Monthly Archives: October 2019

Traveling West on Old Route 66

10/13/19

Driving from Birmingham to Little Rock, AR we encountered a warm, green landscape of forests and rolling hills called the Boston Mountains. I had forgotten how beautiful the South was and this area really impressed me. We drove from northern Alabama to northeastern Mississippi through the beautifully named town of Tupelo. This was part of the South that neither of us had seen and it was fascinating. As we drove through Memphis I waved in the direction of Graceland and vowed to come back and spend more time. At Little Rock we finally got on Interstate 40 which was the old Route 66. Besides the song and the TV show, Route 66 was the road West for many of the Dust Bowl migrants in the 1930s. The fictional Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath followed this road all the way to the Promised Land of California and so will we.

10/14/19

The next day we followed this Mother Road through the drier rolling hills of the many Indian Nations of eastern Oklahoma. This area describes itself as Native America for a reason. In the early 19^th century our country had a process of forcibly removing the Native Americans from their land in the South and sending them to eastern Oklahoma. This eventually led to the infamous Trail of Tears that is now recognized as a crime against the humanity of the Native People. Many of their descendants still live here, even after the State of Oklahoma was opened up to white settlement in the latter part of the 19^th century. The Indigenous people were continuing the process of reclaiming their heritage and identity and we saw many Native American license plates on the cars of different tribes of this area. I remember seeing the struggles of the Indigenous people in Canada and realized that this will be a long process of healing.

We pulled into Oklahoma City in a beautiful late afternoon light and headed straight to the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. Here was the site of the famous Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by two white nationalist, nut-jobs Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. One hundred and sixty-eight people died here and six hundred and eighty were injured. It remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in the US. On one side of the Memorial was a field of symbolic bronze and stone chairs – one for each person lost. The chairs represent the empty chairs at the dinner tables of the victims’ families. A chain link fence which had surrounded the site of the blast had attracted over 800,000 personal items of commemoration. Part of the fence was still on display. Like the memorials we saw in Alabama, these symbols against hate were effective, gut-wrenching and important.

10/15/19

Today we drove through western Oklahoma and the Panhandle of Texas arriving nine hours later in Santa Fe, NM. Compared with the eastern part of the state, Western Oklahoma was flatter, drier and whiter. It still contained some of the rolling hills of the East, but we finally felt like we had entered the American West. The austerity and aridity of this land is so different from the Eastern US. After two months on the road we felt, in some ways, that we had come back home.

Podcasts and CDs were our constant companions. The news about our President was so bad that the intervals of music brought us great joy. But each time we went back to the news, things only seem to get worse. It is ironic to be traveling through a part of the country that so solidly supports Trump. When will they finally abandon him?

After another long-haul drive we arrived at the house of our old, dear friends Meridel and Jerry. She is a well-known and wonderful photographer who taught for many years in Singapore. She is currently working on a long-term environmental photographic project in Iraq. Jerry comes from an old New Mexican ranching family and is a brilliant painter. He has worked most of his life as a contractor.

They used to be married but are still good friends and live next to each other. Meridel’s partner Ben has been an Oscar-winning documentary film maker and is about to start teaching for one year at a university in Sweden.

This was the rich mix of accomplished people that we were staying with for one full day. We greatly enjoyed just staying still in the glorious desert. We were like wide-eyed, shell-shocked children as we wandered through a near-by arroyo secco.

We also enjoyed watching the three-hour Democratic over Vietnamese take-out. We all spent the evening trying to figure out who among the twelve people on stage will be our next President.

10/16/19

Santa Fe to Flagstaff, AZ was another back-aching, bun-busting long drive. Fortunately, the wide-open spaces were awe inspiring. It even seemed appropriate to hear a Terry Gross interview on singing cowboys. Peanut butter and hot sauce was was our essential road food.

A massive forest fire obliterated the famously blue skies as we approached Flagstaff. We had read about the recent disastrous fires in this region and in Southern California. It is another sickening result of climate change inaction by the Republican climate change deniers in Washington. Smoke clung to the air as we entered the forests of Flagstaff. As the American West was again burning, we saw one more reason why the next election is so crucial.

10/17/19

Our second-to-last day of this epic journey took us from Flagstaff to Bakersfield, CA. The beautiful Arizona forests turned into a drier, hotter desert as we descended to the Colorado River.

We crossed into California at the small town of Needles. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Dust Bowl refugees of the 1930s as they entered what they believed to be the Promised Land.

We zip through the great, dry desert and we rise up to a high plateau on the southern edge of the Mojave National Preserve. I know and love this area well having taught workshops in the Park for over ten years at a great little place called Zzyzx. Halfway between Barstow and the desert town of Mojave was a small intersection called Kramer’s Junction. We stopped to get gas and found ourselves in the middle of a giant sandstorm. The force of nature was both frightening and awe-inspiring.

Crossing over the Tehachapi Mountains we were struck by the ethereal light of the clouds and sky and also the vastness entering the San Joaquin Valley.

