Leaving Nashville

After some 20 years in Nashville, my dear friend Rhonda is returning to New England. Rhonda and her husband, Charlie, left Boston to follow Charlie's auto industry job, but they've always planned to return north. Now that their kids are grown and semi-launched, Charlie's taken a new position in New Hampshire and Rhonda's readying the Nashville house for sale. When they leave it, they'll take good memories with them.

I, too, have good memories of that house. And, of leaving it. An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

The road from Kentucky led to my friend Rhonda’s house, outside Nashville. We’ve known each other since we were 14, when I was in love with her cousin Rick. After he broke my heart, we stayed friends. Rhonda was the only person I’d made plans to visit.

Like many of their neighbors, Rhonda and husband Charlie came to Nashville to follow work. While on a 6 a.m. power walk through her development, once a vast farm, I watched people transplanted from Michigan and the northeast drive off to jobs at Dell Computer or the car plants at Spring Hill and Smyrna. As I circumnavigated the tidy neighborhood, I noticed what looked like “For Sale” signs planted on some of the front lawns. When I got close enough to read them, I learned that “The 10 Commandments Are Supported Here” and “Ye Must Be Born Again.”

Rhonda and Charlie have adapted to their new culture. They’ll always be Yankees, but their kids were born in the South. Erin and Paul go to Christian school, and their summer reading list included the Bible.

Our kids played together in the cul-de-sac, while Rhonda, Charlie and I drank beers on the front porch. Charlie’s a traveler. Real travelers know geography, even of places they haven’t been to yet. I described our route, and Charlie sat back and smiled, visualizing the Stonehenge of old Cadillacs sticking up in Amarillo, the jagged reaches of the Sawtooth, the forested shores of Lake Huron. This is a guy who, years ago, got in a car with a few buddies and drove from Boston to Yellowknife, just to see what a place called Yellowknife looked like. They spent a few hours there and drove home. I understood completely.

Rhonda’s house had been a psychological safety net. It was a familiar destination. A place where we’d been expected. Somewhere with people who cared about us. A chance to stretch out and hang around a house with a yard and lots of rooms and a washing machine and a kitchen with food. A visit with friends. A point from which I could turn around and go home if something wasn’t right about this trip and still feel the venture had been worthwhile.

We left Rhonda’s driveway and left the safety net behind. We were on our own, for the next 10,000 miles. We drove into America, and it embraced us.

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Remembering where we were

On this 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks many of us will reflect on where we were as the horror of that day unfolded.

In this excerpt from my book, "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," I share how my family took that terrible day and transformed it into an enriching odyssey:


Although my kids and I didn't climb into the van and drive off until nine months later, our 12,000-mile American road odyssey began on September 11, 2001.

Where I was and what I was doing when the planes ripped through New York are part of my life's fabric. I was outside painting the fence brown, telling my neighbor Donna that I had plenty of time now to do the job my 13-year-old son was supposed to have finished because I'd just been laid off. We groused about the economy's sorry state and mused over whether things could get any worse.

In the next instant, they did. The kitchen phone rang. It was my husband calling from the car to tell me one of the Twin Towers had been hit. Mike was on the road, making sales calls, and hadn't seen any pictures yet. He'd only heard the radio reports.

The paintbrush hardened outside in the sun, pieces of cut grass sticking up like spikes in the brown mess.

When Adam and Dana came home from school we gathered around the table on the deck and began, as a family, to sort through facts and feelings and fears. The kids' teachers had done a good job dispensing comfort and assurance before sending them home. By the time they got to us, we'd decided we had three things to communicate: they were safe and loved; America was strong; the world's people were good.

To our family, this last point was as important as the others, because our kids have been traveling the world since they were babies. Respect for the world's people is part of their upbringing. This is a gift, and we'd allow no senseless act, however brutal, nor any retaliatory distrust or intolerance, to steal it.

My mind's eye called up images: two Turkish teenagers kicking a soccer ball with a five-year-old Adam on the grounds of Topkapi Palace; Adam joining a group of Bolivian boys in tabletop foosball during recess at Copacabana's school, Lake Titicaca shining at the end of the street; the kids building sand castles with Javier and Daniel, two Belizean brothers who'd pass our hotel each day on their way to class; Dana setting off for a bird walk, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, with Mike and Masai chief Zapati. These experiences enrich life and must continue.

As the painful, numbing slowness of the weeks immediately following September 11 yielded to something approximating normalcy, I regained enough focus to give the future some thought. That future had us traveling again, but this time, we'd get to know our America.

www.LoriHein.com

Drums and guns

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the start of America's Civil War, and the media is milking that for all it's worth: books, magazines, radio, TV and the Web chock-full of Civil War stories, analysis, photographs, biography, much of it content people started working on years ago knowing that 2011 would be the sesquicentennial of something really big, something that would sell, and the rest of it content from bandwagon jumpers who don't research anything in depth themselves but put a quick, shallow spin on trendy topics and spit them out to buyers and perusers of shallow content. I expect pieces on Civil War recipes, music and fashion to appear anytime now. I'm a cynic, being in the writing biz, and I know how this works. The Civil War is a product, one that has potential for brisk sales this year, so everyone with a keyboard, camera or microphone is manufacturing content.

America's overtly at war in three places right now, and we're hearing more about a 150-year-old conflict than we are about our daily death toll, about the number of American limbs blown off weekly. While Americans die and war rages today, the Civil War is all the rage. It sells; Afghanistan doesn't.

Both the lack of focus on our current dying and the hyperfocus on our past dying because a media-pretty anniversary date has rolled around bother me.

But I do know a bit about the heavy drape of the Civil War, the way the Civil War can feel, even after and through 150 years. An excerpt from my book, Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

As part of its “Hour of Classical Music,” Memphis public radio played the Kansas City Chorale singing “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,” an Irish war lament whose haunting melody echoes the Civil War song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” The doleful notes, the chants of “drums and guns and drums and guns,” and the long, hushed “hurroos” hung in the air like spirits unable to sleep.

Since Tennessee, the war whose ghosts walked the landscape had changed. Farther north, we’d passed fieldstone taverns where the Continental Army had planned attacks on redcoats.

