Many of our friends seem to be in various stages of moving to Santa Fe, NM. The brother of one of our close Boston friends is running for Mayor here. Others, who have established themselves already in Santa Fe, participate in the Grumpy Grandpas lunch group and the Raging Grannies singing society. Our friends took us to Harry’s Roadhouse, where the owner perked up when he learned we were from Boston. He told us his Boston story: When he was hitchhiking once he got a ride with a Boston driver. As they were going down the highway, an ambulance suddenly screamed by, and the Boston driver abruptly switched lanes to follow the vehicle, careening dangerously closely behind him, at full speed. A policeman tried to pull him over for tailgating the ambulance. But the Boston driver kept driving, yelling back at the cop: “It’s my brother in there!”
That sounded more like Tennessee or Texas drivers, to us, but never mind. New Mexico has always been full of dreamers and artists, those who make history and those who make it up because it’s a good story. They enjoy myriad transcendental and intellectual approaches to the unknown, including sunset rituals, healing massages, Yoga, crystals, secret alien encounters and nuclear experiments, paranormal phenomena, and the devil’s own hot sauce. Other states have politicians who do corrupt and bad things, our friend observed, but New Mexico suffers from a different problem: politicians who do nothing.
Snowy portholes for the solstice dagger of light
I have always loved New Mexico. This time we visited not only our hosts’ graceful hacienda, but also the work-in-progress artist’s house being taken over by other friends, who are in the process of abandoning New York City to move here. Their adopted home needs a lot of repairs. But it has a magic secret. Through a series of strategic portholes in the thick adobe walls, the sun, at the time of solstice, shines through as a solid shaft of light, piercing the entire house.
Alas, my timing was wrong for this miraculous display. Our visit was hampered by my head and chest cold, which was getting worse by the hour. I felt as if I were spreading plague. John, who had gotten sick first in Mississippi, was feeling better now in New Mexico. So he carried on sociably while I fled to our bedroom to sneeze. There would be no visits to Ten Thousand Waves this time, for massages and lunch. Instead we bought several boxes of Kleenex and hit the road on Jan. 9 for Gallup and Flagstaff.
The Texas panhandle had been a series of small rancheros. In New Mexico, we found a few scattered cows and sheep grazing in deep canyons and along flat-topped mesas, sun-washed in ochre and yellow. We were amused by a billboard on I-40 outside Albuquerque, consisting only of the famous bushy black eyebrows, eyeglasses, and mustache of Groucho Marx. “Laugh More,” it said. We did.
Driving parallel to Route 66, we wondered what it actually looked like. At lunchtime we finally turned onto the historic road, where we found the El Rancho Hotel, a once-famous wild west film location. Guest rooms were named for all the top movie stars who stayed here. Forty years later, it seemed pretty quiet, with just a few locals in the café.
El Rancho Grande
Heading toward Flagstaff, AZ, we took a side trip to the Petrified Forest, near Holbrooke. Trees that grew over 200 million years ago washed down here into a massive volcanic sea, and petrified into gorgeous giant stones.
Randy the park ranger told us that the fierce crocodile skeleton displayed at the Visitor Center was a Smilosuchus, dating from the dawn of the dinosaurs, in the Triassic period. https://www.nps.gov/pefo/learn/management/images/smilosuchus-cast.jpg?maxwidth=1200&autorotate=false He said some relatives of this dinosaur grew to be 80 feet long! With this frame of reference, Homo Sapiens seem ridiculously small and arriviste.
With a new sense of our own insignificance, we retired to our Courtyard hotel in Flagstaff, AZ. The next morning, the car was covered with snow!
We had to watch for icy patches on the highway as we headed toward Kingman, where the cozy Siren’s Café had already run out of lunch specials by 12:30 p.m. A postman breezed in, singing to the crowd, “Here’s your mailman!” He hand-delivered packages to each staffer behind the counter, and then turned to the entire room, saying “Thank you for employing me!” Everyone laughed and applauded. Even though it was snowy outside, he was wearing shorts!
