out and about in Nashville. Again, I encourage you to do your own research and find out what works best for you.

The last pillar is endurance…stamina. Keeping up with my rambunctious beagle helps me in this department, but I try to make sure I have at least one “long” session in my work out regimen each week. I love biking and it is excellent for cardiovascular health and building endurance, but you have to make sure you couple that with load bearing activities to avoid bone density loss. But a long 25-mile + ride on a Sunday is fantastic. Long hikes and rucks fit the bill as well.

Clearly there are other elements to maintaining your health. Maintaining your mental acuity is as important as your physical health. I try a couple of different puzzles and games – Sudoku, crossword puzzles, chess and a game that involves and element of chance, like Battleship on-line are part of my brain diet each day. Reading and journaling are helpful too. But think of the brain as a muscle that needs to be worked out regularly to stay strong. Find the things that you find stimulating and develop a routine. For mental health, human interaction is critical. Modern society is incompatible with our biology. We sit 12+ hours a day, we eat hyper-processed food, we doom scroll till midnight, rarely get out in the sun. All of this leaves us overstimulated and under-recovered. Being around a healthy community helps build our health. The tragedy of living into your 90’s is that odds are, you have outlived your friend group. I give my mother huge props – she works the friend list on her iPhone and stays up on all the community news in her hometown. Dad, not so much; most of his friends are long gone.

Underpinning mental and physical health is diet and sleep. I will not go into a diatribe about diet. My wife and I have followed the Mediterranean diet for years and that seems to help. She has the eagle eye always out for the dreaded seed oils, and it does seem that as a country, we are wising up to the reality that we have been fed toxic poisons in processed food. Perhaps there is a connection between diet and the fact that we are an obese nation. I sense a revolution is occurring though. Increasingly, I see signs of people willing to question the prescription, the vaccine, the diagnosis of the physician. This is not to say we should not take pills that actually provide a cure not just a temporary fix that has long term consequences. There is plenty of evidence that vaccines have save millions of lives and we should listen to the medical professionals. Just remember that it is called “practicing medicine,” you need to be your own physician, and the tools are there for you.

As for sleep, that is my Achilles heel. I wear a Garmin Enduro 3 that has more computing power than the Apollo space ship. It tracks everything I do – stairs climbed, steps taken, heart rate, etc etc. It gives me a “sleep score” every morning by reading several variables and sadly, I rarely get above 80. Fortunately, one of the skills the Navy taught me was the “nooner.” This was a 15-minute nap after lunch that recharged the body battery, especially if you had stood the Mid-watch or Morning Watch. I never lost that ability, and it has served me well.

Well, that about covers the waterfront on aging and what I am observing firsthand. It is not pleasant to watch the slow fade into the good night. But I am not sure Dylan Thomas was right when he told his father to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” I believe that being a Catholic Stoic brings inner equilibrium amid outer changes. My faith gives me the hope that there is more beyond this mortal coil and my amor fati keeps me grounded and accepting of things as they are. Aging strips away illusions of control – strength, speed, youth. Learning to love the process frees you from resentment. I am challenging myself to accept the new limits with grace while still training hard to stay ahead of the death angel. In short: Love the fact that you are aging (it beats the alternative). And within that love, keep dancing of the edge of your capability – steady, strong, and affirmative.

Let me know in the comments if you think I am on track or have missed anything. I would love to hear your stories and suggestions!

"On a dark night, inflamed with love's urgent longings — oh, blessed chance! — I went out unseen, my house being now at rest." — St. John of the Cross

He slipped out unseen as it is for those the darkness claims as seekers.
The house resting, breathing in the night, but something inside,
Older than his learning, deeper than the office he held, would not
Let him sleep, his learning unfinished.

The oil lamp beckoned in the window of the upper room as he was
Pulled through the unlocked door into the silent street where prophets
Foretold the light would fall in the morning.  The city, folded in on itself,
But he had to go, pulled beyond the Law.

The lights he knew, the architecture of his knowledge, made no sense
Any more in the shadow of the young rabbi and he yearned to 
Grasp it’s meaning, to come to grips with the reality that the time
Of the teaching had come.

Fifteen centuries later, St. John of the Cross would trod into that same
Night, searching for what Nicodemus found: that God does not meet
Us in the places we have mastered.

“The soul must pass through the darkness to arrive at what it cannot see.”

In His presence, Nicodemus stood there, holding his theology like a lamp
That had gone out.  “Born again,” He said, “of water and wind.”
Leaving the teacher, he returned in darkness, but like John of the Cross,
A darkness that precedes a new kind of seeing.

