Library Road Trip

Starting in 1983, Ellen and I have had a long interest in water in the West. We even started a 10-year collaborative project with over a dozen other photographers looking at water issues throughout the American West. After years of looking at the environmental commons of water, I decided to look at the very different shared commons of libraries. But we never lost our interest in the land and the environment. After 40 years of doing a deep dive into the meaning of libraries in the US and globally, we found ourselves interested once again examining the importance of water.

The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s was one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the United States. Due to poor farming practices in many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 30s. By 1938, a massive conservation effort by the Federal Government had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65%. But for a long time, the land still failed to yield a decent living.

Between 1930 and 1940, about 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states. In just over a year, over 86,000 people migrated to California. About one-eighth of California’s population today is of Okie heritage. I grew up in California with many children and grandchildren of the Dust Bowl. I did a long-term photographic project and book with two descendants of the Dust Bowl refugees, Gerry Haslam and Stephen Johnson. Our book, The Great Central Valley California’s Heartland looked at the part of California where many of Okies settled. I was also greatly influenced by the astonishing Okie flavored Bakersfield Sound of musicians such as Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Dwight Yoakam. I grew to be aware and respect the important contributions that the children of the Dust Bowl brought to all of us in California.

Ellen and I were also greatly influenced by the legendary photographers of the 1930s working for the Federal Government agency called the FSA. Several of them worked in the Dust Bowl including Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein.

The best recent book on the Dust Bowl was written by Timothy Egan and is called The Worst Hard Time. It inspired the Ken Burns PBS film series on the same subject and initially got me interested in visiting this place of so much history. About a year ago I began to plan a trip to the Dust Bowl area.

Respected environmental writer Donald Worster visited the Dust Bowl region in the mid-1970s. He observed that capital-intensive agribusiness had transformed the scene; deep wells into the aquifer, intensive irrigation, the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and giant harvesters were creating immense crops year after year whether it rained or not. The scene demonstrated that America’s capitalist high-tech farmers had learned nothing. They were continuing to work in an unsustainable way.

The Dust Bowl was a human made environmental disaster involving water and land use. It was one of the largest environmental tragedies in the history of our country. We are currently draining the Ogallala aquifer that has made agriculture possible in the dry part of the Southern Great Plains. It is predicted that this could produce a second human made catastrophe that also involves water and land use in this same place. It is already happening in some areas but will be more widespread in the next 20 to 30 years. It will have massive consequences to agriculture in the mid-West and it could ripple through all our economy. It will probably devastate the communities of the Southern Great Plains and possibly create a new wave of environmental refugees like the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

With our deep background and interest in water in the West we decided to visit our country’s most famous example of environmental hubris and see what the region had learned. Ironically, the morning we drove into the old Dust Bowl, we encountered a raging dust storm. Driving our little Prius north of Amarillo, TX in the fierce wind was a little like riding a bucking bronco. My white knuckles were hanging on to the steering wheel in a death grip. While fighting to keep the car on the road, I remembered hearing that the panhandle regions of Texas and Oklahoma have some of the strongest and most sustained winds in the world and the best potential for wind power. Later, we saw massive wind farms throughout the region.

We were literally blown through the doors of the massive Window on the Plains Museum in tiny Dumas, TX. We felt like Dorothy in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” and we had just landed in Oz. The smiling Christian Museum Director told us that she had been advised by God to take the job as Director and I was so happy that she did! Here was a refreshingly quirky museum about the culture in the heart of the old Dust Bowl. We learned a lot about the “Dirty Thirties” as well as the more contemporary culture that came after the Hard Times. We were entranced by the displays of a community that had been devastated over 80 years ago but had clawed their way back to a unique way of life.

In the early 20^th century, the XIT Ranch was over 3 million acres in size and was the largest in Texas. Today, the XIT Museum in the small town of Dalhart, TX houses some very good displays on the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl and, of course, the cowboy culture of the ranch.

While driving through the Rita Blanca National Grasslands on the far northern edge of the Texas Panhandle, we briefly pulled into a rest stop to take in the endless sea of grass surrounding us. This area continues to struggle through a terrible drought The National Grasslands had been established during the Dust Bowl to re-grow the native prairie grasses that had been plowed under during the boom years of farming in the early 20^th century. We saw here that despite the current drought and sometimes violent gusty winds, the grasses held the soil in place and kept the dust at bay. Thank you, Franklin Roosevelt!