Fortified by warm food and good humor, we crossed through a long, lonely stretch of the Mohave Desert into California. All we could see was a mirage on the horizon, as the gas gauge warned us of pending doom. In the nick of time a real oasis appeared out of nowhere, on Route 66 in Fenner. The gas station was owned by a Seventh Day Adventist who strategically placed religious pamphlets on giant display racks that had to be navigated by anyone trying to visit the restroom.
Our own salvation lay many miles ahead, in the Joshua Tree National Park. We didn’t know it yet, but miraculous margaritas and live music were waiting for us, at the Twentynine Palms Inn.
All the sinners from the Bible Belt must have migrated to Texas. As we arrived at our Gainesville B&B at dinner time, John discovered that this town was the site of the largest mass hanging in US history. Forty-two citizens were hanged or shot after a kangaroo court in 1862, for being sympathizers to the Union side. Today Gainesville is adjacent to the largest gambling casino in the US, which is just over the Oklahoma border.
Our earnest young hosts at the empty Denton Historical House confessed that they were new to the B&B business, having just bought and restored the place a year ago, hoping to capture the gamblers. They steered us to dinner down the street at a former whorehouse, where our waitress wondered why we weren’t staying there. Its history was more delicious than its food.
The next day we had another big drive, aiming for Tucumcari, NM, a town I picked off the map because I loved Lowell George’s lyrics to the Linda Ronstadt song “Willin’.”***
Because our B&B hosts didn’t offer the fancy hot breakfast we expected, we stopped early for lunch off Rte 287 in Childress, and stumbled into the Top Notch Texas BBQ. Here we enjoyed fabulous slabs of BBQ meats, pecan pie and peach cobbler! I casually asked the young waitress, “What happens in Childress?” She shrugged, “Nothing.” But then she added: “The state prison is nearby. It’s the big business here.” She gestured at the booth behind us, where two prison deputies, with guns in their holsters, were eating lunch.
We escaped without further incident to Amarillo, where we discovered Cadillac Ranch on a side road. This was once just a muddy field, but some hippie artist in the mid-1970s decided to plant a bunch of real full-sized Cadillacs, face down, into the ground. For forty years, folks have been decorating them will all kinds of colorful graffiti. The gift shop nearby was overshadowed by a huge cowboy statue honoring the Second Amendment. An RV park out back apparently offered permanent housing to folks down on their luck. Amarillo once flourished as the helium capitol of the world. We found it a friendly-enough place, but we couldn’t linger, because we wanted to get to Tucumcari by dinnertime.
Well after dark, we pulled into our Tucumcari truck stop, the Garden Court hotel. We walked across the parking lot to discover the joys of KB Steak House, where the menu offered—yes—“Chicken-Fried Chicken” as well as all the permutations of beef that are native to this region.
John was valiantly working through a head cold that first found him in Natchez, and I was chugging Airborne and zinc tablets to avoid catching it too. Alas, as we set out the next morning to join our waiting friends in Santa Fe, the virus exploded in my head and chest. What a bedraggled set of travelers we were, as we presented ourselves, sneezing and coughing, at the front door of our friends’ Spanish hacienda!
**** And I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari Tehachapi to Tonopah Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made Driven the backroads so I wouldn’t get weighed And if you give me weed, whites and wine And you show me a sign And I’ll be willin’ to be movin’
Driving through Mississippi and northern Louisiana, we were struck by the economic hardship and lack of public services in Scotlandville, Sugartown and other small rural communities. They seemed to have only God to get them through. Every half mile, next to collapsing wooden shacks and trailer homes, there was another Baptist church with a tiny cemetery. “Seventh Day Sabbath OBEY GOD’S LAW” warned a billboard. Boo Paul’s Assembly Building stood tall as an impressive outpost of the Calvary Missionary Ministry in the middle of Louisiana’s rural oil and gas fields.
“Bluegrass Festival”
On the radio, everyone was talking about Jesus. White church elders debated different ways to avoid sin if you had unnatural (homosexual) feelings. “He rose spiritually and gendered!” insisted one man. On a black Gospel radio show in Jena, Louisiana, the preacher said “I’m going to keep trusting God despite contradictory circumstances.” He invited everyone to meet down at the church this Saturday, to participate in a NAACP voter registration drive. “The only way you can make changes is at the ballot box,” he said.