I have spent so much time working on projects in this area that I felt I was entering home. Bakersfield is a tragic, poetic and fascinating place. It has some of the worst air-quality in the country and yet has also produced some great writers and a unique form of country western music called the Bakersfield Sound. I always think of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens when I drive through here. I was amazed to hear on the local public radio station some guy who had organized a pro-Trump rally here complaining about all the people driving by flipping him off. With what has been going on, what was he expecting even here in conservative Bakersfield?

10/18/19

We discovered an oil-derrick themed hipster coffee shop in downtown Bakersfield. It was excellent and gave me hope for the revival of the downtown.

The five-hour drive to San Francisco gave us time to think and talk about the big take-aways from our two-moth journey around the edges of our country. Three new ideas emerged from this journey. The first was the relationship between the Indigenous people of Canada and education. Sadly, we found that some of those efforts were misguided. I had always felt that education could be a great tool to help lift people out of poverty and elevate their lives. We found, in some cases, education could also become a form of cultural genocide for the Native people.

The second big take-away occurred in Québec. We saw many churches in the province that had gradually lost their parishioners and had been abandoned. Ironically, several of these churches had become public libraries. Why the loss of faith? What caused the people of Québec to abandon their once dominant religion? Why were secular public libraries occupying what was once a religious space? What does all this say about the sacred and the secular in contemporary French-Canadian society?

Finally, the last take-away occurred in the South. Here we traced the epic struggle for Civil Rights, especially in Alabama. I was fascinated by the role that libraries played in that struggle. I was encouraged to see that libraries continued their role not only as community centers but, for some communities, as a place to heal a broken civic space. This idea deserves a lot more research and I will be coming back to explore this more in the future.

It was with great joy that we finally came to a stop at our home in San Francisco. We had traveled almost 11,000 miles circumnavigating the country. We will now stay still for a while and absorb the many lessons we have learned. Thanks for coming along for the ride! Between this trip and the Fulbright Fellowship, we have been on the road for eight out of the last fourteen months. Time for a break and I will be back in touch.

Until then…

Through the Cradle of the Civil War and Civil Rights 

10/10/19

After spending most of September in Vermont, we headed south at the beginning of October. While staying with Ellen’s sister Martha we visited the wonderful Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston.

We stayed with our friends Dave and Claudia in Salisbury Mills, NY in the Hudson River Valley.

We spent one day taking the train to New York City to see a retrospective show of Vija Celmins at the Met Breuer Museum and have dinner with our friends Lynn and Stanley in Brooklyn.

The next day we drove to Washington, DC to stay with our friends Jeff and Susie.

Jeff used to work at the Smithsonian and he took us to see the new and astonishing National Museum of African-American Art and Culture. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this Museum set us up for the rest of our trip through the South.

As we drove south from Washington, I felt like we had entered the South. Being born and raised in California, I have always been fascinated by this part of the country. My father and I used to have big arguments about civil rights when much of the history of that movement was being played out here in the 1960s. As we drove through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia I noted my first impressions: red dirt, kudzu, Southern pines, anti-abortion ads, friendliness, Civil War memories, peaches, William Christenberry’s photographs, Civil War battlefield sites, Lewis Hine photographs, Walker Evans and the 1930’s Farm Security Administration’s photographs and listening to the Blues.

After the end of a long drive and listening to lots of podcasts about the insanity with our President, we arrived at the small but very pleasant town of Eclectic, Alabama. It was founded  in 1907 by a practitioner of eclectic medicine, hence the name. I had spent 18 years photographing libraries throughout the United States but, unfortunately, didn’t photograph any libraries in Alabama or Hawaii. I was here in Alabama to make amends and help complete the project. The Eclectic Library was housed in the old red-brick jail. Behind it was a very large water tower. Inside, the librarians were very enthusiastic about our project and took me on a grand tour of their tiny library. In the half an hour tour I learned much about this place including that Jessie Owens, Hank Williams, Willie Mays and Condoleezza Rice all came from Alabama. We later pulled into the capitol city of Montgomery after dark. I was exhausted after the long drive but happy to have finally photographed a library in Alabama. Impressions of this state included cotton, aerospace billboards, lots of churches, high school football, “Jesus Saves”, and vast tree farms.

10/11/19

Ellen’s sister Martha had recently told us about a new museum in Montgomery dedicated to the civil rights struggle called the Legacy Museum. A few days ago, we had visited the National Museum of African-American Arts and Culture in Washington, DC. That museum was a great celebration of the accomplishments of African-Americans as well as some of the dark history of slavery and segregation. The Legacy Museum focused on the grim reality of slavery and segregation and the heroic fight of the Civil Rights Movement.

Of course, Montgomery was one of the largest centers of the nineteenth-century slave trade, was one of the capitols of the Confederacy and was the scene of the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott which was an early battle for civil rights. As a result, there was great resonance in standing in the place of so much human suffering and conflict.