Now, we passed silent fields where hundreds or thousands of boys in gray and blue died. The weight of war felt heavier in the south than I feel it up north. Back home, buildings and monuments of the Revolution are the stuff of school field trips to clapboard places like Paul Revere’s house. Its fighters are valiant figures with rousing collective names- Sons of Liberty, Founding Fathers, Green Mountain Boys.

But those men were over two hundred years away from us, known through writings and artists’ renderings. I thought of them as icons, not as somebody’s son, brother, father or friend.

Here, it was closer, more intimate. The boys who lie under this grass were not so far in time from us. There were photographs to show who they really were. We could study their eyes and hands and the buttons on their shirts. They were men and boys somebody loved and cried for.

When we passed the sign for Shiloh, Adam and I exchanged a glance. Shiloh. The word had a powerful sadness. We had left behind places where Americans created the nation and now looked on places where they almost took it apart.

The hush of these southern knolls and grasses intensified the ability to imagine the death played out here. As if it happened yesterday. I’d never felt so palpably connected to war. www.LoriHein.com

A tapeworm grows in Brooklyn

I have a story in a book that hit store shelves in October. Chicken Soup for the Soul: All in the Family promises to be a hot seller: it's already in a second printing. Fun book. (Get it at Amazon, and while you're there, throw Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America in your cart. If you don't love it I'll buy it back.)

My Chicken Soup story, "The Sauerkraut Cure" takes you to Grandma Fink's kitchen in 1930s Brooklyn:

A recent genealogical expedition into my dad’s childhood yielded a folk remedy brought by his grandmother to Brooklyn from her native Alsace. I’d asked my dad to spend a day sharing memories of growing up in New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, and he had tales to tell, the most colorful of which involved Grandma Fink, the tender-tough matriarch of the extended family that shared her six-unit Brooklyn apartment building.

The close quarters of the Lincoln Avenue tenement were, thought Grandma Fink, a breeding ground for germs, critters and other unpleasantness, so she maintained vigilant guard over her clan’s health, administering poultices, plasters, salves and syrups and occasionally calling Dr. Hantmann in for a 25-cent kitchen table consult (the patient laid on the table for examination). And, she did seasonal cleaning, not just of the house, but of her grandsons’ insides as well.

Grandma Fink counted tapeworms among the potential threats to her family’s well-being, and twice yearly she waged war on any that might have found their way into my father and his two older brothers. Her weapon? Sauerkraut.

“One day each spring and fall, Grandma Fink would call me, Henny and Eddie into the kitchen," recalled my dad. "On the stove was a huge pot of water in which cabbage had been cooking for hours, made into sauerkraut. We knew from the towels and blankets covering the pot that it wasn’t for consumption. It was to attract tapeworms.”

The boys took turns standing on a stool that Grandma Fink had pulled to the stove. She’d lift the heavy towels that covered the steaming pot and push the boys’ little heads into the stinky steam. "We," said my dad, "were told to inhale the sauerkraut aroma, which Grandma said would ward off colds but most importantly, lure out any tapeworms growing inside us.”

Grandma Fink knew that tapeworms loved sauerkraut, especially kraut as delicious as hers, made from an old family recipe, and that, to get some, the parasites would swim up through the intestines to the mouth and try to jump into the sauerkraut pot.

As the boys sniffed the pungent mash, Grandma stood close by, waiting to pull out any tapeworms that might emerge. “Grandma was ready to capture them,” said my dad, “and we thought she was quite brave, because she told us they could be thirty, even up to eighty feet long.”

As far as my dad knows, Grandma never did catch a tapeworm. “I cannot recall a single one ever coming out of us,” he chuckled. But Grandma never let her guard down, pulling out the pot and firing up the semi-annual sauerkraut boil year after year after year, releasing each grandson from the ritual only when he became a young man and moved, for work, marriage or the military, out of her Brooklyn tenement and into the wide world.

www.LoriHein.com

Journey

Although my kids and I didn’t climb into the van and drive off until nine months later, our 12,000-mile American road odyssey began on September 11, 2001. Where I was and what I was doing when the planes ripped through New York are part of my life’s fabric. I was outside painting the fence brown, telling my neighbor Donna that I’d plenty of time now to do the job my 13-year-old son was supposed to have finished because I’d just been laid off. We groused about the economy’s sorry state and mused over whether things could get any worse.

In the next instant, they did. The kitchen phone rang. It was my husband calling from the car to tell me one of the twin towers had been hit. Mike was on the road, making sales calls, and hadn’t seen any pictures yet. He’d only heard the radio reports.The paintbrush hardened outside in the sun, pieces of cut grass sticking up like spikes in the brown mess.

When Adam and Dana came home from school, we gathered around the table on the deck, and began, as a family, to sort through facts and feelings and fears. The kids’ teachers had done a good job dispensing comfort and assurance before sending them home. By the time they got to us, we’d decided we had three things to communicate: they were safe and loved; America was strong; the world’s people were good.

To our family, this last point was as important as the others, because our kids have been traveling the world since they were babies. Respect for the world’s people is part of their upbringing. This is a gift, and we’d allow no senseless act, however brutal, nor any retaliatory distrust or intolerance, to steal it.

My mind’s eye called up images: two Turkish teenagers kicking a soccer ball with a 5-year-old Adam on the grounds of Topkapi Palace; Adam joining a group of Bolivian boys in tabletop foosball during recess at Copacabana’s school, Lake Titicaca shining at the end of the street; the kids building sand castles with Javier and Daniel, two Belizean brothers who’d pass our hotel each day on their way to class; Dana setting off for a bird walk, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, with Mike and Masai chief Zapati. These experiences enrich life and must continue.

As the painful, numbing slowness of the weeks immediately after September 11 yielded to something approximating normalcy, I regained enough focus to give the future some thought. That future had us traveling again, but this time, we’d get to know our America.

Introduction to Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. To purchase, see right sidebar.