Boise City, OK was ground zero for the Dust Bowl and was featured in Tim Egan’s book and Ken Burns film. The wonderful Cimarron Heritage Museum featured a replica of a bomb that was dropped on the city during WWII by a confused American bomber crew, a replica of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, and an amazing exhibition on the Dust Bowl funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. Ken Burns’ film crew had done a lot of filming in their archive. The Museum also had a very large brontosaurus standing outside. This is one of the most conservative parts of the US and some of the locals even wanted to name a Highway after former President Trump. But I was heartened by the continuing support of FDR’s New Deal which helped pull this region back from disaster many years ago.

The sense of space and light in the Southern Great Plains is simply astonishing. There is a beauty and sadness here that evokes almost an emotional response. Coming upon an abandoned farmhouse, I felt a great melancholy and wonder for what had been here before.

We spent the night in Guymon, OK and went to a great, greasy spoon Mexican restaurant for dinner. Walker had told us earlier that this area has one of the largest concentrations of Latino/Latina worker population in the US outside of the area that used to be owned by Mexico. Perhaps the new emigrants here from all over the world are part of the answer on how to renew this place.

The next morning, on our never-ending quest for good coffee, we drove to the tiny town of Goodwell, OK. It was founded as a railroad stop that had a good well. The coffee shop was gone, but instead we discovered the fascinating No Man’s Land Historical Museum. It was founded during the Dust Bowl era as a way for the local people to preserve their heritage and have something to do after their farms had been ravaged by the winds, drought, and dust. The severe brick exterior was softened by the thriving, native Buffalo grass. Inside, we saw two graphs that showed the wild variations of rainfall in the area, and a second showing the rapid rise of the cattle industry in the area after WWII.

The displays were often from local collections showing what the community valued and how it wanted to preserve its memory and identity. We began to see how these local museums were an invaluable way of understanding a place through its own selective remembrance. The quality of the exhibits was sometimes astonishing. The enormous energy, skill, and craftsmanship put into creating some of these objects spoke to an indomitable creative spirit that was moving for both of us. Given the history and context of this region, these small museums were a revelation.

We traveled many miles through Oklahoma’s Panhandle seeing endless corn fields watered by massive center-pivot irrigation.

We finally found a good cup of coffee in a Christian coffee shop called Higher Grounds in the border town of Elkhart, KS. We then headed north into another ocean of grass called the Cimarron National Grasslands. It is the largest area of public land in the state of Kansas and during the Dust Bowl this area was the most devastated county in the nation. The Federal government bought land from bankrupt farmers, restored the original prairie, and in 1960 the National Grasslands was created. However, this is a mixed- use area where cattle are grazed, and oil and gas wells are found.

We drove our Prius down a bumpy dirt road to a place called “Point of Rocks” where we gazed out over the Cimarron River with its beautiful Autumn foliage. Here the 19^th century westward pioneers following the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail, used the rocks as a navigation point, and we could still see the wagon tracks stretching all the way to the Western horizon. The restored grasslands were rich in diversity and breathtakingly beautiful. The nearby Middle Springs was a big draw for wildlife, Native people, and the early pioneers. It showed what this natural landscape could look like with the addition of a little water.

As we were heading to spend the night in Dodge City, KS we had been told that we had to visit “Dorothy’s House and the Land of Oz” in the oddly named town of Liberal in conservative southwestern Kansas. It turned out to be a quirky, slightly offbeat, tourist trap that featured a recreation of Dorothy’s fictional house in the Wizard of Oz. After spending only a few minutes there, we dropped all our literary pretentions and quickly headed out of town.

We spent much of our time in the Southern Great Plains trying to comprehend the vast scale of the place. It was a humbling and confusing experience to be in this space. Endless trains, monumental grain silos, and unrelenting wind, dryness, and silence. As the sun was setting, I stood next to a huge field of corn stubble and endless wind turbines stretching off into infinity. We used this part of our trip to try to find answers to our questions about the future of the old Dust Bowl. Instead of answers, we found possibilities, and more questions.

One possibility came from an NPR story that gave us a faint sense of hope for the future of the area. “With the Ogallala Aquifer drying up, Kansas ponders limits to irrigation. Water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer continue to plummet as farm irrigation swallows an average of more than 2 billion gallons of groundwater per-day statewide. But after decades of mostly inaction from Kansas leaders, the state’s approach to water conservation might finally be starting to shift.” We will see.

