There’s something about a disaster that becomes personal even to those who are not damaged by it. Many people take a personal ownership of it, even take a peculiar personal pride in it even if their property stays dry and intact.
We’re seeing some of that in Jefferson City in the wake of our tornado a few days before the Memorial Day Weekend and the accompanying flooding. This is “our” disaster and we see and will see other disasters through our lens.
It’s not unusual. Those of us who remember the 1993 flooding measure floods in other parts of the country against that one and in some odd way find satisfaction in thinking, “Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.” The Joplin tornado has become our measuring stick when we see reports of tornado disasters in other parts of the country. Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.
Until the disaster takes off OUR porch, blows down OUR house, destroys OUR business.
OUR tornado took nobody’s life. It damaged about 200 buildings in Jefferson City, some of which will have to be removed because they cannot be repaired, but compared to Joplin it was a little thing.
Except it’s OUR thing. And now we will consider ourselves kin to Joplin and we will see reports of tornadoes in other places through OUR lens, not in terms of extent of damage but in terms of fellowship. We have now joined the fellowship of them.
We don’t know if the folks in Joplin, on hearing of the tornado that hit Eldon then Jefferson City, have thought inwardly, “Huh! We had it a lot worse than they did.” But it is likely natural that some of them would have evaluated our situation against the extent of their disaster.
We’re still waiting to see if our rainy spring continues, as it did in 1993, and pushes later flood crests that establish new references that end observations such as, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad. But back in ’93…,” the same way that the 1993 flood ended observations from the real old-timers that, “I remember back in 1951…”
In Eldon and in Jefferson City right now, though, the focus is on recovery. The comparisons with later disasters will come after the debris is cleared away, the buildings that can be saved are saved, and the buildings that cannot be rescued are bulldozed down and the lots where they stood grow new grass.
I haven’t consulted with Nancy yet, but if we win the big lottery jackpot(s) I think I’d like to offer one-million dollars to the Historic City of Jefferson, which has worked for years to revitalize East Capitol Avenue where some of the historic structures might become those grass-filled lots, to be used to supplement insurance payments to rebuild those damaged homes—even those now seemingly destined for destruction. Gutting the destroyed interior and building a modern inside structure while salvaging the historic exterior would be a goal worth some of those lottery winnings.
But I’m not going to win the lottery. Somebody else somewhere else always buys a winning ticket just before or just after I buy mine (I tell myself that). I think I will send a much, much, much smaller amount, though. And maybe others capable of greater philanthropic capacity will want to participate more grandly in saving what some think cannot be saved.
After all, it is OUR disaster. And part of comparing OUR disaster to those elsewhere in the future should include what we do now to save the things we are told can’t be saved.
History tells us an Act of God can be countered by godly acts that rescue people and the past from the worst that has happened.
I bought another lottery ticket a few days ago. And I also wrote a check.
Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.
If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.
It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.
A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there. If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource. Jefferson City is acting.
The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City. Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity. And a major challenge.
We should not underestimate that challenge. Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.
We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.
There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package. It also would finance construction of a new state museum building. Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.
This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.
This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol. The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.
You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.
If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war. We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity. If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.
A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal. There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum. We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.
We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state. We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.
This is an important point: We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds. We can do all of this without a general tax increase.
Our proposal is even more significant because—
It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856. It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.
Why are these boats so special? And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west. Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier. We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived.
From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air. The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.
The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty. Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.
The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.
The Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.
David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.
And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete. If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.
If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.
Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill? Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?
David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere. The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.
David is a dreamer. Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River. That history spanned 1820-1880. By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.
The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles. It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close. The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta.
We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.
The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.
2019-2026. It’s not much time.
Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal. It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.
Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed. But we, as a community, must help them. Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers. Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms. It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.
We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”
We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.
We must do this.
(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)
Almost eight years ago (has it really been eight years?) after the Joplin tornado we were curious about how it stacked up compared to other disastrous events in Missouri and we put together a list on the old Missourinet Blog that we knew was incomplete. We’ve found some other tragic events to add to that list and have decided it’s time for an update. In fact, the number of deaths from the Joplin tornado was a premature total so we’ve updated that. Some accounts vary in the number of deaths for some of these incidents and some are only estimated numbers.
It is difficult to pin down the exact number of deaths caused by heat waves throughout Missouri. The National Weather Service has extensive records of the heat but we haven’t been able to find comprehensive numbers of deaths for Missouri during heat waves. We’ve been able to find numbers for St. Louis in three of them but it’s quite likely the statewide totals were much higher. We’ve listed the fatalities in St. Louis to make note of the tragedies and will update the figures if we find better numbers.
Few deaths were recorded in the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes. The areas hit hardest were thinly-populated in those days and while records were kept of the violence of the shocks it appears no effort was made to compile a comprehensive death total.
Just for the record or a record of some kind, here’s the list of disasters that have taken twenty or more lives in Missouri.