LoriHein.com

Alpena: Dairy Queen and mini-golf

In this excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, the kids and I make ourselves at home at a funky hotel in friendly Alpena, Michigan:

"You are an intrepid woman!” said Susan, as she pushed her chair back from the desk in the small office of her Water’s Edge Motel to get a better look at me and the kids. We liked each other instantly. She was a 50-something pistol with firecracker-red hair. She talked fast when she wanted to, slow when she wanted to, and she looked you right in the eye. Her drapy cotton clothes- loose trousers and shirt in a turquoise print more Maui than Michigan – were the sartorial equivalent of downtown Alpena’s crayon-colored homes and businesses.

Susan sized us up and rented us a room, the $60 end unit closest to Lake Huron, with a bench outside. She wanted to know where we’d been, what we’d seen. She asked the kids what they thought of it all and smiled knowingly at the “It’s okay,” and “I like it. It’s good.” She looked back up at me and nodded. As I signed the credit card slip, she pushed her chair back again, and looked at the three of us. Then she looked Adam and Dana in the eye. “These are times you’ll never get back with these kids,” words aimed at all of us.

The Water’s Edge sat at the water’s edge, on its own stretch of sand, and right next to the public beach at Mich-E-Ke-Wis Park. We saw Susan all the time, as she lived in a green cinderblock bunker-like structure to whose rear was attached the straight line of modest motel units, of which ours sat closest to Susan’s personal space, closest to the lake. Susan’s house, which looked homemade, was a beautiful thing to me. The funky bunker sat right on the beach and had a killer view of Thunder Bay, and Susan had a big rectangular window from which she could watch the moods of Lake Huron at all hours, in all seasons. I imagined a conversation between Susan and her husband 10, 20, or however many years ago, after they’d tapped the last cinderblock into place and nailed down the roof. Susan would probably have started the conversation.

“We should paint it.”

“What color?”

“Green.”

“Dark green?”

“No, something wild and sea-foamy, like Huron all whipped up. I’ll go find something.”

And then, I imagined her in the paint store, passing the quiet greens, and emerging with gallons of something called, maybe, Tropical Great Lakes Green, like the color of the Maui-Michigan pantsuit that worked so well with her blaze of orange hair.

We made the Water’s Edge and the spaces and places near it our little universe. The kids were free to roam around, up to but not including stepping into Huron unless I was with them. There was plenty to keep them busy while I brought my journal up to date and did laundry. The park, the beach, a Dairy Queen, and, the mini-golf that I could see from our room’s bathroom window.

Every half hour or so, Adam, Dana or both would burst into the room (made into a commodious accommodation by the keep-door-open-park-New-Paint- right-outside method) and ask for more money for golf and video games. Adam spent a fortune in quarters in the arcade, trying to win a free round of golf. When they were all golfed out, we went to the beach, just as the lifeguards were calling it a day and packing up the rescue surfboard. At 7 p.m., it was still over 70 degrees, and a big ball of orange sun the color of Susan’s hair still lit the calm, indigo water. “You can wade out there for quite awhile,” she’d told me, “before you have to make any decisions.” Dana, who’d been our official Great Lakes water temperature tester, pronounced Huron, “this part of it, anyway,” the warmest of any she’d sampled.

Susan’s big, logy dog had pooped all over the little patch of grass that separated the motel parking lot from the beach, grass which served as a parking lot for her motorboat, the Susan. We picked our way carefully around the boat and the dog droppings as we came and went. Susan took note of our comings and goings.

“You have great kids.”

“I do. Thanks for saying so. They are pretty cool. The kind of kids you can live in a minivan with for a whole summer. We’ve made it to Michigan, and we still like each other.”

“I wish they’d gotten to see the turkey vultures we’ve had lately. Or the deer. I get deer on my lawn sometimes. And a great blue heron my husband calls Mister Blue. And, I hoped you’d be lucky enough to see a freighter. They call regularly, and it’s quite impressive as they come into the bay.”

I wished we’d seen all those things, too, and said so, but added, “The Dairy Queen, the mini-golf and the beach were enough for the kids. Just what the doctor ordered at this point in the trip. They had a lot of fun.”

“The mini-golf is a good neighbor. Nice and quiet.”

I told Susan I loved Alpena and felt lucky we’d come upon this fine place as we came into the homestretch of our American journey. It was a perfect near-ending, an ideal finishing touch. (Had we invoked the interstate escape clause when we’d reached the mitten, we would have missed it.) “I’ll always remember Alpena. It’s the kind of place I could live in.”

Susan smiled and looked out at Huron. “People say kids from Alpena spend their first twenty years thinkin’ about how to get out, and the next twenty years thinkin’ about how to get back in.”

Other people think about getting in, too. “We get lots of retirees movin’ in, because it’s cheap. They’re all snowbirds. Drive their RVs to Arizona in the winter.” She shook her head. “I can’t see sittin’ around in a lawn chair.” No, Susan’s ideal winter is spent right there in Alpena, watching out her big rectangular window for the Great Lakes freighters that anchor close to Thunder Bay to wait out the freeze in Superior. An ice cutter could make Alpena’s Huron port accessible, but they don’t bother, because “the water starts to flow again in February.”

In the morning, I sat on the bench outside the room and laced up my sneakers in the still-dark, and, by the time I’d stretched, a glorious red-orange sun had started to ascend from the watery horizon. I ran to the orb’s rising and watched it gain height, degree by degree, splashing magnificent shafts of colored light across Huron’s surface as it climbed, slowly turning dawn to day. I watched it detach itself from the horizon and become a full and colossal tangerine, a blood orange hanging great and ripe over the gentle swells of the vast lake.

After the run, Susan caught me leaning against New Paint, stretching. “My, what a fit specimen.” That made an old chick feel good. I’d loved her when she’d called me intrepid. Now, I wanted to take her home. She asked if we’d slept well.

“Slept well, and rose well. I just watched a magnificent sunrise.”She turned to the lake. “That’s why we could never leave.”


Buy Ribbons via the PayPal button in the right sidebar and get free shipping in the U.S.

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Natchez: A Fish Tale

I have a Mississippi story in the current issue of Country Roads Magazine.

Click here to read Natchez: A Fish Tale.

I've had the pleasure, lately, of dealing with some wonderful editors, and Country Roads' James Fox-Smith is one of them. Delightful and gracious.