To be continued…

There is something about the American West that lends itself to art. All kinds of art – whether it is poetry, music, or visual art it seems to naturally come out of this awesome space. Many artists have explored this place including Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and the artists in Marfa, TX such as Donald Judd, Robert Irwin, and light artist Dan Flavin.

Judd, with the help of the Dia Foundation, purchased 340 acres in the late 1970s near the isolated town of Marfa in West Texas.  It included the abandoned buildings of a former Army base and the artwork created for this place was intended to interact with the light, space, and place of this area.

After the hardscrabble cities of the Texan/Mexican border, coming to the art centric conceptual town of Marfa was a relief and revelation. We stayed in the old but beautifully restored Hotel Paisano. In 1955, this was where the crew for the iconic Hollywood film Giant stayed including Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. In case you weren’t aware of the film, the hotel conveniently placed giant black and white photos everywhere of the stars working on the production of the movie.

Dinner on the patio that night was a delight, and I began to see the quirky attraction of Marfa.

Early the next morning, we took a tour of Marfa including a great coffee shop in an old gas station and, of course, a great little public library off the main street.

We took a paid tour of the Judd site which is run by the Chinati Foundation. Our excellent guide took us through some of the artwork scattered throughout the old Army base and in the town. It was so exciting to see the actual work, especially of Judd and Irwin, and to see how they dealt with area’s space, place, and light. The basis of all this work was that it must be experienced in its context rather than simply reproduced in a book.

After Marfa, we drove West into the hot Texan landscape and after a long drive, drove through the city of El Paso, Texas which is across the river from Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. It is one of the largest binational metropolitan areas on the border. Drug cartel violence has spiked in Juárez, especially against women, and by 2022 over 700 people have been killed. Large-scale corruption has been endemic, especially with the police which resulted in the Mexican Armed Forces and Federales taking control from the local government. Juárez once had one of the highest murder rates in the world, but recent trends have seen a hopeful decrease in the violence.

We had hoped to photograph several public libraries in Juárez and had contacted a “fixer” who worked for CBS News to safely take us around the city and bring us back to El Paso in one piece. When we contacted him, he said that recent spikes in Cartel violence made it an especially bad time to go. And the recent surge in migrants trying to cross the border made it likely we would have a long wait crossing the border back into the US. With that information we quickly cruised on through this area, hoping that it would be safe enough to come back someday.

We ended our drive in Las Cruces, NM at the home of our friends Barbara and Keith. They had both retired from teaching art in Kentucky and had recently moved into their beautiful new home in the desert. It was fascinating to see them adjust to their new environment, and it will be interesting to see how they incorporate this place into their art.

We didn’t get much sleep that night as we all got up at 5 AM and drove three hours to Roswell, NM to see the spectacular annular eclipse of the sun. The Roswell Public Library had made the eclipse into an event by letting a local astronomy club set up their big telescopes in the parking lot and let everyone view the eclipse through their filtered lenses.

Roswell is an ordinary small New Mexican town that has promoted the heck out of its reputation as a space alien landing site and lots of colorful characters filled the library’s parking lot and downtown streets. It was delightful and positive community event, and we stood in awe as the sun darkened and was eventually eclipsed by the moon. Spontaneous applause erupted from the crowd when it finally happened. It was an unexpected and slightly weird example of a library as a center of a community.

Even though we had already had a long day, we all wanted to visit White Sands National Park on our way back to Las Cruces. This spectacular place turned out to be another highlight. The pure white sands were stunning, and we were all like 70+ year-old kids delightfully scrambling up and down the massive sand dunes.

The next day, after a long drive, we arrived in Santa Fe, NM and the home of our friends Meridel, Ben, and Meridel’s ex-husband Jerry. They are all fabulous artists and we have known Meridel and Jerry for a long time. Jerry is a fourth-generation New Mexican, has just turned 90, and continues to do his wonderful paintings. Meridel is a noted photographer/artist who is currently finishing an enormous art project / wastewater treatment plant in Iraq. Ben is an Oscar-winning film maker who is currently teaching at the American Indian Art Institute in Santa Fe.

Jerry was a construction contractor during most of his time as an artist. Over the years has built all the buildings in their compound including where he lives and where Meridel and Ben live. The care and artwork in the adobe structures is everywhere.