4,317—St. Louis cholera epidemic, Summer, 1849 (Some accounts put the number closer to 6,000.)
4,000 plus—Kansas City and St. Louis Spanish Influenza 1918-1919
479—St. Louis only, Heat wave of 1936.
255–St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896
209-300 (est.) Steamboat Stonewall fire, Neely’s Landing, Cape Girardeau County, October 27, 1869 (accounts vary)
158–Joplin tornado May 22, 2011 (plus three “indirect” deaths)
118—St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896 (118 more in East St. Louis)
114–Hyatt Regency Hotel Skywalks collapse, Kansas City July 17, 1981
More than eight decades ago a study was done to determine what makes a city a worthwhile place for people to live. It probably wasn’t the first study and it sure hasn’t been the last.
The same factors that make a city a good place to live make a state a good place to live. In our political discussions, however, contemporary talk seems to focus on one element that diminishes the importance of other factors and, in fact, makes some other factors harder to achieve. But the other factors often don’t manipulate political emotions as effectively as the one that year after year gets the greatest attention.
The Jefferson City Post-Tribune ran an editorial on December 17, 1937 about the survey on the qualities of good cities. Then, as now, the politically popular supposed solution to all problems was not a factor in determining what makes a livable city. Here’s the editorial that could be as applicable today as it was then.
More than three hundred cities of our United States recently were investigated by a group of researchers from an eastern college to learn the difference between a city where people live and where they merely exist or serve time until the job runs out.
They found among other things that the character of the cities’ inhabitants more than economic advantages make for civic goodness.
In studying a given city, the university investigators asked questions like these:
What are the general and infant death rates? How much money, per capita, is spent on libraries, on education, on recreation? How common is extreme poverty? What percentage of the people own their own homes? What percentage own automobiles? How many doctors, nurses, and teachers are there in proportion to the population? What are the per capita expenditures for highways, for light, for sanitation, for police, fire and health departments? What is the homicide rate? How much unemployment was there in the census year 1930? What is the average income of the citizens?
Answer all those questions—and a lot more along similar lines—and you get a pretty fair picture of a city. Furthermore, you get a picture which is not necessarily the same as the one you would get simply by adding up the city’s tangible, visible assets—its transportation facilities, its industries, its natural resources and so on.
In other words the man who works for decent municipalplaygrounds is doing as much for a city as the man who goes out and gets a factory. One is essential to the well-being of the community and the other to its prosperity in dollars and cents. A first rate mayor, chief of police or street commissioner can be a civic asset of incalculable value. And so, of course, can a first rate Chamber of Commerce, civic club, women’s organization, that has the general welfare at heart.
A city is a place to live as well as work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of the community.
We thought it interesting that the editorial’s list of questions asked “How much money, per capita, is spent on…?” But our state policy makers so often find themselves saying, “There isn’t enough money for….” as they discuss the newest proposal to have even less.
A state is a place to live as well as to work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of a state. Unfortunately there aren’t many lobbyists or major campaign donors who have “the general welfare at heart.”
There is a difference between a state where people live and where they merely exist or serve until the job runs out.
This is the old home place. It’s changed quite a bit since my folks left it a long time ago.
We think they lived here. The story has gotten kind of foggy in the last three million years or so. The old home place actually could be in one of several places in Africa. Cousin Lucy, for example, was living in nearby Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago.
This is Oldupai Gorge. “Oldupai” is a Masai word. This place usually is called “Olduvai” Gorge because a German butterfly hunter named Wilhelm Kattwinkel stumbled on this place in 1911, and asked the Masai people who live in the area what the place was called. They thought he was referring to a plant that flourishes there, the Oldupai, and he misunderstood what they said and furthermore mispronounced it and the gorge has been stuck with Olduvai ever since..
That’s the Oldupai plant growing outside the museum. The more formal name is Blue Sansevierra or Sword Sansevierra. It has a tuxedo-formal name but let’s just leave it at being a Sansevierra plant. The old timers such as Uncle Nutcracker Man used it for all kinds of things, much like a more modern people in this country we erroneously call the Anasazi used Yucca plants.
The Masai have used it for clothing, or thread for sewing. They use it to fix problems with leather products. They make the fibers of it into rope. It’s also good for baskets and roofs. And bandages. In fact it has a natural antiseptic quality. Almost fifty years ago one of the scientists working in the gorge used the plant for a natural bandage over an injury. It worked so well that he went into pharmaceutical research with it. And cattle like it during the dry season.
Oldupai Gorge is a thirty-mile long feature of the Great Rift Valley—as some call it—which is an area of tectonic activity that eventually will produce a rift deep enough for water to flow into it, splitting this part of eastern Africa away from the main continent. Don’t worry about it. It will happen long after you have been there and have returned safely.