He did not understand it that night, and walked home with the wind still in his ears— 
“The wind blows where it wishes, you hear its sound, but you do not know where it
Comes from or where it goes.”

The days would pass and the night would do its slow work and then he stood
Saying the words in a crowded room, “Does our law judge a man without first
Giving him a hearing?”  A small candle. A precious and holy light.  But his.
Then the hill and the wood, the awful hammering echoing into the corners of
His soul.  Those that loved Him could not look away.  Those that brought him 
To this place and feared Him, could not look at what they had done.

The crowds moved on, the Disciples cowered behind locked doors. But in the 
Quiet of the late afternoon, Nicodemus came out into the full and merciless light.
Carrying myrrh, carrying aloes, carrying the accumulated weight of every night he had spent in the dark being made ready for this moment —the one who slipped out unseen now standing in the open, the one who came with questions now arriving with his hands full, and the light burning brightly.

Down the centuries we struggle to keep the light burning and alive to respond to St. John of the Cross and say:

“On a dark night, inflamed by love’s urgent longings – oh, blessed chance – I went out.”

We are rounding for home in the season of Lent. We are in the “Passiontide",” the last two weeks. I’ve been dabbling in St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” again, as I do this time of year…and this connection came to me.

We stare into the hillside and see
tree trunks snapped at savage angles,
white wood screaming beneath torn bark
in the sudden, shattered hush.

A merciless blue sky drills
through the opened chest of what
was forest—heartwood laid bare.

Broken limbs and stumps huddle
like exhausted soldiers after battle,
their war finished in one frozen night.

It falls to us, the living, to walk
the wreckage: drag fallen boughs,
stack them with their brothers curbside,
turn ruin into rough pyres.

Yards gouged by grapple skidders
will crust over, fill in;
grass will thread upward through mud again.

Pines stripped naked of branches
will lift what green they have left
toward tomorrow’s sun.

We cut, haul, pile, sweat—
in the fragrance of fresh sawdust
we move as one body.

All shall be well.
We will rise with the forest
to green once more.

Everyone has their power back now, but this was not Nashville Electric Service’s finest hour. Years of tree trimming after the 1994 ice storm has produced weaker trees more susceptible to being torn apart. My inner Druid weeps as I gather the branches and limbs from around the yard.

We’ve had quite the go of it these past few days. The original forecast was for several inches of snow over the weekend followed by “wintry mix,” whatever type of fiendish concoction that is, with the chance of “some ice” on the tail end. What we got was about two inches of snow and somewhere between a half and three-quarters of an inch of ice…an utter hellscape. The weather moved in Friday night and continued all day Saturday. The snow came first, then the ice began in earnest on Saturday afternoon. The streets become impassable except to fools who believe that “four wheel drive” means you can drive on ice…you can’t, you are in a sled with a heater. Sunday morning I woke to the repeated booms of tree limbs crashing down. At 7am, a large boom to our northwest signaled the death of a transformer. I saw a bright flash and then the power went out. About 30-seconds later our generator kicked in and it has been running non-stop till about an hour ago.

I turned to my wife and said the famous line from Admiral Stockdale when he had been shot down over North Vietnam, “we have entered the world of Epictetus.” Stockdale was a brilliant philosopher and educator. I had the privilege of going through the Stockdale Course when I was a Naval officer many years ago. He presented the Stockdale Paradox: confront the brutal facts of your current reality, yet never lose faith that you will prevail in the end. As my notes from that class read: “know that things can get a helluva lot worse, but pray and believe that they will get better.” Things got worse.

First, the kitchen sink chose this moment to begin backing up. I did not have “Liquid Plumr” on my winter supply checklist, but will from now on. I tried numerous home remedies but was finally able to clear the clog with a battery powered snake (highly recommended home tool!) As the dirty water drained out, I cleaned out the dishwasher…a fair amount of that yuck had backed into it when I had been trying to plunge the plug out. After wiping it down, I fired it up. My wife was taking short-term possession of our neighbor’s child’s fish a beta named Swimmy, who could not take the cold of no power. We were commiserating in the kitchen when a billow of suds came pouring out of the dishwasher onto the floor. Ugh! One of the home remedies I had tried was dish soap and boiling water. That didn’t work…but it coated the dishwasher with additional soap and those suds had nowhere to go. Any rate, we finally got everything cleaned up and we are fully functioning again on the plumbing side.