Before Meridel began her complicated Iraq project, she did an equally complex project on the relationship between the development of the atomic bomb and the people of New Mexico. The release of the recent Oppenheimer film has sparked renewed interest in her earlier work. Ben continues to do impressive work with film making and he generously showed us the campus of the school where he works that is devoted to teaching art to young Native Americans from all over the country.

We hiked the land near Meridel’s property in the fading light of the afternoon and were deeply moved by the beauty of the desert. After dinner, Meridel shared examples of her fascinating and important work in her studio. The relationship between place, space, and light was evident in the work of all three of these talented artist’s work. It provided a surprising continuity with the work of Donald Judd and others that we had seen earlier in Marfa. And it reinforced our love of these arid lands.

One of our favorite books is called The Desert Smells Like Rain by Gary Nabhan. It is an inspiring book about the human relationship to dry lands. On my next blog we will explore a part of the West that has had a catastrophic past and a doubtful future in this dry part of the American West. Until then…

The recent news from here has been grim. The New York Times recently stated that a surge of new migrants struggling to get into the US on this border has reached its highest level ever. We have long been interested in libraries on or near contested borders. With the recent bad news, we wondered how libraries are functioning in an area that seemed to be in the midst of a battle between the US Border Patrol and desperate people fleeing their homeland for a variety of reason to make the arduous journey to the US.

Located on a major transportation corridor with Mexico, Laredo, TX has a population that is 95% Hispanic, one of the highest in the US. Its border crossing is one of the oldest and is the nation’s largest inland port of entry.

I kept humming the words to the song “The Streets of Laredo” as we walked the streets of Laredo. But down near the border in the old part of town, the streets became strangely deserted and I began to feel unsafe. Crime in Laredo is very low, but right across the border in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, drug cartel activity is very intense, and we were warned not to cross over because of robberies and the high threat of carjacking. $16 million worth of drugs have been trafficked over the border into Laredo by the cartels. This type of activity fuels a sense of unease and even paranoia in this complicated community.

We were disappointed not to be able to photograph libraries in Nuevo Laredo but decided to look at the Main Library in Laredo. Libraries often reflect the character of the community that supports them. The Joe A. Guerra Laredo Public Library was in the urban sprawl north of the old town. Here the schools were good, and the much of the population had a long and deep connection with the community. The new library was enormous and beautiful. But the library staff felt distant to us, perhaps reflecting a mistrust and wariness of outsiders. However, the library’s Laredo History Center was welcoming and the librarian there was very helpful in sharing her community’s past.

Traveling along the border in Texas involves moving through a vast space that is almost incomprehensible, achingly beautiful, and difficult to describe. But each time we settled into a blissful state of marveling at the expansiveness of the big sky, we were quickly pulled back to the reality of the border by another Border Patrol road stop.

We arrived late in the next border town of Eagle Pass, TX. Our endless stays at chain hotels were all beginning to blend and after a time we forgot if we needed to exit from our room and turn left or right to go to the elevators. Our son Walker explained that we were now in the heart of the Tex-Mex Tejano hybrid border culture of this area and our meal that night was fascinating and the customers in the restaurant provided great people watching.

The New York Times podcast The Daily did a recent story on Eagle Pass called “A Texas Town Wanted Tougher Border Security. Now It’s Having Regrets.” We wanted to find out how the local public library was dealing with this crisis. When we reached the beautifully restored Eagle Pass Public Library, we talked with a delightful librarian named Paco. He explained that one of his relatives had ridden with Poncho Villa during his cross-border raids on the US before WWI. Paco explained that people had been going back and forth across the border for centuries and that the recent news stories were overblown. He really hadn’t seen much of an uptick in migrants using the library. The few that he had seen were surprised that everything in the library was free and they could even recharge their cell phones here.

Paco’s statements about the “border crisis” seemed to contradict what we had been hearing and reading in the news. Here was a local who had lived in Eagle Pass all his life and didn’t seem to think there was much of a crisis. He worried that Republican politicians in Texas were ginning up the problem for their own political gain.

We decided to check out one more border library in Del Rio, TX to get a different point of view about the migrant issue. At the Val Verde Public Library, we met another wonderful librarian named Barbara. Her ancestors had founded the city of Laredo, TX but she hadn’t been there in years because she felt it was a violent and weird place. In 2021, approximately 30,000 Hattian migrants crossed the border at Del Rio. The Border Patrol set up a squalid camp for them that attracted widespread national attention. Barbara also felt that her library had not been affected by the surge of migrants because most of them did not want to settle in the border communities but, instead, were passing through to somewhere else. I was impressed that this library even had a copy of my Public Library book.