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Acme Oyster House: Down the hatch

The other night the Travel Channel ran a show wherein the host ate his way through New Orleans. The puffy gentleman popped into the kitchens of about a dozen Big Easy establishments, sampling crawfish and po'boys and all manner of boiled, barbecued, gumboed, jambalayaed and deep fried culinary staples. As we watched, I said to Mike, "I bet he goes to the Acme Oyster House." Since the show was all about excess -- stuffing one's face at each sitting with food enough to feed a family for a day -- I bet that the biggest pig-out of all, the acme of this eating orgy, would take place at the Acme Oyster House.

Sure enough, after the final commercial break, our jowly host entered Acme, sat at a table covered with one of Acme's signature black and white-checked tablecloths, and geared up for his attempt to down 15 dozen oysters in under 60 minutes, which feat would land him a place on Acme's oyster eater wall of fame. (He did it, with 20 minutes to spare, and it was disgusting to watch.)

On our cross country trip the kids and I spent a marvelous four days in New Orleans, and one day we went to Acme for lunch. This excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America takes you there:


We called Mike from the Acme Oyster House in the Quarter to tell him what we were eating. Dana gave the report: “Hi Daddy, it’s us. We’re in New Orleans. Mommy is eating gumbo poopa, Adam has a po’boy, and I’m eating hush puppies.”

The stall door in Acme’s ladies’ room advertised a product I’d never heard of – one that must sell well here. A poster touted Alka-Seltzer’s MORNING RELIEF: “Fast Hangover Relief. TONIGHT You’re Feeling Goooood. TOMORROW Feel Better Than You Should.” Necessary equipment in the Quarter, where even quiet, polyestered couples walk around with cups of beer and tropically flavored alcohol in long neon-pink glasses, filled and refilled at “To-Go” bars.

Hollywood was shucking oysters as we read Acme’s Wall of Fame.

“Those the champion oyster eaters?” I asked.

“Those’re the fools.”

Hollywood told me that the name of the new Leader of the House hadn’t been put up yet. “Jes’ las’ week a guy et 41 dozen. He’s goin’ on the Wall. An’ you know what he et after that? Sof’ shell crab. Raw.”

The new champ’s name would join the likes of Bill Poole from Berkley Heights, NJ, who downed 32 dozen while watching Super Bowl XXIV in 1990, and Edna-Sara Lodin who carried back to Stockholm well-earned tales of ingesting 16 dozen Louisiana oysters on May 29, 2000. Way to go, Edna.


(To order a copy of Ribbons, see the right sidebar.)



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Tin, coal and gold: Journey down the family tree

Dana just did a geneaology project for her history class wherein she aired our family laundry, some nice, some not. On the not side lies great uncle George Fink, a card-carrying member of the National Socialist party who flew the Nazi flag from his Brooklyn tenement, to the great dismay of his neighbors. He met his death in a New York elevator shaft. There's no official homicide determination, but the word passed through the generations is that George was, shall we say, helped over the brink. "Sorry for your loss," said Dana's teacher.

But we had good folks, too. One of our ancestors was a deckhand on Horatio Nelson's ship during the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson took a fatal blow, but our ancestor lived to beget a line that would include my grandfather, Steele Pille, who wanted to join the U.S. Navy at 16, but couldn't because he was underage. So he copped an alias and fake papers and overnight became 18-year-old Harry Doubleday (photo below). He spent World War II in France and Japan and rose to Chief Petty Officer. He only revealed his real name to his future bride, my grandmother, shortly before their wedding. "Your name won't actually be Mrs. Doubleday... You'll be a Pille..."
Steele Pille dba Harry Doubleday's father was John Delbridge Pille, a tin miner in Cornwall, England, who emigrated to the U.S. after Cornwall's tin lodes were exhuasted. He moved to Pittsburgh and mined coal. He developed black lung and died in a coal mine accident in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

John Delbridge Pille (photo above) appears briefly in my book, Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. I thought of him when the kids and I visited the Empire Mine in Grass Valley, California. An excerpt:


We got off the interstate and took Route 20, a single lane highway that would carry us most of the way across California. The highway changed with the elevation, taking us out of high wilderness down to where the land lost its mountains. It was first a National Forest Scenic Byway, with huge pines hugging the road and vast mountain vistas. Then, it was an artery feeding the huge agribusinesses of the Sacramento Valley. It ended as a winding meander past the string of laid-back lake towns that sit east of the Russian River, the Redwood Empire, and the Mendocino coast.

Latino pickers, wrapped against the sweltering sun in hats, face scarves, pants, long sleeves, and gloves, tended hot fields. Endless alleys of Diamond walnuts, almonds and pecans; strawberries and blackberries; peaches, plums, apricots and nectarines; tomatoes, peppers, cukes and avocados; lemons, melons, grapes and cherries; pears, sweet corn and sunflowers. The Sacramento Valley was wickedly dry, yet still bountiful.

Earlier, we’d detoured into the Gold Rush. The towns of Nevada City and Grass Valley overflowed with magnificent sherbet-hued Victorians, built by Cornish miners to resemble cottages back home. The hilly towns were nonstop eye candy, and I could have walked their streets for days.

At Empire Mine, 350 miles of underground passages and once California’s richest hard rock gold mine, we stood at the top of the slanted shaft and peered down a minute stretch of Empire’s 11,000 feet of total incline depth. Cold air from the bowels of the earth washed over us. Workmen from Gray Electric were in the shaft, building a simulated ride that the foreman explained “will make visitors feel like they’re hurtling down in the carts that brought the miners down.” It was to open at the end of the summer.

“Oh, man!” moaned Adam, lamenting missing this high-speed jolt down into a dark hole in the earth. “We should’ve come here in August!”

I would have liked to go down into Empire, too, not for the hurtling, but to listen to a mine’s ghosts. To hear in the empty tunnels and caves and niches the voices and labored breathing of men, the clink of axes picking slowly and ceaselessly at unforgiving walls of rock, the rattle of pony carts, the drip of water from stone. The grim underearth sounds of men wresting something people deem precious from brutal, sunless holes. Descending into a black mine only lets you begin to grasp the bleakness of a miner’s day and lifetime.