The Leakey family, starting in the 1930s, found fossils here that started to rewrite the human evolutionary record. They found in soil layers about three-hundred feet deep four kinds of hominids, each showing an increase in brain size. In related levels, they found increasingly sophisticated stone tools.
For a few minutes we were face to face with old Uncle Nut, as we like to call him. He originally was named Zinjanthropus boisei. Well, we don’t know what his contemporaries called him, assuming they had names for each other 1.84 million years ago. The Leakeys gave him that name and then they changed it after deciding he was part of the Paranthropus genus. He gained the nickname “Nutcracker Man” because he had small incisors and large molars that led the Leakeys to think he fed on grains, nuts and seeds. Later studies have revealed he lived on grass and leaves.
How do we know that Uncle Nut should actually be Uncle Grass? A Smithsonian article in June of 2012 says there was another Paranthropus genus in another part of Africa. And an analysis of the fossilized teeth of Paranthropus robustus, who lived in South Africa suggest he was the one who ate hard foods. Chemical tests of robustus’ enamel, indicates as much as sixty percent of their diet was fruit and hard-shelled nuts. Imagine that—there’s enough food residue on those teeth after almost two-million years that scientists can figure out what their diet was.
Uncle Nut, P. bosei in scientific terms, had a bigger jaw and the biggest molars of any hominid found up to 2012, indicating that species was a strong chewer. At the time, eastern Africa was open grasslands and woods, much different from southern Africa. But Uncle Nut’s molars don’t have the pitting one might find in animals that eat hard objects. Carbon isotopes from his teeth also show as much as 77 percent of his diet was sedges and grasses. The study of the teeth also indicates the area of Oldupai Gorge was quite a bit different from the arid area it seems to be today.
So Uncle Nut was a vegetarian, a trait that hasn’t crossed to this particular possible descendent in the millennia since. This possible descendant is a confirmed carnivore. If there’s going to be pizza, let’s make it a meat lover’s pizza.
To be clear, we call him “uncle,” but he might be more of a cousin. Some scientists say the Paranthropus genus is an offspring of Australopithecus, the line that they think led to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens, which is us.
Frankly, I don’t see much of a family resemblance in the pictures at the museum but as time went by and as his descendants and contemporaries moved throughout Africa and then later into what we call “The Holy Land” and ultimately into northern Europe or along the Mediterranean seacoast—and the rest of the world—they gained some new looks.
Now, we realize some who read this chronicle disagree with the whole evolution thing. That’s okay. But Nancy and I have let National Geographic analyze some of our spit and our DNA shows we might have had some relatives in common with Nutcracker Man or at least some of his contemporaries.
Things are pretty up-to-date in ancient Oldupai or Olduvai Gorge. Power lines are not strung across national parks to reach this place. Tanzania is big on what we call alternative energy. Hydropower. Solar power. And wind. There is oil but it’s under some areas that are too precious, not to mention too dangerous, for drillers. And we hope it is always so. If the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge had some of the critters lying in the grass that we saw in the nearby Serengeti National Park, there would be no controversy about drilling for oil there as there does not seem to be, so far, at Oldupai. It’s not wise to drill for oil in an area where the drillers are considered food.
Just before we headed to Africa, I started reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He writes that at least seven different kinds of Sapiens eventually evolved from areas like the Gorge. But we, Homo sapiens, have survived and we’ve done it by eliminating the others. We have been the lone human species for the last twelve-thousand years and that, he says, has left us arrogant but uncertain.
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
A group of Homo sapiens gods from a place their kind call Missouri looked down into an ancient gorge that day, the place where Paranthropus bosei ate grass and leaves in what they call Tanzania, African-Americans many generations removed visiting the old home place.
There were three zebras munching on the grass outside our patio on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater on our last morning in Tanzania. Monkeys frolicked on the sidewalk as we walked to the lodge for breakfast. And we realized after two weeks of civilized travel in dangerous places what an amazing adventure we had had. And it is likely we would never return. But we took a lot of pictures that we will look at time and again because—–
Well, because we were someplace magic, I guess. That might be the closest we can come to describing being in another world, one that wasn’t a human world.
Imagine being in a place so sublime that you can sit on your patio after dinner and watch what we were able to watch.
It doesn’t take long to realize why Serengeti National Park in Tanzania is called “The Last Eden.” But dangers lurk in these places. Not long after we got home, we saw a news article that a tourist at a park where we watched zebras and gazelles graze was killed by a hippo. We were told that the hippos came around our sleeping places in that park late at night to graze. They are very territorial and surprisingly quick. We were in a boat on a Kenyan lake one day and we made sure we kept our distance.
So did the hippo.
Visit all the zoos that you want to visit, but until you have seen the broken line of hundreds of families of approaching elephants stretching to the horizon on your left to a similar line headed to the horizon on your right, these elephants crossing the road twenty yards in front of you, you have not seen elephants.