But the damage to our trees and all the trees in “Forest Hills” is biblical in scale. It looks like we got shelled. We were here in the last big ice storm in 1994, but this was much worse. In 1994, after the storm passed, the temperatures rose into the 40’s for several days, making everything more passable even though it did take them longer to get us our power back. Our house came with a Carolina stove set into the downstairs fireplace so after the first night we set up camp downstairs and gritted it out. We were able to get out of the house by mid-day following the storm and we treated the kids to a big breakfast at Shoney’s before gathering some last supplies and retreating to our warm cave. For years, the kids talked about how much fun it was…and it was…for about three days. Cabin fever starts to set in on Day 4 and pure anxiety by Day 5, you must remember the Stockdale Paradox!

We are the lucky ones. As I write, three days after the storm has passed, there are over 100,000 homes still without power. There are over 300 poles that are broken and have to be replaced. The task is gargantuan.

The thing about events like this, is that people forget their pettiness and sometimes even their own problems…people become a community. We talk to each other in the checkout line at the Home Depot or grocery store. We share our predicaments and wish each other well. I remembered that from the ‘94 storm too and 9/11. Maybe we need to experience the deprivation of not having our internet for several days or having to do heavy manual labor to restore a yard to appreciate how good we have it and what our common humanity actually is.

For now, we are back in the 21st Century, for better or worse. During the “down time,” I thumbed through some older works and found this poem below. I pray you are reading it from a safe, warm place and that it gives you some sense of what it is like to go through one of these. This polar vortex anomaly is not going away for several days. I will be praying for all of you.

Ice Storm in Nashville, 1994

February 1994

I.

It snuck up on us.
The weather forecasters called for rain:
"Take your umbrella to work!"
By mid-day they upped the forecast
To "storm watch."
As sleet and freezing rain began
Painting the patio and streets it was:
"Storm Warning."

We continued our normal lives
Despite the inconvenience of a longer
And slipperier commute on shiny, wet
Ice.
The television in the kitchen
Played the news and the
Wake Forest game.
The outside world was disturbing.

In the second half the lights
Flickered, went dim, flickered again.
Then went out.

II.

The night gnawed on.
Stepping outside in the total darkness

Total except for the ghostly gas
Lamps haloed in the freezing mist.

The popping sound, like distant artillery,
Sang through the valley.
Trees, whose limbs were coated with
Quarter inch ice bent and
Broke.

Like Napoleon's shattered army trying to drag
Itself off the fearful frozen Russian steppe, but
Stopping to rest, they
Hunch-armed stooped low to the ground and numbly
Stood their posts.

Flashes in the darkness foretold, you thought,
Of coming thunderstorms: the eerie juxtaposition
Of approaching summer prairie storms with
Tundric ice.
Morning would prove the flashes
Were transformers, loaded and
Bursting with zingery booms that left
Whole neighborhoods dark but electrically
Humming.

It was as if God had decided to
Set the record straight.
Had we done something to deserve this,
Or was it, as the scientists said,
The jet stream twisting further
South?
On the weather map it looked like
A tortured backwards "S" stretched across the
Gut of the nation.

III.

Under blankets and
Several
Layers of
Sweatshirts, sweat pants, sweat socks,
You drift off, with only
Your face, like camping outdoors,
Feeling the gathering chill.
Jumping at sounds that might be
Electrical, like the big breaker has
Finally been thrown.

IV.

Dawn brings a Zhivago landscape.
Tree limbs bowed to the ground
Forming icy arches.
No cars moving...
Silence.

Some sense of normalcy in the
Morning paper being delivered:
Difficult, as it is, to be retrieved.
The driveway a strangely
Canted skating ring.

With 125,000 out, we should know better, but still
The day wears on in expectation.
Small gulps of air taken
At anything that sounds mechanical.

The Shoney's is stacked with people
And still serving the "Breakfast Bar"
As confused survivors draggle in
To long lines and the food almost gone.

The neighborhoods look like war zones.
Will it look like this in the end?
Ice covered and litter of shattered trees?
Roads impassable for modern conveyance.
Buildings revealed that before
Had hidden behind hack berry limbs.
All masks taken away.

V.

By nightfall you realize it won't come soon.
No HBO or MTV or CMT or whatever.
No stereo.
No stove.
No oven.
No laundry.
Or fuzzy warm dryer.
No dishwasher.
No computer.
You are cut off.
Forced to talk to one another.

In this you find calmness and peace.
The anxiety slackens.
Roles are clear.
You cut firewood and haul it
Back to the house.
You provide.
She looks after the children,
Does laundry by hand,
Washes things.
She sustains.
This is not a backward step.
It is an efficient one, it is a necessary one.
The unit works together.

Little House on the Prairie, you gather
In one room.
Wood stove throwing off heat.
Sing songs and rock together
Gently in the half light of the
Flickering, green wood-popping
Fireplace.