We’d gone down into an old coal mine back in Beckley, West Virginia, where I’d reminded Adam and Dana of their great-great-grandfather, John Delbridge Pille, a Cornish tin miner who’d come to America to mine coal outside Pittsburgh, not all that far as the crow flew from Beckley. Jim, who’d been a miner for 38 years, was our Beckley guide. His grandfather, father, sons, and grandsons had also spent years of their lives underground, working the soft coal of the Sewell seam. We’d traveled in converted coal cars on tracks, down and through the dank pitch of Beckley’s drift mine, nearly horizontal and far closer to the surface than the steep maw of the Empire, at whose entrance, 4,600 miles from Beckley, we now stood.

Jim had pointed out hand-hewn alcoves, some no more than three feet high, telling us to imagine stooping or lying on our backs, swinging a pick for eight hours to loosen the coal overhead. He’d talked of killers unleashed as men cut coal. Methane, released from seams that had held it for ages, exploded. Seeping poison gas displaced fresh air and killed quickly, creating deadly pockets called black damp. Canaries would succumb before humans, so if a miner’s bird died, the man knew he had but a few minutes to escape the area of fouled air.

Now, as I stood before Empire’s steep lip, I wondered if John Delbridge Pille, tin and coal miner, had known any of the Empire gold men. Empire’s success had been built in no small part on the skill and experience of Cornish tin and copper miners who’d left England at the news of California gold. Pille had left England for Pittsburgh about 1840, only a decade before Empire’s first Cornwall miners arrived. Maybe some of the men who’d worked a mile or more down in the cold hole we now stood at had once worked beside my great-grandfather, pulling tin from one of the mines whose stone wheelhouse ruins dot the Cornish landscape like crumbled industrial cathedrals.

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Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel: The $10 Porch

From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

We said goodbye to Judy and boarded the Arnold Ferry that took us out into Lake Huron and delivered us in a half hour to Mackinac Island. The place was gorgeous, privileged, and overflowing with history and tourists. We rode big, fat-tired Schwinns, ate ice cream, bought postcards, and walked the streets, marveling at the boys whose summer job it is to shovel horse crap from the streets of this auto-free island into yellow plastic wheelbarrows. Where do they put it all? The great blooms that blossom all over the island, in gardens and window boxes, must be helped along because tourists ride horses and horse carts through the roads and lanes of Mackinac Island, a beautiful fake fairyland, so stunningly perfect and impeccable that it hurts. Teams of Belgian draft horses delivered Pepsi, Fruit Loops and bottled water to the island’s inns and hotels. Hotel valet boys pedaled bicycles, piled high with luggage precariously perched in baskets, from the docks to the inns.

At the Grand Hotel, grand in this case being understatement, I tsk-tsked all the travel writers I’d read who’d written about this place, because they’d all left something out of their stories. The Grand Hotel, built after the Civil War in the opulent manner of resorts and refuges for the movers and shakers of the gilded age, boasts the world’s longest front porch. I’d read about and seen photos of the porch for years, and Dana, Adam and I walked up the loftier than thou hill the hotel commands for the sole purpose of sitting in a rocking chair and looking out over the Straits.

But a quick rock in a wooden chair on the world’s longest front porch costs 10 bucks a head if you’re not a Grand Hotel guest, something the travel writers failed to report. The approach to the Grand is regal and, if you’re not chic, moneyed, or willing to blow a chunk of your children’s inheritance on a few nights in this place, intentionally and successfully intimidating. American flags and mango-yellow awnings lined the broad, tree-lined, uphill approach which was dotted with signs that, among other genteel but firm directives, told ladies they weren’t allowed to wear “slacks.” (Yikes! The planning of a trip here involves the packing of skirts!) The horse carriages of the rich and wish-they-weres clopped by, the carriage inhabitants wearing a hint of smile as they looked down on those of us on foot. The ye-who-do-not-belong-amongst-us-must-pay-10-dollars-to-sit-on-our-porch signs started early, so you had the chance to hang it up, declare yourself a poor boor, and turn around, to forever wonder what lays at the top of that hill.

We made it, unimpeded, to the top of the driveway. The Grand truly was. We looked down on the garden lawn at the topiary and the registered guests playing croquet, the green Mackinac Bridge sitting beyond the lawn in the Straits, looking like the ultimate croquet hoop. We looked up at the great porch, most of the chairs empty and lined up, waiting for someone to sit in them and keep them company.

I saw two people in matching polo shirts. They were not smiling. I kept walking, looking at the superlative porch. I wanted to sit on it. I geared up for a challenge.

A polo shirt stopped me.

“Excuse me. Are you guests of the hotel?”

“No. We’d just like to sit on the porch for a minute.”

“If you’re not registered guests, there’s a ten dollar per person fee to enter the property.”

“Do you mean I really have to pay thirty dollars for my kids and I to just take a quick walk up there to the porch?”

“Yes.”

“When I saw the signs along the driveway, I wondered how close we’d be able to get before someone stopped us. This must be the spot. From this point on, it costs ten bucks a head to walk on the hotel property?”

“Yes.”

“So, this is the official line of demarcation. You’re the border guards. On this side of you, free. On that side of you, ten bucks a head.”

“Yes.”

I laughed. We left. I loved and hated Mackinac Island.

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Dry as bone: Excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

"Entering the Homeland of Jicarilla Apache." The homeland was dry as bone, and Dulce, the reservation’s main town, held no sweetness. Dulce Lake, behind Dulce Dam, was grass and dust. Adopt-a-Highway stretches remembered tribal members like Assegra Luccero, Sea Willow. The Jicarilla Vietnam vets had adopted another piece of this lonely up-and-down road. From here on, for many days and many hundreds of miles, I kept the headlights on. These roads numbed the brain, and I wanted a fair chance of waking the eyes and reflexes of anyone coming at us on these thin strips of sizzling blacktop.

We’d been climbing on Route 64, and when we plateaued, the natural gas industry took over. On high ground, where I got some Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on Big Dog 96.9, KDAG out of Durango, compressors, tanks, wells, pipes, and holding containers sat unmanned in the desert wilderness. Bright white gas worker pickups populated the road, and when we crested one long rise in the highway at noon, we faced a wall of the white trucks, many from Williams Company, parked at a lone, low building marked "Café," twenty-three miles from Bloomfield, in the middle of nowhere. Lunchtime out in the gas fields.