Until you see a black line in the distance and realize it is thousands of migrating Wildebeests, you cannot imagine the Great Plains in our country as our ancestors in covered wagons saw buffalo. Nor can you imagine the grasses of that era until you have gazed at the grass of the Serengeti that extends as far as you can see.
See the giraffe in a zoo and you have not seen a giraffe until you see a half-dozen of them gliding in their awkward dignity across an open area, nor can you appreciate the magnificence of these creatures until you walk past one of them munching on the leaves of the tree over your head as you head to your room from the dining hall.
And seeing a lion in its zoo “habitat” is not really seeing a lion. Peering into the tall, tan, grass trying to differentiate between what is grass and what is fur, listening to it eat and then watching something of powerful grace emerge and walk away, perhaps with a dismissive glance toward you, that is seeing a lion. But it’s often hard to see them, and that’s the way they like it.
For most of us, zoos are where we can appreciate these animals. In some cases, zoos are places where these animals have their greatest hopes of survival as species and we should appreciate the people who want to make sure we see something more than skeletons of extinct animals in our natural history museums.
But friends, if you ever have the opportunity to see them where they really live, save your money for however long it takes to afford the trip, and take it. We signed up for a Central Bank Classic Club tour, knowing we would spend hours in an aluminum tube high in the air, sometimes so crowded we couldn’t stretch out our legs all the way, hoping our tray tables didn’t cut us in half because a dolt in front insisted on lowering his (or her) seat back all the way. We knew we might get little sleep, would eat microwaved food (which isn’t all that bad) and snacks and might get to watch a movie to help pass the time. More than seventeen hours on three flights each way, and vehicle travel for two weeks that often made us dearly appreciate seat belts might be discouraging to some. But every inconvenience was worth every penny—and then some.
We endured the worst roads we’ve ever traveled to get to some of the most magnificent areas we have ever seen. (Come along with us for several minutes on a stretch of road that led to one of our lodges. Understand that our guide, James, did an excellent job making our ride as smooth as possible by swerving all over the road to minimize the beating we were taking). It is worth noting that the tires on our vehicles were TWELVE-ply radials. The tires you and I drive on our tame Missouri roads are four-ply. Some of our party who wore the wrist-bands that measure how many steps are taken in a day (10,000 is considered healthy) were seeing numbers beyond twenty and thirty-thousand. One even got a reading of 42,000—because of the daily bouncing, twisting, turning and grabbing the OS handle in our Land Cruisers. At the end of the day we could understand how tennis shoes feel after they’ve been through the clothes dryer. We were surprised when we got home to see that we had each lost about five pounds although we had eaten well.
But, oh, my goodness. The things we saw—some of them things that are disappearing in the wild.
The rhinoceros is under dire threat from poachers who are killing them for their horns that are ground into a powder and sold for high prices in some countries because of the belief the powder cures cancer or hangovers or improves virility or produces a cocaine-like high. This is the only time we saw rhinos and these were white rhinos. We saw no black rhinos because they are considered critically endangered and only about 5,500 are known in all of Africa.
Marvel at the trees, the Acacias with their leaves that seem to grow as clouds over the top branches, but also with thorns similar to the thorns on our locust trees—a reminder that in the wild, beauty and danger often are the same. And sometimes it’s not the thorns that are the most dangerous things in those trees.
No, we did not get out of our Range Rover to go stand under the tree to take this picture. On trips such as these, we worship the telephoto lens and the high-megapixel camera. In fact, we worshipped them more than 3,500 times, probably and we worshipped the big memory card when we got home.
But the eaters and the eaten are facing uncertainty. The National Geographic we bought at Downtown Book and Toy after our trip had an article about Kenyan farmers who were crowding the habitat of the magnificent creatures we saw poisoning the animals who were there in the first place to protect their crops and livestock.
Did you know that you can tell if an elephant is right-handed or left-handed? Yep. And that leads us to the difference between the elephants we saw in Africa compared to those we would see if we ever go to India. African elephants such as this fellow (and we were a safe distance from him, too), both male and female, have tusks. Asian elephants don’t all have tusks. Those that do are males. About half of the Asian lady elephants have tusks but they don’t have any pulp in them and they’re called tushes, a word that has a different meaning in our country. something else.
Yes, the tusks are weapons against predators. But they’re mostly used for foraging, or digging, or stripping bark off trees or just moving things out of the way. And you can tell if an elephant is right-or-left handed (tusked?) by checking which tusk is shorter.
We saw the “Big Five,” the animals the big game hunters most covet—Lion, Cape Buffalo, Rhinoceros, elephant, leopard—throughout our safaris although we saw the rhinos only that one day and leopards were elusive. We didn’t start seeing them until our last couple of days. We saw them from a safe distance, too, and we wouldn’t have seen them at all if our guides and their trained eyes didn’t spot them for us.
Leopards like to take their food up a tree to eat it. Otherwise a lion will take it away from them, we were told. We knew we were in leopard territory when our guide pointed out the horns of a former gazelle dangling from a tree branch.