It was hunting season, and we met burly men in full camouflage gear, driving their muddy all-terrain vehicles and trucks into roadside gas stations with next-door cafes. “Deer and duck processing” shacks offer their services with hand-lettered signs. The Butt Hot BBQ looked like a popular spot, featuring a giant homemade billboard of a pig with flames coming out of his rear end. We passed the Concordia Pawn and Gun shop and the Sunflower Baptist Church. Acres of of cotton fields were barren for winter, but there were posted notices offering “We Buy Pecans,” and “Crawfish” with a phone number to call. Catahoula, LA showed a certain pride, or was it stubbornness? with two barbershops along its short main street.
Sleek megachurches lined the road as we crossed over into Texas at 1:40 p.m. We found lunch at Jim’s BBQ and Catfish place, with fabulous pulled pork sandwiches, peach cobbler, triple-sized ice teas, and hunting trophies on the walls. The temperature was finally thawing out, climbing to 57 and then 62 degrees!
As we continued north toward our B&B in Gainesville, the car wreck billboards were getting more insistent. “When Everyone Forgets How to Drive, We Won’t Let You Down,” promised State Farm Insurance. ““In a Jam? Call Sam,” said another huge sign. Our favorite simply stated in gigantic letters, “Blessed are Those who Mourn,” with a Bible verse citation and an attorney’s phone number.
We finally understood what all this was about, at around 5:30 p.m., driving through the gigantic ring road outside Dallas. I was minding my own business, driving in the far right lane of a congested eight-lane divided highway, where everyone else was zipping around, changing lanes with a gotta-get-home-NOW–for-dinner intensity. Our northbound side of the highway was moving pretty fast, but the southbound lanes were crawling at a near standstill. All of a sudden, in the breakdown lane to our immediate right, a big black car came whizzing right toward us, at a high rate of speed. He was using our northbound breakdown lane as his route south! We stayed on course and managed to avoid a head-on collision, but it was a bit of a nerve-tingler that we weren’t going to forget anytime soon. It was actually the second time on this trip that we were nearly erased by another driver. In Tennessee on Dec. 30, huge trucks were racing to Nashville meet their end-of-the year deadline. We were passing a huge semi-trailer at about 75 miles an hour, when he decided to move into our lane. I was able to keep driving on the shoulder, hitting the brakes hard to pull behind him.
Driving calmly in the Wild West
This cross-country trip was not for the faint of heart. The long haul driving days like this one from Natchez to Gainesville required a 100% cold-blooded focus on what was directly in front of us, without regard to the past, the future, or the charms along the countryside.
To sweeten our long days in the car, we listened to an audiobook of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Steinbeck found a way, on his 1960 journey across the country, to ask people about what was going on in America. The issues they worried about then seemed easy and old-fashioned, compared to the political Armageddon we are facing 58 years later. Steinbeck’s technique was to invite people into his camper, offering a drink of coffee laced with whiskey. Charley, the poodle, provided a natural entry point for conversation.
But I didn’t have a dog, a camper, or whiskey to offer, and engaging people informally was proving to be more difficult in these hostile times. My profession of journalism, with all of its 2018 offshoots and permutations, has lost its most important function, which is providing the country with a common set of facts. “Where do you get your news?” would have been a good starting point to learn about political views, but it seemed like a hostile question, thanks to President Trump’s attack on the media as “the enemies of the people.”
John with our laundry at Suds dem Duds
So I was looking forward, for multiple reasons, to the laundromat in New Orleans. I figured we were all stuck there, and I could start a conversation with my fellow captives. After beignets at Café Du Monde, we found ourselves at the Suds Dem Duds! down the street from our Bourbon Orleans Hotel. Dinah, the proprieter, said she used to sell Volkswagens, and having this laundromat business was a dream come true. I asked her how she felt about 2018, and she was optimistic. Before I could pop my questions about the news and Trump, she turned to help an Australian family, who were emptying their suitcase contents in a jumbo washer. What was it with these Australians? They were everywhere.