One of the great turning points in the Civil Rights struggle was the march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery in 1965. We drove the 54-mile National Historic Trail in reverse arriving in the depressed town of Selma around mid-day. As we drove over the historic Edmund Pettus bridge, we came upon the scene of the Bloody Sunday police riot. Here, State Troopers beat the marchers with night clubs, then donned gas masks and released tear gas to further terrorize the marchers. The demonstrators began running back, stumbling over each other and trying to ward off blows. The troopers and posse continued to use nightsticks, whips and rubber tubes to drive the marchers through the streets of Selma. Standing on these same streets I felt it made these awful events more real by physically being in the place of such historic consequence.

The one place in Selma that offered some release from the surrounding poverty and grim history was the Selma Public Library. The exterior and landscaping seemed like an oasis. The interior contained an extraordinary quilt that was produced by the community churches. It addressed Selma’s painful past and was an attempt to continue the community’s struggle to heal. There was no better place for this than the Selma Public Library which had literally witnessed such horrors on its front steps 54 years ago.

We drove west from Selma and as we turned off on to Alabama State Highway 61 (not to be confused with Mississippi’s Highway 61 that Bob Dylan made famous) we entered the very rural Alabama Black Belt. This name refers to the incredibly rich soils that stretch all the way to Georgia and the Carolinas. It was also the heart of the plantation cotton and slave empires of the antebellum South. Cotton was still grown here but the crops have been diversified. This was beautiful country, especially in the warm, Fall afternoon light.

We arrived in the fascinating restored town of Newbern, AL. It was very small with a population of 186 and a per capital income of $9,476. The Rural Studio of Auburn University was based in Newbern. Its architecture students work under the supervision of faculty designing and building affordable housing and similar projects to support the population of rural areas of Alabama. One of the projects the Rural Studio built was the Newbern Public Library. It was housed in a former bank and the building was donated by a local family to become a social center and the first public internet point in the community. It was designed to be a resource-rich social center, but also to preserve the town’s history, heritage and memories. Newbern and its library gave me some hope for the future.

Newbern is located in Hale County, Alabama. Walker Evans photographed the area in 1936 with writer James Agee. They looked at a group of dirt-poor, white tenant farmers in one of the poorest parts of the rural South. They produced their famous book from this project called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. Photographer William Christenberry also worked here for many years. In 2019, the film “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” by artist RaMeil Ross was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, poetically addressing the region’s shift in demographers and the power of intra-community cooperation.

The second library we photographed in Hale County was in the town of Greensboro, the Catfish Capitol of Alabama. This area was also central to the cotton/slave empires and was part of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King hid from Klu Klux Klan members here in what is now operated as The Safe House Black Historic Museum. The beautiful Hale County Library dates back to 1925. Additions to the Library have maintained the original style. The very smart, literate and gracious librarian was kind enough to let us stay a half an hour after closing time while she filled in Ellen with the local history and I scrambled around the small library with my camera.

We then drove into the night in a white-knuckle downpour. Listening to podcasts about the crazy stuff coming out of the White House was the only thing that distracted us from the sheets of rain and lighting all around us. We finally landed in Birmingham, AL, exhausted.

10/12/19

In our hotel there was a large room with a big screen TV showing Trump blathering on at one of his rallies. I was encouraged to see that no one was watching the story and everyone had turned their backs to the screen and the President. I was also happy to see a car in the parking lot from Mississippi with a “Republicans Against Trump” sticker on the bumper.

Walker had urged us to have a meal at SAW’s BBQ in Birmingham. It was absolutely a highlight and my shrimp and grits meal was incredible.

Our first stop was the famous Birmingham Public Library which had been the scene of a sit-in in 1963 to force the desegregation of this Jim Crow era library. We weren’t able to photograph the beautiful Reading Room where that sit-in took place. But I did photograph the exteriors of the both the old and new libraries. This library made me think that I should think about starting a new project on libraries that were important in the Civil Rights struggle including ones today such as the library in Ferguson, MO. More on that later as this idea develops…

The next stop was the site of the death of four little girls on Birmingham Sunday. The lyrics of that famous Richard Fariña song were in my mind as I gazed at the reconstructed 16^th Street Baptist Church. In 1963 members of the Ku Klux Klan blew up the church in a terrorist attack killing the four girls and injuring 22 others. No prosecutions were conducted until 1977 when one of the killers was convicted. The others were convicted in 2001. The bombing marked a turning point in the Civil Rights movement and contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Martin Luther King described Birmingham in 1963 as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States”. It was nicknamed “Bombingham” because of the large number of bombings of black properties and churches that occurred during the eight years before 1963. We walked through a park near the church that was a rallying point during the protests. Here, peaceful protestors were knocked to the ground by powerful water cannons. Police dogs attacked women, men and children. Several hundred protestors filled the city’s jails including many children. The park was filled with sad memorials to all of this and more.

I was deeply moved and my heart was crying as I stood in the park remembering the words “On Birmingham Sunday/ the noise shook the ground/ and people all over the world turned around/ no one recalled a more cowardly sound/ and the choir kept singing of freedom.” Amen.

This seems like an appropriate place to end this post. From Birmingham we will drive to Little Rock, AR; Oklahoma City, OK; Santa Fe, NM; Flagstaff, AZ; Bakersfield, CA and finally home. I’ll do one more post at the end. Until then…