And if we needed any reminders that the furry friends at home are related to these beautiful, lethal, creatures, this one reminded us that a cat like this, awakened from a nap and ready for action, acts just like our lap-warmer at home.
Okay, that’s enough for this edition of the summer vacation slide show.
Find a way to do what we did. Find a way to explore cultures and economies and habitats far different from ours and witness some animals who dismiss you as long as you are in your vehicle but who will gladly and quickly kill you if you step outside.
Sunrise. Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. 6:55 a.m. July 23, 2018. It is a winter day in Kenya, according to the animals who float above the animals below.
There is no time in nature; there is only light and darkness. There are no calendars, no seasons in nature; there is only instinctive behavior driven by heat and cold, dry and wet. There is no war in nature; there is only those who eat and those who are eaten—and all ultimately fall into the latter category.
But it is not the lion or the leopard, the angry elephant or hippo or rhino that is the most dangerous animal in those places. Only the most intelligent of nature’s creations—and therefore the most dangerous of nature’s creations—divide the world into measurable segments called time. Only the most intelligent—and most dangerous of nature’s creations—apply names to places, to the cycles of heat and cold, dry and wet, define the world around them in terms of beauty, and declare war on each other and sometimes on nature itself.
There are a few places in the world that prompt such reflections by the most intelligent and dangerous species. And those places are endangered by these most intelligent creatures who long ago abandoned an understanding that nature is a place for living and have accepted the idea that it is, instead, a place for having.
We have returned from places to which our fellow species have bestowed names: Aberdares, Naivasha, Nakuru, Masai Mara, Amboseli, Tarangire, Ngorongora, and Serengeti and in this and succeeding and perhaps irregular entries we propose to tell you about them.
But being part of the most intelligent and most dangerous species imposes a challenge because these places must be absorbed as much as seen. In the end, we suppose, there is a desperate hope that our species will—before it is too late—understand that we need places where there is no time, no seasons, no names.
There were times when we realized we were seeing some things reminiscent of what the a-westering pioneers in our own country might have witnessed when crossing the Great Plains and its high, tan, grass more than 150 years ago. The wildebeest migration was under way, their numbers blackening the horizon as the American Bison must have blackened our horizon then.
In our recent travels, we have gone from cities so crowded, so deadlocked by social and economic structures, so stifling of life itself, places with no horizons, to places where the heart may expand in a seemingly limitless world. Our species needs places where we are not forced to live inwardly but where we are free to fill national lungs (a phrase that originated with former Missouri Senator George Graham Vest when he defended Yellowstone from a plan by the federal government to let private commercial interests develop the area).
One of our group asked one of our guides in Tanzania if the country had natural resources it could exploit to build its economy. “We have oil,” said the guide. “But we prefer to leave it underground where it belongs because refining oil causes wars.” Tanzania uses hydropower, which supplies a lot, but not enough, of its electrical needs. It is extensively exploring development of biomass, particularly in agricultural areas, and it is aggressively moving toward the use of solar power, not surprising in a country with 2,800 to 3,500 hours of sunshine every year.
We stayed in lodges with limited hours of electric lights and limited hours of hot water because generators are used; no power lines are constructed across these lands. But these lodges had seemingly unlimited numbers of employees who walked with us between the main building and our rooms to keep us from crossing the paths of the animals who freely roamed the area: the giraffe along the walkway, the zebras and the antelope and the monkeys that roamed freely in our presence. And especially the hippos that came out of the water late at night to graze near our rooms.
In Tanzania and in Kenya, at least, there are some who realize some places are more important to the national character and to the future well-being of all species than what is beneath the soil. All of us need to see these places. And if our arrogant intelligence will let us learn from these places, perhaps we will learn there is an innate value to us in them that once lost can never be regained.
We are the smartest and therefore the most dangerous of all animals because we can think in abstract terms. Instead of communicating to others of our species, as the wild creatures we saw communicate to their own species, “Lion, run!” we are able to think, “Lion. What a great trophy,” or “Rhino. Horn. Better Sex.” Or “Land. Resources beneath it. Lions and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeest are dispensable. There is money here.”
The ancient scriptures tell us that God gave man dominion over the earth and all of the creatures created earlier. And they tell us that man and woman lived in harmony with those creatures—until they ate from the tree of knowledge and in doing so destroyed Eden. But they became the smartest animals.
There are too many who do not understand there is a difference between “dominion” and “domination.”
Domination is an excuse. Dominion is an obligation. Domination is a rationale for selfish and uncaring consumption. Dominion is a responsibility to save, to preserve, to create that which is lasting and which touches the spirit. Domination is short-sighted. Dominion is a long-term understanding that we, the smartest animals, cannot survive in ignorance of and disrespect for the land that give us life.
Domination is a destructive narrowness of immediate gratification. Dominion is an understanding that there are, as Aldo Leopold wrote, “things in this world more important than dollar signs and ciphers.”