From my perch near the door, I snuck glances at a middle-aged nondescript man, a regular named Tom, who was sitting impassively in a folding chair. A quick guess: a veteran with PTSD? Certainly a loner. He never smiled or joined the chitchat of the other customers. Dinah told me, after he left, that he works as a bartender! Maybe he needed some peace and quiet before putting on his smile for work.
I realized I was violating Dinah’s and Tom’s world by lurking around, trying to pry out their political wisdom. The folks I was meeting seemed generally okay, and they deserved to be left in peace to go about their daily business. Nobody wants a Joe Bftsplk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Btfsplk hanging around, reminding them that their President is a maniac, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, race war and gender war, as well as the End Times, climate-wise.
So I decided to suspend my search for truth and justice in the random views of Americans. I would just listen
and enjoy the life around me, and New Orleans was the perfect place to start. We visited the Mardi Gras costume exhibit at the Presbytere, and the Battle of New Orleans Civil War display next to the St. Louis Cathedral.
A Katrina photo exhibit offered shocking evidence of both the destruction and heroism of neighbors helping neighbors.
Blue jeans worn by a Katrina survivor, with his Social Security number and other identifying info in case he was found dead
The statue in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, which casts quite a shadow at night, is known locally as “the touchdown Jesus.” Next door, our Hotel Bourbon concierge regaled us with his building’s colorful history: once a convent and then a theater, this was the place where Andrew Jackson declared his run for the presidency. It was also the site of a celebrated Creole duel, leaving bloodstains that are still visible under the carpet on the stairs, according to the concierge, who gives official Haunted Hotels tours. He said that the Charbonnet twins, Stephan and Louis, having had a bit too much to drink, decided to turn to the gentleman’s way of gaining “satisfaction” as they both attempted to court the same beautiful debutante. They engaged in a sword fight, ending up in a tangle as they fell down the stairs, stabbing each other to death. I couldn’t help thinking about their mother, receiving the news.
Tennessee Williams’ table at Gallatoire’s
To add to all that drama, we booked Tennessee Williams’ table in the corner at Gallatoire’s. After a festive dinner, with multiple guests celebrating birthdays, we grabbed a taxi out to Mulate’s to hear live Cajun music.
There is a noir underside to the frivolity of The Big Easy. We found the streets a bit sinister and deserted at 9:30 as we left Mulate’s, so we walked very quickly to the nearest lit-up hotel. The concierge told us to wait inside while he called a taxi, confirming that crime is a factor here.
The next day we had breakfast with a friend who works with the families of incarcerated youth. We were inspired again by her work, supporting young people as they leave prison. Some people just try to hold on to what they have. Others, like our friend, go to where the trouble is and try to make things better. How can we do this in a divided world? I was beginning to understand. Start local, with what is in front of you. Find some sort of common ground. Allow people their dignity and a chance to excel.
Driving northwest from cheerful New Orleans, the South was not only frozen, but marked by the legacy of exploitation. On the road to Natchez, MS we stopped by two remarkable places: one was Rosedown, a cotton plantation built in 1835 by the Turnbull family, who had 450 slaves working a total of four estates. The slaves worked 18 hours a day, six days a week. The former Turnbull slaves became sharecroppers for them after the Civil War, and the last descendent of the Turnbull family lived there until 1955. It is a state historic site now, popular with visitors for its gardens in the spring. The whole place, shrouded in Spanish Moss, seemed a little creepy.
No matter where we drove on this journey, there was evidence of Native American life before the Europeans took over. The continent certainly wasn’t “empty” territory waiting to be colonized. In Natchez, the hereditary chief was called the Great Sun, and apparently when he died in 1728 his wives and retainers “were strangled with due ceremony to accompany him into the next life.” His house was burned and the burial mound was raised to a new height, upon which the house of his successor was erected. This was the official description from the Mississippi Department of Archives. Despite this, ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived for eight years in France’s Natchez colony with the Indians until relations soured in 1728, found them to be “more civilized, their manner of thinking more just and full of sentiment, their customs more reasonable, and their ceremonies more natural and serious—distinguishing this nation from all others. It was easy to recognize them as more refined and polite.”