We came to the green San Juan River, which I will always remember and love. The liquid lifeline hosted a valley and basin that would run green and fertile all the way to Farmington. We first met the San Juan at Blanco, the town a wonderful green relief from the yellow desolation, with fertile fields and trees nurtured by the sweet water. The San Juan and its valley formed a long lush strip that my eyes followed to the horizon for hours, and I missed it when it no longer ran beside us.

We’d entered the Navajo Nation. A sign on the Navajo Missions Communication Center asked people to "Pray For Rain." My fire danger radar had been up in earnest for nearly two hundred miles now, and I sensed things were about to heat up for real. I’d checked the maps for alternate routes, should fire close the roads I’d planned to take, the roads that lived within the lines of the Route Narrative. Parts of the Route Narrative might need to be rewritten. KDAG 96.9, "serving the whole Four Corners area," had thanked firefighters for saving homes and urged them to "stay sane and brave." Not a good sign. Out of the frying pan.

Bloomfield and Farmington oozed into each other, like the natural gas industry that holds them together and keeps them alive. With little else around to please the tourist, Bloomfield’s Dairy Queen, which we would have jumped at anyway, looked like traveler’s heaven behind the heat waves that danced on the blacktop. The vanilla soft-serves made our hours of desert driving feel like a race run once the medal’s around your neck. We got larges this time, and Adam lucked out because Dana couldn’t finish hers.

Shiprock was the reason we were here in this burning hot Bloomfield-Farmington sprawl. My brother-in-law, Jim, once hiked near Shiprock, a dramatic monolith that rises nearly eight thousand feet and dominates the Navajo Nation visually and spiritually. He spoke of its monumental profile, its remoteness, its deep meaning. I value Jim’s opinion on any subject and put Shiprock on my list of things to see if I ever had the chance.

As we drove through the Navajo Nation, we looked on bright blue meat markets selling mutton and lamb to families eating outside on aluminum tables; satellite dishes painted with Indian motifs; a few mud hogans; stores selling two dollar a pack cigarettes; penned sheep; tightly-packed green and gold hay bricks sold from pickups for five dollars apiece; billboards urging teens to practice sexual abstinence; power lines; houses selling "Frye Bread, Sweet Corn, Roast Mutton." And always, there was Shiprock. To the Navajo, Tse Bit` A`i. Rock With Wings.

We drove out of Navajo land on Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients. The road was arrow-straight, and when the colossal monolith was no longer in front of or beside us, it sat in the rearview mirror and remained there, gradually filling less and less of it as we neared Colorado. Dana had been reading for a long time. She looked up and out the window. "Shiprock is still there," she said quietly. Like Acoma, a place that always was. A great ship of stone riding the earth, giving the people a link to the past, a grip on the present, and hope for the future.

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Ashland: Home of the Oredockers

From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

As we moved through America we were, for periods of time that were always too short, part of so many places that radiated pride, history, industry, honesty, these strengths sometimes lying beneath a tired, wizened surface, making you scratch a bit to find whatever gave the place its meaning.

As we approached Ashland, Wisconsin on Route 13, something singular appeared. The road rode high, and the view opened into a wide sweep. Something monstrous and hauntingly gorgeous jutted a quarter-way out into Chequamegon Bay. It was clear it was a ruin, once powerful and important, now disused. It looked like a bridge, an aqueduct, a railroad trestle, a giant pier. It was mysteriously beautiful.

Ashland’s Soo Line oredock was the first of several we’d see on the Great Lakes, mammoth, hulking vestiges of the once mighty iron and steel industries. Colossal steel and wood cathedrals across whose tops ore-laden railroad cars had rolled to the literal end of the line and dumped their cargo into the holds of freighters waiting in the water below, freighters like the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Ashland seemed a Carl Sandburg place. He would have found poems here, I think. A crimson sandstone city that once pulsed to the beat and brawn of arriving and departing ore trains and ships. The rich red stone and towering silvery-white steeple of Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church commanded the hillside above the bay and glowed in the intense sun as if afire. Vivid murals with scenes from Ashland’s history adorned the old brick sides of buildings all over town. Main Street was a parade of exquisite late 19th century red sandstone buildings and big old banks like Greek temples, built, I imagined, to hold all the iron, railroad and freighter money of an earlier Ashland. Main Street rivaled the best of the scores of pridefully preserved old American downtowns we rolled through on this journey, downtowns that wore their pasts like medals and badges of honor, and that presented a looking glass into our history, history sadly overlooked or, worse, lost, in the numbing sterility of strip malls and interstates.

The longer we spent in it, the more I loved Ashland.

But it was the great black and rust oredock that kept drawing us back. A mammoth ribcage, gritty and haunting. It captivated, then choked you with melancholy. I couldn’t leave it.

The $20-a-night RV sites next to Kreher Park sat in the shadow of the leviathan oredock whose last load shipped out in 1965. The campers could boat, swim, read in a chair on the beach, or consider the mighty rusting ore chutes overhead that ran the length of the massive dock. We parked under the rail approach to the dock, and looked up between the wooden ties and steel rails and imagined the great Soo Line cars rolling over our heads out over the water to the end of the dock, freighters lined up, hungry holds open and agape, metal clanging, ore pellets booming down endless chutes called pockets, men yelling, whistles wailing.

Up the road at Bayview Park, some kids dashed down a wooden swimming pier, screeching and hollering as they jumped off into cold Superior. Their parents sat at a picnic table under a tree and ate chips and big sandwiches. The kids would jump off, swim to the beach, catch their breath, then whoop again down the pier. The parents were consumed by their food, so the lean, young lifeguard was left to monitor every pier-length dash, every leap off the edge, and every swim back to shore, making sure every kid was at all times accounted for. He shared bits of oredock info between leaps and dashes.

“We’re the Oredockers,” he said, of Ashland’s high school sports teams. (I imagined him the star quarterback.) He pointed to long, straight rows of seagulls sitting in the water near the pier we stood on. “That’s an old dock right there.” We looked closer, and saw the submerged remnants of an oredock, now just flooded pilings that made excellent bird pedestals. The exact skeleton of the dock was revealed by visually connecting-the-gulls. “There used to be seven or eight oredocks right here around Ashland,” said the blond Speedoed teenager before he sped off again to check on the running, leaping, swimming triathletes.