If you trust your fellow intelligent species to accept Leopold’s words, you have no worries. Otherwise, do what we have done. See it before it is too late.
Some (maybe many) people have never trusted me. Some people have been afraid of me. Some people dislike me.
Because I am a reporter. I am a journalist.
I am an enemy of the people.
Some people.
They are most often people in power. And their strongest supporters.
Even now, when I do not daily roam the halls of political power, some consider me an enemy because of what I write.
I am an enemy of SOME people.
And because they think I am their enemy, they do their best to convince a general public that I am its enemy, too.
And their constant efforts to undermine the institutions of democracy—not just the press—are paying off, it seems.
Sam Stein, who writes for the politics and popular culture website The Daily Beast, wrote a few days ago of a new public opinion poll done by the Ipsos marketing and opinion research group that says almost half of self-identified Republicans think “the news media is the enemy of the American people.” Only about one-fourth of that group disagreed. And almost eighty percent of those surveyed think the mainstream media is unfair to President Trump.
Further, says the poll, forty-three percent of those self-identified Republicans think President Trump should be given authority to shut down news outlets “engaged in bad behavior.”
Whatever that means.
Almost one-fourth of those folks agreed that the President should be able to close The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations that apparently don’t willingly accept the Trump world view.
It’s no surprise that the poll found Democrats sharply disagree. But twelve percent of Democrats and one-fourth of the Independents surveyed feel that people like me are enemies of the American people.
Twelve percent of self-identified D’s and twenty percent of the I’s agree that President Trump should be able to stop the presses and turn off the cameras for newspapers and television networks he doesn’t like.
People like me have not felt so honored since Spiro Agnew referred to us as “nattering nabobs of negativity” in the Watergate days of the Nixon administration. But yesterday’s “nattering nabobs” continued to natter and history records who was more truthful about what had been going on.
This survey brings to mind an article discovered in The Guardian, an eastern African newspaper I picked up in Arusha, Tanzania a few days ago. The Tanzanian deputy minister for information, culture, arts and sports, Anastazia Wambura, had banned publication of the weekly paper MwanaHalisi last September for two years because of government-claimed “unethical reporting, the publishing of fabricated and inciting articles, and endangering national security.”
It seems the newspaper was accused of sedition for asking, “Whom should Tanzanians pray for, the President, or Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian lawyer and opposition politician” who had been arrested a half-dozen times last year including the final time—a year ago this month—for “insulting the President.” He had been shot eight times in the stomach and legs nine days before the newspaper was banned for “unethical reporting,” etc.
But the High Court in Dar es Salaam threw out the ban on July 24. The government information ministry did not report the reversal. But The Guardian let readers known the government had crossed a line in banning the newspaper. The editor of MwanaHalisi announced the shutdown had cost the newspaper 2.2 billion shillings (not quite one-million US dollars), and the newspaper was going to sue Wambura for damages.
So there’s an example of what happens in a country where the government defines “enemy of the people” and thinks it has the power to do something about them.
Enemies of the people spreading fake news. That, apparently, is people like me.
Richard Nixon had his list of enemies of the people spreading fake news. We know that didn’t turn out well for him.
Government officials and government in general prefer not to be held accountable, not to be questioned either about their motivations, the legitimacy of their implied or emplaced policies, or held accountable for the results of their statements and actions. And it gets worse as they climb higher up the political food chain. As they rise, they find it more expedient and more politically advantageous to attack the integrity of those who ask the questions rather than explain their possible lack of integrity that has generated those questions. And the bigger megaphone they get as they rise higher, the more people are inclined to accept what they say or do as unquestionable gospel or as unquestionable action. So it is that a segment of the public willingly forfeits one of its greatest responsibilities of citizenship—holding accountable those they place in high position—and accepts the idea that those who seek that accountability on their behalf are in some way liars and even traitors.
Questioning the statements or actions of those in authority is a healthy virtue of citizenship. And there’s no harm in questioning the fairness of those who have the most direct access to those who need to be questioned.
But to advocate keeping those with the most direct access—the press—from asking the questions is tragic. We might ask questions you would prefer not be asked. But those in high leadership positions have their own mouthpieces. It is not the role of the press to be another one.
One of the penalties of freedom as well as one of the great virtues of freedom is the ability to question authority. Because it NEEDS to be questioned. Always.
And it’s the press that has the access to ask those questions.
The Ipsos survey does have some reassuring results for people like me, we suppose. Almost sixty percent of ALL respondents believe journalists are “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest.” The percentage of Republicans agreeing with that idea slightly outweighed those who disagreed—39-35 percent. And eighty-five percent of all respondents think “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy.”
The survey says almost three-fourths of all respondents think it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information (eighty-five percent Republicans, sixty-three percent Democrats).