It was still bitter cold as we drove north. When we were halfway to Natchez, my cell phone rang. It was our B&B hostess calling to tell us her pipes had frozen, there was no water and we couldn’t stay with her. She generously had booked us a room at a more ostentatious antebellum mansion called Dunleith Castle. The estate was built in the late 18th century by a couple whose daughter was widowed at the age of 15. Her second husband lived longer than she did, and rebuilt the house after it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. This did not seem like a lucky place to spend the night.
The dining room at Dunleith Castle, Natchez
We were looking for a little warmth and rest, as we retreated to our small room behind the Dunleith kitchen. A big challenge loomed the next day: we needed to drive halfway across Texas, if we were going to meet our friends in Santa Fe by Jan 7. We dreaded this leg of the trip. A fully armed population of Good Old Boys in pickup trucks, speeding around in their Trump Virtual Reality world, did not bode well for a Massachusetts car. I expected trouble, but not in my wildest nightmares, did I anticipate what came next.
On our New Year’s Day drive from Memphis to Vicksburg, we looked in vain for a lunch spot. Everything was shuttered for the holiday. Finally at 3 p.m. we found a faded sign for “Simply Southern Café and Grill” in Grenada, MS. It was a modest African-American establishment, well worn but well-scrubbed. It offered an “all you care to eat, all-day buffet” for about $10. We had the place to ourselves, except for a young father and his two little kids. We had stumbled on a mecca of southern cooking: perfect fried chicken, collard greens, black eyed peas, peach cobbler and sweet tea.
Simply Southern buffet
It was a good thing that it was getting dark when we finally pulled up to the Cedar Grove Mansion Inn, a walled-in antebellum estate with a colorful history. We couldn’t see much of its surrounding neighborhood, a place of dilapidated houses and apartments, broken down vehicles, and random trash. In Cedar Grove’s once-beautiful garden, the cascading fountains had frozen solid. No one had bothered to turn them off. The ceiling fans on the outdoor veranda were also turning, as if we needed further cooling. We shivered on the front steps in 20-degree weather.
Finally a woman answered the door, seeming surprised to see us. We were to be the only guests, except for one other couple who had already disappeared for the night. We ate alone in the once-splendid dining room, eyeing the large cannonball that was still embedded in the wall. The empty tables around us were set with china, linen and crystal, for phantom guests who never came.
The cannonball in the wall
Cedar Grove’s original mistress was no ordinary Southern belle. She was General Sherman’s Mississippi cousin Elizabeth, who married jeweler John Klein, the richest man in Vicksburg. Klein, who also had banking and railroad interests, presented her with this house as a wedding gift. They had met in Natchez when she was 12, and Klein courted her until she married him four years later. General Sherman rescued her Confederate family as the war came to their doorstep, and when his Union Army overtook Vicksburg, he turned this manor into a Union hospital. The Kleins were allowed to return, and they continued living in suspense upstairs throughout the war, wondering when the Union soldiers would discover their safe of jewels, money and other valuables, in the family dining room. Miraculously, it was never touched. Klein had successfully hidden it in plain sight, disguised as an armoire.
Ready for the guests who never came…
As we retired for the night in a separate building on the estate, I could hear animals—or was it ghosts? rustling around in the woodwork. It was a bleak, cold night, without the cheer of a fire or the charm of other guests.
Day Six. Tuesday Jan.2 Battlefields
The next morning, we ate a rubbery breakfast of scrambled eggs and an impenetrable hotdog the cook tried to pass off as “sausage.” The white toast crumbled to bits when we tried to butter it. The other couple appeared in the dining room, and mumbled a few comments to each other about the toast. The gentleman introduced himself to us as a retired New Orleans police officer, with his lady friend from New York. They agreed that Cedar Grove, which he used to visit regularly, had fallen on hard times.
I asked him about his experiences during Hurricane Katrina. He hadn’t been on duty then, but he said that the storm’s awful impact actually had one beneficial side effect: It cleaned out some of the corruption in New Orleans, by disempowering the levee district boss patronage system established during the old Huey P. Long days. He told us to be sure to visit the Vicksburg battlefield nearby.