The nightly dog walk
Is an eerie scene.
As the temperature warms
And moisture boils off the
Streets,
Lights from cars, slow moving,
Disoriented in the street lampless scene.

Shadows of shattered limbs
Edge nervously into the street
As if the spirits of the now
Rendered tree were afraid
Of being hit yet again.

VI.

On the third day,
Dawn comes on gray
Feathered wings.
The temperature is falling now,
And a new urgency commences.

Though settling into a new routine,
A frustration of disorder grows.
In a brief alienated moment
You share some sense of understanding
With those who endured the
Blitz or even now, Bosnia and acted
As if all was normal.
No match, to be sure,
But a sense of how humanity copes with
Disaster and deprival.
Though creatures of habit,
We can hard-wire around
The problem.
We are strong, we can survive.

Community grows in shared disaster.
People talk to each other
In the grocery store,
In the restaurant,
On the street.
We smile at one another, we
Share our misfortune.
In our deprival we find that
Gem at the heart of our humanity:
We are able to laugh.

VII.

The phone man said:
"Fredericksburg looks like a battle zone."
Fredericksburg was a battle-zone.
The Yankee's Pickett's charge and
We celebrate it by naming
Streets after the battle.

They looted the town
Before they were slaughtered.
Poured molasses on the carpets then
Marched into the massed rifles behind
The stone-wall
And the Confederate Artillery
On Marie's Heights.
It was a glorious suicide.
The wounded moaned in the night
As the temperature fell
And the hot blood froze.
They had poured molasses on the carpets
Then marched.
We name our streets after battles.

The newsman said:
"All NES customers will have power
back tonite."
We have all grown smarter than
The ability of the news to entertain.

We hunker down.
We bring in more wood.
The night will be cold.

VIII.

The fourth day blows in
Clear and cold.
The morning Mass is filled:
Has this been a reminder?
"How great though art" in the warm church.
We pray for peace,
We eat the body,
We restore our hope.

Trying to keep chins up
We return to normal chores:
Cutting up fallen limbs,
Splitting green firewood.
The Lord has provided with fallen trees.
He works in mysterious ways.
You calculate consumption rates in the wood
Stove with the continued cold
And begin to worry.

By now,
You figure you won't have power
"Till summer," the older child says.
You have learned to do
Daylight things by daylight
Nighttime things are few.

You do Chinese at night
And drive home on Tyne.
Here, the heavy artillery was used.
Rows of tree bodies stacked on top
Of each other reducing
The street to one lane.
Fredericksburg is frightening.



IX.

The fifth day is a
Normal working day:
Phone calls to be returned,
Messages to be left,
Wood stove to be stoked.

NES reports the harder hit
Areas will not be restored for
Seven days.
70,000 without and 142 crews working.
They've brought them in from
Chattanooga and Cincinnati.
A Dayton crew is working our street.
Chain saws sing nasally all day.

The refrigerator seal is finally broken.
The interior is a mess of redefined
Shapes and life forms.

At 5:12 P.M. a surge of power brings dim
Electrical light and whirring sounds.
5:14 P.M. the electrical wand is waved
And we are restored!

Giddily we run around the house turning
Lights on and off,
Assessing the situation with the
Clearness of incandescent light.
Though you had steeled yourself for
The long haul,
And older child is disappointed at
The adventure being over,
You are overjoyed.

You feel like you just caught the winning pass
In the end-zone as time expired.
You kneel and give thanks.
Thanks mainly to being wiser
And for being shown how
Distracted we are in the everyday.

For now, the ordeal
Is over.

The rooms will be warm again.
And although it will be longer,
The night will not seem so.

New year, new challenges. One of my personal habits that I have maintained for many years is the practice of journaling. I find it a great way to keep my sanity, throw ideas around, sketch poems and essays and blow off steam. I use the Leuchtturm 1917 Hardcover Medium and love it. It comes with two book mark ribbons, so I split the book in half. The front half is for my calendar notes, to do’s and fitness logs. The back half is where I journal, sketch, hatch ideas and generally scribble. A lot of the material on this website stems from those notebooks. I like that the unpronounceable notebook also features a couple of index pages up front so I can quickly find what I am looking for. I have tried electronic journaling with a couple of different products, but nothing is as satisfying as the analog pen and paper. The Leuchtturm’s paper is also high grade, so it handles my favorite writing instrument, the fountain pen very well. The Moleskine notebooks are very nice, but they have only one bookmark, and the ink tends to bleed through. With thinner paper, the ink isn’t absorbed as quickly so if you are a left hander like me and your hand is circled around the pen, you end up with a blue blur on the page and a very bad looking tattoo on your hand.