Folks, we’ve got (real) news for you. Laws on libel and slander provide that right, although people in high public places are limited—and the shutdown of the newspaper in Africa is an example of why those with the power to control information should be limited although we do have instances where people, and companies with power, file libel and slander suits to bankrupt people who have told the truth or who have sought it.
The United States Constitution’s guarantees of First Amendment freedoms establishes a sometimes-awkward confrontation of rights. The news media are free to publish and presidents as well as private citizens of all stripes are free to talk. Whether we like it or not, irresponsible speech and irresponsible comments are a price we have to bear so that we might speak our own minds and think our own thoughts whether we buy ink by the barrel, use a microphone to magnify our voices, or make disparaging comments about each other at the coffee shop.
The media structure of our nation is in great flux today because of the rise of personal information devices that can isolate people within their own opinions and protect them from considering ideas of others that might change their thinking. But advocating a system that prohibits and punishes those whose opinions differ from yours is extremely dangerous, or could be if the political winds change direction.
The journalist, the reporter rather than the commentator, is the one most likely to ferret out the truth. Scripture tells us that the truth will make us free. Perhaps it is better to say in these times that the freedom to search for the truth is what keeps us free.
In a time when so many are encouraged not to search, those who are unafraid to light a lantern against the darkness are sometimes considered enemies. We should always pray that there are always those with the courage to turn on that lantern. Limiting or endangering their freedom is the surest way to limit or endanger the freedoms we all must sustain.
Call us all the names you wish, people like me will not give up our lanterns.
The scenario is a familiar one. A tumultuous time. A government in chaos. The prospect of internal conflict intensifying. A crucial meeting to forestall collapse and civil war dissolves in anger. The federal army takes control of the capital city hours after the leader of the government flees. An interim government, backed by the military, is installed. Popular elections are suspended. Imagine that you live in the capital. Imagine that you see the federal troops marching through your city and seizing the capitol.
That’s Jefferson City, Missouri in 1861 and for the first time in American history the United States Army has invaded the capital city of a state of the union and made it an occupied town. An amphibious landing, no less.
But where did they land? Not an important question then. But it is now.
Conventional wisdom has held that the landing was at the foot of Lafayette Street, the street that is between the federal courthouse and the front of the old penitentiary.
I’ve been looking at some historic images of part of the area now known as the “Missouri State Penitentiary Redevelopment” project. The state has agreed to transfer thirty-two acres of the old pen to the city, which hopes to develop the area for hotels, office buildings, entertainment venues, auditoriums, museums, boat landings and marinas, and other uses.
In the process it has occurred to your faithful observer of this past and present that one word has been misunderstood for decades in the history of Jefferson City. Herewith we will explain how the correct interpretation creates an important historic site of state and perhaps national significance within that redevelopment project.
I call it “Lyon’s Landing.”
Negotiations to restrict federal troop movements in Missouri as the nation plummeted toward the Civil War broke down in St. Louis between Union General Nathaniel Lyon and Governor Claiborne F. Jackson with Lyon proclaiming, “This means war.” Jackson and his entourage hurried back to Jefferson City by train, burning the Gasconade River bridge behind them and ordering loyalist troops guarding the Osage River bridge to disable it. The legislature was called into an overnight session, and the governor, lieutenant governor and some lawmakers fled to Boonville.
Lyon, in St. Louis, had quickly started loading two-thousand troops on four steamboats—the Iatan, the City of Louisiana, the A. McDowell, and the J.C. Swon. Within forty-eight hours, some of those troops were pitching camp at the Capitol.
Harper’s Weekly of July 6, 1861 recounted the arrival:
“On the morning of the 15th, ten miles below Jefferson City, General Lyon transferred his regulars to the IATAN, and proceeded with that boat, leaving the SWAN to follow in his wake. As we approached the city crowds gathered on the levee and saluted us with prolonged and oft-repeated cheering. Colonel Thomas L. Price (no relative to the rebel, Sterling Price), a prominent Unionist of Jefferson City, was the first to greet General Lyon as he stepped on shore. A bar has formed at the regular landing, and we were obliged to run out our gang plank below the penitentiary, at a point where the railroad company has placed a large quantity of loose stone, preparatory to forming a landing of its own.The steep, rough bank prevented the debarkation of our artillery, but the infantry scrambled up in fine style. First was the company of regulars formerly commanded by General Lyon, but now led by Lieutenant Hare. These were sent to occupy a high hill or bluff near the railroad depot and commanding the town. They went forward in fine style, ascending the steep acclivity at the ‘double-quick step.’ In one minute from the time of reaching the summit they were formed in a hollow square, ready to repel all attacks from foes, whether real or imaginary. Next came the left wing of the First Volunteer regiment, under Lieutenant-Colonel Andrews, five hundred strong. These soldiers were formed by sections and marched to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle,’ with the Stars and stripes conspicuous, through the principal streets to the State House, of which they took possession amidst the cheers of the people of the town.