As we were leaving Del Rio we stopped and visited the Armistead National Recreation Area Visitor Center. Managed by the National Park Service, this area is the confluence of the Rio Grande, the Devils River, and the Pecos River. All are vital waterways in this arid environment. The international management of the water of this area speaks to the close cooperation and friendship between the local and federal governments in the US and Mexico and perhaps could serve as a model for other ways of working together.

As we left on Highway 90, I remembered the famous photograph by Robert Frank of his wife Mary in their 1950 used car called “U.S. 90 En Route to Del Rio, TX, 1955.” This image appeared in Frank’s famous book The Americans. To honor it, I made my own image of Ellen in our 2020 Prius titled “U.S. 90 En Route from Del Rio, TX, 2023.” We are continuing the tradition of the classic American road trip.

The Robb Elementary School shooting occurred in May 2022 in Uvalde, TX. Nineteen young students were killed along with two faculty members, and 17 students were injured but survived. About 90% of the school’s students were Hispanic, and about 80% came from poor backgrounds.

We weren’t planning on stopping in Uvalde as we drove from Houston to Laredo on the US/Mexico border. This small town was still in the middle of a painful process of grieving, the emotions were still raw, and we didn’t want to get in the way. But its location made it a good place to stop during our long drive. Because we were stopping there anyway, I decided to find out about the El Progresso Memorial Public Library.

I was surprised to find that the library had become one of the centers of healing for the grief-stricken community. “Thousands of unsolicited gifts have been flooding into the Uvalde library including children’s books, care packages and money to support programs.” This was from a recent article in The Times of India pointing out the critical role the library continues to play in Uvalde. It also highlights the world-wide interest and outpouring of help for the people of Uvalde. But, unfortunately, the on-going tragedy of gun violence in America today continues.

When I wrote library director Mendell Morgan I received a warm invitation to visit the library. That was when we decided it would be appropriate to visit this place of grief and healing. Rather than emphasize the unspeakable death of Uvalde’s children, our intention was to record how a heroic library could be a positive force in a community desperately in need of finding a way through a very dark time.

We spent the afternoon with Assistant Director Tammy Sinclair as she showed us the library and the collection of gifts sent to Uvalde from around the world. She was hired to help catalog and archive this phenomenal flood of support for this broken place.

As we entered the building, we saw signs for many kinds of personal counseling and healing throughout the library. Tammy spoke movingly during the several hours we were together. She had been an elementary school teacher before becoming a librarian and knew several of the children and teachers that were in the shooting.

All three of us were on the edge of tears throughout the guided tour of the heartbreaking and remarkable gifts of compassion flooding into the library. I was surprised at the great care and detailed work many people put into these memorials to the lost children and teachers of Uvalde. One person spent months putting together a large quilt with the names, ages, and photographs of the 19 people killed.

Another woman named Penny spent a year making intricate needlepoint butterflies that were magnets for each of individual victims. A mother whose daughter was in a different school shooting send a box of handmade Stars of Hope. One particularly powerful gift was a blanket sent by trans-sexual person who had grown up in Uvalde. They had a rough childhood here and eventually had to leave but the blanket was sent to comfort someone who lived through this tragedy.

Another moving gift was a stack of 19 boxes, each containing a wooden cut-out painted figure of each victim. This made each of the lost children and teachers seem very real. All three of us struggled very hard not to be overcome with grief at that moment.

Thousands of personal notes were included with the gifts. One of the victim’s tricycles was included in the archive and seeing it hit another emotional cord that made me gulp.

Many religious objects were sent including many displays of crosses.

Under a large blanket we discovered a huge painting of the victims made by prisoners in a penitentiary. Like many of the objects here it will eventually be put up on display in the library.

The library’s task was to preserve, catalog, and store the thousands of objects sent and to treat them with the dignity and respect that they deserve.

Besides being the repository of this vast and tragic archive, the library was one of the centers of healing for a traumatized community. Signs were everywhere offering counseling and help to all that needed it. A special room had been set up for private therapy. Everyone was welcome and no one was turned away.

The El Progresso Memorial Library has been a much-loved public institution in Uvalde for over 100 years. The beautiful and spacious space inside reflects the respect the community has for this place.