We left without knowing where we were going. The wifi hadn’t worked in our room the night before, and our new Honda HRV’s Garmin navigation system had no capacity for historic landmarks or cultural attractions. “Vicksburg Battlefield,” “Civil War battlefield,” “Jackson civil rights museum,” “Mississippi Civil Rights Museum” and “The Hermitage” all produced directions to random gas stations and cafes in different states. I wanted to hit the stupid dashboard with a frozen water bottle. (We had six or seven frozen half bottles rattling around the car, because anything left out overnight was solid by morning.) Our paper maps weren’t local enough to show the streets we needed to find.
Our noble vehicle, whose Navi was embattled
On Confederate Ave., we passed a wooden shack with a hand-lettered sign offering “Live Catfish” and “Fresh Buffalo,” but it appeared to be closed. Finally, thanks to a gas station attendant, we found the Vicksburg Battlefield national park just 10 minutes away. It was forested with stone memorials, scattered on gentle hills. These monuments honored fallen soldiers from Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio. As we left the park, we stepped onto the rotted wooden deck of the ironclad Cairo warship, dredged up from the Yazoo River bottom a few years ago. I wondered what the tour bus full of gray-haired seniors hoped to find here.
Dredged up from the Mississippi mud
Our next stop: the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, a perfect counterpoint to the Vicksburg’s lost Confederate glory. This display of the horrors of slavery, reconstruction and the Klu Klux Klan reminded us that the white South’s American dream was everyone else’s nightmare. Before Brown V Board of Education, Mississippi offered only a few months of school each year to segregated black students, with twice as many kids in black classrooms compared to white ones, and only a tiny fraction of the money per student. After they were forced to integrate, many white families put their children into new “segregation academies.”
Most striking were the glass pillars listing every known Mississippi lynching, year by year. Mississippi was the leader in this form of terrorism. Crusading black newspaper editor Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave in Holly Springs, MS, went to England to lecture progressive audiences about how British textile companies were profiting from slavery in the American South. She and others are honored here for challenging the law and culture of the South. There were scary white KKK hoods and photos, along with videos of the Mississippi Freedom Riders, the NAACP and other resisters. We saw no mark recognizing that President Trump, who appears to believe in white supremacy, came to the opening of this new museum less than a month ago. The museum staff seem to be the only people on earth smart enough to ignore this man.
MS Civil Rights Museum
A black woman I passed by in the museum was telling her grandson, “Now look at this history. Learn it.” I wished that instead of tearing down all the Confederate monuments, progressives today would put up new plaques on them, explaining what these men and women thought they were fighting for, and why it was so wrong. A white volunteer stopped me to explain part of the civil rights exhibit, and I told him about the ongoing Not In Our Town (www.niot.org) initiative that helps American communities that have been torn apart by hate crimes. I hope he will spread the word to others. I’ll be volunteering some time with the NIOT team once we get to California on January 15.
“Its amazing that this is all one country,” John said as we drove into a carwash machine outside Patchatoula. A surprising rainbow of colored soap, raining down from above, brightened our outlook. The car had been encrusted with frozen white bird droppings ever since we parked it under a tree in Opryland. We could finally see through the windshield again. as we drove into New Orleans!
That sounded more like Tennessee or Texas drivers, to us, but never mind. New Mexico has always been full of dreamers and artists, those who make history and those who make it up because it’s a good story. They enjoy myriad transcendental and intellectual approaches to the unknown, including sunset rituals, healing massages, Yoga, crystals, secret alien encounters and nuclear experiments, paranormal phenomena, and the devil’s own hot sauce. Other states have politicians who do corrupt and bad things, our friend observed, but New Mexico suffers from a different problem: politicians who do nothing.
Because our B&B hosts didn’t offer the fancy hot breakfast we expected, we stopped early for lunch off Rte 287 in Childress, and stumbled into the Top Notch Texas BBQ. Here we enjoyed fabulous slabs of BBQ meats, pecan pie and peach cobbler! I casually asked the young waitress, “What happens in Childress?” She shrugged, “Nothing.” But then she added: “The state prison is nearby. It’s the big business here.” She gestured at the booth behind us, where two prison deputies, with guns in their holsters, were eating lunch.