Sundance rodeo

Sundance, Wyoming wrapped its cowboy tradition around us within an hour of arrival. We sat back on bleachers and watched the whole town turn out to see local seat-of-the-pants toughness in action at the Crook County Fair.

Some of the toughest pants belonged to grammar school kids in full chaps and cowboy hats who tore around barrels and poles so fast I wondered what it must be like to be their mothers, watching their babies streak around the dusty arena at full gallop, cutting edges and corners closer than a buzz cut. We got dirt kicked in our eyes every few minutes, and loved every granule.

Outside the arena fence, pickups and horse trailers sat in the grass, and people led, fed, and groomed their horses. It was kids’ rodeo night, with both juniors and seniors competitions, and grade schoolers to teengers waited outside the fence, controlling varying amounts of nervous energy.

Inside the arena fence it was take-no-prisoners rodeo.

And, between outside and inside, the rodeo queen reigned from the fence at the chute that fed the riders into the ring. The queen was about 17, and she wore glasses, jet black cowboy hat and jeans, and a cobalt blue shirt of glittering sequins that dazzled and jumped like it was alive. Everyone around was dusty, but the queen sparkled.

I took a picture of her, from behind. She sat on the fence facing left, watching the next rider tuck her nervousness up under her hat and get ready to enter the ring.

The rodeo kids were amazing riders. Sharp-turning and lightning fast. Kids with names like Tess and Cody earned blue and purple ribbons, and their parents displayed them on the side mirrors of their pickups or lined them along their dropped truck bed tailgates next to the horse grooming brushes.

"Look at that lil’ cowboy!" exclaimed the announcer, as some tiny guy in jeans and boots and hat (how do they stay on at that speed?) raced tight around obstacles and thundered across the arena. Townspeople here know what kind of cowboy a kid is by the time he’s 10.

Above us, on the bleachers’ top two rungs, sat a group of lean, fit teenagers, all of them, boys and girls alike, with self-assured mountain good looks. "You ride that horse, girl!" They whooped and cheered for their barrel-racing friends the way other high school kids scream for the kids who make touchdowns and slam dunks and speed records in the mile. The harder and faster the riding, the tighter the corners, the louder the hoof-pounding, the dustier the ring, the greater the appreciation and approval from the rider’s peers.

Adam preferred the Sundance Motor Inn’s cable TV to rodeo, but Dana was utterly enthralled by this magical place where people lived and breathed riding and ranching and rodeo as a matter of course, threads in the fabric of their everyday lives. She saw past the spectacle of the Crook County Fair and realized in a hoofbeat that the people in this town – the kids and teenagers, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas – lived a life centered on land and animals, the outdoors, hard work and hard play. They lived and worked in jeans and cowboy hats. Where we live, people gather for baseball and soccer games. Sundancers gather for rodeo.

Dana spoke barely a word while we sat on those bleachers. I could see her thoughts. I could see her eyes take in everything, every detail her senses allowed her to capture. I watched her mind catalogue Sundance, Wyoming as a dream town, the greatest place on earth to live.

Proof positive of the town’s magic came when the loudspeaker crackled and the rodeo announcer broadcast the news that there’d be a giant cake to celebrate 4-H’s 100th birthday. Everyone was invited to come back to the big exhibition barn where the cake would be cut, "after Karaoke Madness." Surely, heaven must be like Sundance. Horses everywhere and a cake big enough to feed the whole town.

I went out at 6:30 the next morning and ran the neat, tree-lined streets of tiny Sundance and ended up back at the fairgrounds, which sat next to the Crook County Regional School, "Home of the Bulldogs." The yellow school buses that had been parked since June still had last school year’s "Who Let The Dogs Out" and "Go Dogs Go" written in white paint all over their windows.

I ran behind the livestock barn where, the night before, we’d taken in the exhibitions and seen prize-winning pigs and cows and champion sheep, wrapped like royalty in little purple coats.

In rose-colored post-dawn, the scene was different. No flash or showmanship, just love, pride and hard work. A dozen or so of the ranchers and farmers who owned these show animals were in the barn, tending to their livestock. Feeding, washing, grooming, patting, talking, whispering. A family gathered around its goat, stroking it.

Out back, a lanky teenage boy with long, tousled brown hair nuzzled, soothed and said good morning to his black cow. He held the animal’s ears in his hands and rested his chin on the cow’s forehead. I left Sundance with this scene of love and deep contentment in my head.

excerpted from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

Crossing the Hudson: Nostalgia trip

I'll need a lot of hot coffee tomorrow. I'm looking at 10 hours of dashboard time as I ferry Dana and two friends to running camp in New York's Catskill Mountains. The trip is five hours out and five back.

I'm actually looking forward to the trip. I enjoy long distance driving. (When I was a teenager I announced to my parents that I planned to become a long-haul trucker. As I was seventh in my high school graduating class of 400, my dad gave a crafty response, one that simultaneously humored a pouty, 17-year-old rebel and directed a six-removed-from-valedictorian toward higher education: "Sure!" he said. "Trucking's a wonderful career. And you'll be good at it. You can do it right after you finish college!")

I pulled out my Rand McNally road atlas to map out my route to the Catskill camp and found I'll be covering some of the same territory the kids and I traveled at the very beginning and very end of our 12,000-mile, post-9/11 back road journey across America.

As I traced the map's red, black and blue lines with my finger, wonderful moments of that journey, one I feel blessed to have been able to take and to have experienced with my children, came rushing back. Tomorrow's long road trip will deliver sweet stretches filled with good memories.

Early in the day tomorrow I will cross the Hudson River at Fishkill, New York. In this excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America Adam, Dana and I come to Fishkill as we roll westward in the summer of 2002:

By the time we’d crossed Connecticut, New Paint was transformed. Somewhere around Hartford, the family car became a comfortable home, a secure haven, a dependable workhorse, a full member of the expedition. The kids settled in with their pillows and books and headphones. I eased into the rhythm of the road. And New Paint purred confidently westward, thrilled to be released from post office and grocery store runs. We were four travelers- three with legs, one with wheels.