Outside was a moving memorial made of rocks under a tall tree called the Uvalde Memorial Kindness Rock Garden. Everyone is encouraged to take and share one of the painted rocks. I took one that had the word “Hope” painted on it and I am sharing it to the readers of this blog. Hope is one of the things that might help us through these troubled times.

Speaking of troubled times, as we have been driving across country, we have been riveted by the disaster unfolding in Israel and Palestine.  The trauma and scarring that took place in the town of Uvalde is being multiplied many times in this new conflict. One can only pray that things there will not get worse. Let’s hope.

Nashville, TN is a great and storied American city. Many people think of it as the country music capitol of the US but as it has grown and diversified, it has become more liberal and complex. Today it is a large American city made up of many moving parts. Its lively food culture was on display when we ate at one of the greatest restaurants of this trip called Husk.

Its beer/party/football culture and Evangelical preachers were roaring the next morning as we drove by pedal powered, beer-guzzling partiers and angry Bible-thumpers on the street.

Our Prius with California plates seemed a little out of place here, so we made a quick exit for our next destination. The Natchez Trace is a 440-mile National Scenic Parkway that travels south from Nashville to the northwestern corner of Alabama. It then cuts a diagonal line across the entire state of Mississippi ending at a little jewel of a town called Natchez. The trail was created by Native Americans over hundreds of years and was later used by early European and American explorers, traders, and emigrants in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The rise of steamboats on the Mississippi eventually caused the Trace to lose its importance as a national road and large parts of it were eventually abandoned.

This old trading route travels through four eco-systems from the foothills of the Appalachia mountains to the Mississippi River. Traveling southwest, it gradually becomes dryer and more like the American West. But eventually, it changes to become more humid and lusher, like the American South.

On our previous leg of this journey, we experienced the beauty of Monticello and the enigma of Thomas Jefferson’s life. We also experienced the sorrow of nearby Charlottesville and the courage of public library that helped the community during their troubled times. The Natchez Trace has seen its share of hard times as well. Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, committed suicide while traveling on the Trace while governor of the Louisiana Territory. And at several places along the Trace, Native Americans on the infamous Trail of Tears crossed this path during their forced evacuation of their homelands in the early 19^th century.

But we came here to experience the surprising beauty of a part of our country neither of us had ever seen. Hernando de Soto traveled through here in 1542 on his way to being the first European to cross the Mississippi River. This environment has changed so much since then that we struggled to catch a glimpse of what the first Europeans must have encountered while traveling through here.

On our drive through the lush forests of the Trace we did come upon several sites of pre-contact Native American mounds including the National Historic Landmark called Emerald Mound dating from between 1200 and 1730 CE. The platform mound is the second-largest Mississippian period earthwork in the country after Monk’s Mound in Cahokia, IL. The place was awash in the beautiful warm colors of sunset, and we were alone at this haunting and quiet site. A deer surprised us as it scampered away from near the top of the mound into the forest.

We thought back to some of the massive structures built by the Native People of Mexico that we had visited last Spring. They seem to have the same function and similar look as the mounds we had seen along the Trace. The Southeastern part of the US had a large mound building culture within the Indigenous tribes of this region. It seemed to indicate there was something of a shared culture among some of the tribes of pre-contact Native America before the Europeans came in and messed everything up.

After driving through Tennessee and Alabama, we broke up our long drive by spending the night in Tupelo, Mississippi. This town is in the heart of the massive New Deal water project called Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA which reshaped the hydrology of this region. It was the first city to receive power from the TVA. Tupelo is better known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley.

Continuing the Trace, we came upon the Cypress Swamp area. This beautiful area contains a large stand of water tupelo trees and cypress that can live in deep water for long periods. A trail led us to an abandoned river channel which is gradually filling with silt and will eventually replace this exotic, spooky forest with other trees such as sycamores and maples.

At another surprising place we came upon was the Sunken Trace This is a portion of the deeply eroded or “sunken” part of the Old Trace. Here, the relatively soft, wind-blown soil interacted with thousands of walkers, riders, and wagons to wear down this part of the path. It was a haunting demonstration of the human impact on the geology of this area over a long period of time.