This year will be my 50th High School reunion year. We were the Bicentennial Class and proud of it. I graduated from high school in Brazil. It was an international school but attended mostly by Americans and Canadians, so it was fun that we got to do this with the yearbook:

The school was Escola Maria Imaculada, but we went by “Chapel.” The sports teams were the Trojans, thus the Aeneid for the yearbook. I had a lovely two years there and the very unusual nature of coming from there made me a curiosity for college admissions people, much to my advantage! But the addition of that 50-years means that this is the 250th Birthday of the founding of our country and should be cause for great celebration. Despite the rancor of the last, I don’t know, 10? 20? years, we are still the last best hope for freedom in the world.

In my Introduction to Real Estate Finance course that I teach at Vanderbilt’s business school, in the last class before their final presentations, I give what some have called “the life lecture.” It’s about a 25-minute PowerPoint and I share with them my observations on what it takes to be successful in our industry, but more importantly, I share with them my observations on what a life well lived should look like. I was very busy this year and didn’t have a lot of time to edit the presentation. About halfway in I have a slide that features this:

When it showed up on the screen I commented that perhaps this had gotten dated and I should take it out. I had put it in the deck during the Covid fiasco. I riffed on how the message should apply to how we speak to each other in the political realm, how tribal we have become. After class, several of my students came up and told me that I needed to keep that slide in - the message really resonated with them. Never lose your humanity is a message we all need to hear. I share all of this in the context of a project I have been working on that I plan to bring to these pages in the weeks ahead.

In 1973, Eric Sloane published a small book that alas is out of print. It’s title was “The Spirits of ‘76” and it was meant to be a wake up call as we approached our bicentennial. “The Spirits” is an evocative tribute to the enduring essence of American character. Sloane was also an illustrator, and each chapter included one of his prints - like this one:

The “spirits” were not ghosts, but a comparison of the early Americans and their modern (1970’s) day counterparts. The frugality of our founders was contrasted with the rampant consumerism of the time: “the early American was a maker not a buyer.” His thesis was the self-sufficient ethos of the 1700’s is what birthed our independence. There were essays on pioneering, hard work, thankfulness and (shudder) Godliness. I suspect it’s somewhat harsh indictment of the American character might be the reason it is out of print.

Now that we are in the year of our Semiquincentennial, or Bisesquicentennial if that is too much of a mouthful, I thought I would revisit some of those themes with some observations and contrasts with where we are now. All in the spirit of trying to not lose our humanity, but we are very different. Americans in 1773 dumped British tea into Boston Harbor over a 3 pence per pound tax. Today, we pay on average, 29.2% of our income in various taxes and don’t batt an eye. Why is that? We tolerate intrusive regulations, routine invasions of our privacy, a world run by “experts” that have expertly gotten us into close to $40 Trillion in debt and we don’t talk about it. I intend to explore these themes and see where that exploration leads.

I would ask your thoughts, dear reader, on this project. What do you think has changed? What can we do to restore that sense of self-reliance? I look forward to interacting with you in the coming days and hopefully seeing this New Year’s resolution fulfilled.

Happy New Year and blessings to all!

Perhaps it was a dream.  I was walking, it was night,
The dark sky stitched with silver threads.  Orion riding
High, the Pleiades, insouciant, drifting westward, a
Glow in the east. I was on the edge of a town and as I
Entered I sensed light leaking from the edges of
Windows, but the doors have already decided.

The air smelled of olives recently milled.
Ahead I spied a fire outside the open doors
Of what appeared to be a small stable.
As I neared, I could see light pouring from
The inside of the stable; a donkey stood next
To the fire undisturbed at my approach, his breath
Visible in the late night cold.

I moved closer to the stable doors and saw
A young couple kneeling over a straw laden
Wooden trough, adoration in their eyes
At a newborn child, swaddled and resting in
The straw, radiant but vulnerable, the fulfillment
Of a promise made centuries ago.

I knelt next to the man across from the woman,
Barely more than a girl, but radiant as the child
Before me. “Emmanuel,” she whispered. 
Somehow, I knew I was on the edge of a new
Beginning, trying to grasp that this was how
Salvation would arrive: not in conquest or
Sword’s blow, but in holy closeness to
God so humble and small.

I touched the edge of the trough, felt the wood’s
Rough edge and shuddered at the thought
That this precious life would lie on wood for us
Again, down the long road of life, finally
Going home.

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers. I hope your travels are safe and that you are with the ones you love. I am grateful for your readership and comments, I have a couple of new projects that will be launching in the new year, so stay tuned!

I’ve been practicing meditative prayer where you envision yourself in a scene or passage from Scripture. This one came to me this morning, I hope you enjoy.