I’ll remember Fishkill, New York as the place where my mind grasped the magic and enormity of what we were doing. The pull of the road; the lure of unknown places; the freedom of being away. These gripped me as we filled our water bottles at the Fishkill rest area and gazed over the history-steeped Hudson River Valley falling away just beyond the endless line of truckers resting in their rigs.

Letters on the trucks and license plates told of vast stretches of highway leading to the places where these tired men lived when they weren’t on the road: Tomah, Wisconsin; Lincoln, Nebraska; Texas; Louisiana; Minneapolis. Hard-working men delivering things Americans want and need, catching some sleep in the late afternoon on the side of the road in Fishkill, New York.


Very late in the day tomorrow I will recross the Hudson River as I head back toward Boston on a route I've driven before. From the final chapter of Ribbons of Highway:



Ten miles south of Albany, we crossed the Hudson on a sky-blue steel bridge. Full circle. We’d crossed her near Fishkill, New York, nearly 12,000 miles ago. Jetskiers played in the twinkling water below us. I pointed south. "If you followed that water, guys, in a few hours you’d be in New York harbor. You’d pass under the George Washington Bridge, you’d float by Grant’s tomb and the Intrepid, and you’d come to the Statue of Liberty. Those jetskiers could ride to New York City if they wanted to." The kids liked the image. Jetskiing to New York City!


We saw the Massachusetts Turnpike’s pilgrim hat logo and a sign that said "Boston." It was an odd moment. No one spoke for a while. We were almost home, and we didn’t know what or how to feel.

We crossed the Massachusetts border at West Stockbridge, lush and rolling. After the bright blue "Massachusetts Welcomes You" sign near the Stockbridge tolls, I tooted the horn, and Adam and I rolled our windows down. We waved and whoopied at the cars lining up to go through the tollbooths. Some people had seen the tailgate etchings and had likely figured out we weren’t crazy or rude, just long gone and now returning.

We passed the cellphone around and called all the people to whom the words, "We’re in Massachusetts!" would mean something. Now they waited for us, while we rolled the final miles down the turnpike, which felt like a long, green exit ramp to home.

But we’d really been home all along. Our whole journey had been a 12,000-mile discovery of home.


It will feel good to get back home tomorrow night after such a long trip, but it will also feel good to have made the trip -- again.



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A Cajun 4th of July

It was the first 4th of July after September 11, and the kids and I spent it with some fine people in Louisiana. An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

On the 4th of July, we found ourselves at Avery Island, home of McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce factory. Being a holiday, the factory was closed, and the workers had a day off to crab. We hung at the dock outside McIlhenny’s with two-year old Trey, his mom Tracy, dad Doug, his grandma, and his “nanonk,” Uncle Travis. (I wondered if nanonk owned Nonk’s Car Repair back up Route 329 in Rynela, near the trailer of the lady that advertised “Professional Ironing.”)

Trey, in his little jeans and bright red rubber Wellingtons, held his hands on both sides of his head and, with eyes wide as plates, told me about what was “in there.” Turkey necks tied to strings and weighed down with washers were the bait of choice of all the crabbers on the dock, and a four-foot gator had decided to come and help himself. He’d just been shooed away and waited on the other side of the canal.

Trey had his own cooler filled with crabs. His parents had a second cooler, so full that when they opened it, crabs spilled out. Tracy and grandma sat on chairs under striped umbrellas and tried to keep Trey from climbing the dock’s fence. Nanonk said, “If’n you fall in, I ain’t goin’ in after ya. Gonna let the gator git ya.”

That night would be America’s first 4th of July night since September 11. All through Louisiana we’d seen evidence that people planned to celebrate with spirit. Fireworks stands were busy. But there’d be caution, too. I’d seen a Times-Picayune story titled “United We Plan” about security measures to protect celebrations large and small around the country. Americans would be out on Independence Day, but with their guard up.

We stood on the balcony of our Bossier City motel and watched fireworks from Shreveport, just across the Red River. Inside the room, James Taylor and Ray Charles entertained on TV from New York City, and two giant crickets tried, unsuccessfully, to elude me.

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Fallingwater and funky toilets

From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America (click here to order or to download the e-book):


Our Donegal, Pennsylvania motel sat near the BP station - good for filling up, not good for Friday night sleeping. The music of a Donegal Friday night is the continuous screech of teenagers peeling out of the BP, sound systems at high bass and high volume, burning rubber down Route 31 to the Dairy Queen.

Even without the earsplitting coming of age ritual, I wouldn’t have slept in Donegal. The chatty gentleman who checked in just before us (“On my way to Virginia to see the grandkids.”) had nabbed the last non-smoking room (“The missus’ll gag if I take smoking.”). So, I took the hit for her, wishing I could put my nose on the nightstand until morning to get it away from the stink that started in the pillowcase, then permeated every ounce of polyester fiberfill. I resolved to never again rent a smoking room. We’d keep driving, or sleep in the van, maybe in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Morning brought sweet silence, fresh air and Fallingwater. The kids knew the Guggenheim and knew Frank Lloyd Wright’s stuff was funky, but they gave me the “We’re gonna tour a house?” lament anyway. Until they saw it. We followed our guide, Justin, into all the cantilevered corners of the cement and steel aerie, and imagined what it must have been like to be Lillian Kaufman or her two Edgars and live in a place that belonged, in every sense save ownership, to the platform-shoed egoist who built it.

We loved it, even the treehouse-like ticket pavilion with deep eco-friendly toilets that terrified one girl so much she burst from the stall shouting, “I can’t go! It’s too scary!”

Back in the van, as Dana told and retold the scary bathroom story, we laughed, at more than the story. Something good had just clicked into place, and we knew we were going to enjoy this trip - and each other. If we could have this much fun talking about toilets, and dishing on Frank Lloyd for getting mad at Lillian because she didn’t like his dining room chairs, just imagine what great times lay ahead! An entire country’s worth! We opened some bags and cans of junk food, cranked the tunes, and headed for West Virginia.

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