We drove the entire length of the Trace rarely seeing the presence of other people. Near the end of the second day, we exited the Trace to get gas in the small Mississippi town of Port Gibson. It is the third-oldest European-American settlement in Mississippi. It was founded by the French in 1729. In the 1830s, after forcibly removing the Indigenous inhabitants, planters imported thousands of African American slaves from the Upper South. Up until the Civil War, most of the people living in this area were slaves. During the war, it was occupied by Union forces and General Grant declared the town “too beautiful to burn” which spared the wonderful old buildings we see today. Waves of immigrants came through here after the war including a group of German Jews. Their fascinating old Moorish Revival synagogue with a Russian-style dome still stands today along with a suprising new library. The town’s population is now mostly Black and mostly poor, but its history speaks to long history of the region.

Finally, we ended our journey along the Natchez Trace in another beautiful old town called Natchez. Located on a bluff high overlooking a large swath of the Mississippi River, it was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters, slave trade, and Mississippi River trade. It too was spared destruction during the Civil War. As the sagging economy has become increasingly dependent on tourism, we could see the shift to emphasizing Natchez’s fascinating past and preserving its architecture for the future.

Next stop on our long drive across the country will be border region between Texas and Mexico. Stay tuned…

After spending a very relaxing month and a half in Vermont, we spent two nights with wonderful friends on our way the Washington, DC. I have always been fascinated by the capitol of our country and all the free public displays of art, politics, culture, and history here. There is no other American city like it.

Just when we arrived, after trying to shut down the government earlier, the zany Republicans kicked out their own Speaker of the House instead. Chaos ensued. While we walked around this political power center, we were amazed at how this place worked but feared for the future of our country.

During our short visit to DC, we tried to see as many dear friends as possible. We revisited the wonderfully renovated Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library designed by Mies van der Rohe. We also visited the National Gallery and sampled some of DC’s great food options.

As we left behind the craziness of DC, we were focused on how our country has dealt with other periods of crisis in its history. In the beautiful southern Virginia countryside is Monticello, the creation and home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson. This place has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jefferson designed the house using neoclassical design influenced by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. He reworked the design during much of his presidency consciously creating a new architecture for a new nation.

Jefferson was a collector, and his home was filled with items gathered over a very eventful lifetime. We took a wonderful, guided tour and as we entered the forayer, we saw on displayed many specimens brought back by the Louis and Clark expedition that Jefferson had initiated.

In addition to being a great writer, Jefferson was also a great book collector. When the British burned Washington, DC during the War of 1812, he sold his vast library to the US Government to help rebuild the Library of Congress. I was fascinated by the books in his remaining library.

We came away from the tour of the house with a much better sense of the thinking and imagination of Thomas Jefferson. His home reflects his classical training and, like Jefferson himself, is a product of the enlightenment.

Once we went outside, however, we encountered the other side of this complicated man. The slave cabin of his mistress Sally Hemmings was here as were the fields where Jefferson’s slaves worked. Jefferson fathered four children with Hemmings while here at Monticello. He never freed her during his lifetime and there are hundreds of their descendants alive today. This history was well explained here and didn’t pull any punches talking about the reality of slavery in the antebellum South. We pondered the maddeningly complex character of Jefferson who could unite a nation with his famous Declaration of Independence and yet still own over 600 slaves and advocate for the removal of Native Americans from their lands.

On Jefferson’s gravestone, he wanted to be remembered for three things:  author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia statue for Religious Freedom, and the Father of the University of Virginia. He did not mention being President.

We visited the UV campus late in the afternoon. Jefferson and his friend James Madison designed both the original courses and the university’s architecture.

This beautiful and highly acclaimed university was the site of the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally the night before the White supremacist march. A group of non-student and mostly non-Virginian white nationalists marched on the campus bearing torches and chanting antisemitic and Nazi slogans after Charlottesville decided to remove Confederate statues including one to Robert E. Lee. They were met by counter-protesters near the statue of Thomas Jefferson where a fight broke out. The next day, a young woman Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist when he ploughed his car into a group of counter-protesters injuring many and killing her.

We visited the place of this horrific event the next day. A sad, impromptu memorial has been set up on the site of her death and the street has been temporarily renamed after Heather Heyer.

Tne park where the Robert E. Lee statue once stood was now a homeless encampment.

Right next door was the Charlottesville Jefferson-Madison Public Library which closed during the days of unrest and violence. It was now the center of healing for the community after the traumatic events from six years ago.

Finally, we visited the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park where Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Grant in 1865, leading to the end of the American Civil War.

We were fascinated by the inter-related histories of these different times and places. Somehow the complexities of Jefferson seemed related to the recent troubles in Charlottesville. On this part of our journey, the difficult problems from our past seemed directly linked to the troubled times of today.