“After some delay in finding the keys, which had not been very carefully hid, Lieutenant-Colonel Andrews with a band, color bearer, and guard, ascended to the cupola and displayed the American flag, while the band played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and the populace and troops below gave round after round of enthusiastic applause. Thus was the ‘sacred soil’ of Missouri’s capital invaded by Federal troops, and the bosom of ‘the pride of the Big Muddy’ desecrated by the footprints of the volunteer soldiers of St. Louis. She rather seemed to like it.”
A disgruntled apparent Jefferson City resident later complained in a letter to the St.Louis Daily State Journal about conditions in the city under the occupation, “They landed below the town at the State Prison….” He signed his letter “American.”
It is that word “below” that has led to a misunderstanding of this historic event. The usual assumption has been that “below the penitentiary” and the note that the troops “went up the road fronting the penitentiary” means the landing was at the foot of Lafayette Street from a location geographically lower than the penitentiary location.
But the word “below” meant something different to river travelers then. It meant downstream from.
For example, the steamboat Timour No. 2, blew up near Jefferson City August 26, 1854. A contemporary newspaper account said, “The boat was wooding at the time she blew up, at Edwards’ wood-yard, a short distance below Jefferson City.” (The original Timour had been one of twenty-one steamboats destroyed in the Great St. Louis Fire of 1849.)
A study of some illustrations from Harper’s Weekly of July 6 and October 19, 1861 indicates the most likely place for the invasion was to the east of the penitentiary, in the cut between the present penitentiary property and the bluff known as Miner’s Hill where the Department of Natural Resources has its headquarters, at the end of a continuation of the present Chestnut Street, which a map (below) shows did not exist at the time of the war.
The illustration showing the Iatan unloading troops (above) with the penitentiary up and to the right of the boat, places the boat in the cut to the east. The troops are shown marching ashore and curving to the right, heading to the end of Lafayette Street.
The October illustration (right) shows troops unloading from a train (the eastern bridges having been repaired by then) with soldiers standing atop Miner’s Hill to the east of the penitentiary. The drawing shows a building in the lower area west of the bluff that also shows in the image of the Iatan’s unloading.
So it appears the landing/unloading site was at the foot of what is now Chestnut Street. Two other images tend to confirm that.
An 1865 map of Jefferson City’s defenses done by the War Department’s Office of Chief of Engineers shows Lafayette Street curving behind the penitentiary and its brickyard to a place that approximately matches where soldiers are shown marching up the hill in the July 6 Harper’s drawing. In this map, Chestnut Street does not yet exist. Today, it continues down the hill toward the river. Had it existed in 1861, there would have been no need for the troops to follow the path they are going in the Iatan picture.
Confirming the location of that path is an 1869 “Bird’s eye view” of Jefferson City, then a town of about 3,100 residents (not counting the soldiers).
At the far left edge of the city is seen the penitentiary. The draw that is the continuation of Chestnut Street today is visible. And the path also can be seen connecting the end of Lafayette Street with the area shown in the Harper’s drawing as the disembarkation point for the troops.
Chestnut street exists in the 1869 illustration, but only as a link between High Street and the city cemetery.
Understanding that “below the penitentiary” or “below the town” means downstream changes the understanding of that historic event.
Why is this discovery important to the city’s redevelopment of the penitentiary area? Because it now adds a possibly important historic element to the redevelopment area. The entire riverfront of the site from the extension of Chestnut to Lafayette is now the invasion path followed in the first takeover in national history by the United States Army of a state capital.
Lyon’s Landing Historic Site. Could it make a difference in how the site is redeveloped? Could it mean new funding for part of that redevelopment? Could the designation have an impact on the ultimate development of the rest of the area to the east where DNR now has its headquarters?
Others have those answers. We’ve just corrected the historical record—because for a reason we cannot explain, a new understanding of the word “below” popped into our mind a few days ago.
(Jefferson City)—Nancy and I have returned from our annual few-days visit to our snowbird friends who head to Arizona in October and don’t return to Missouri until April. We were starkly reminded when we got out of our car at our house why they do that.
We drove in some pretty big cities—Oklahoma City, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, for example—but we were never so lost as when we turned off Highway 54 at the Lake of the Ozarks, thinking we were headed to a gas station. We went for some distance down a nice divided roadway and never passed a building, let alone a gas station, before we turned around and figured out how to get back on 54. We cannot be the only hopeless souls who cannot figure out that maze of exit and entrance ramps, traffic circles and winding roads that lack what is (to us, anyway) any reasonable signage that tells us what goes where. Tan-Tar-A is somewhere in that tangle. And the Four Seasons. And the Mall. Yes, we’re glad we don’t have to drag through the Bagnell Dam Bypass, which in its day was a wonder, but getting off the bypass of the bypass is about as adventurous as Lewis and Clark setting out from Wood River Illinois, bound somewhere up a long and winding Missouri River.
(Las Cruces, NM)—Maybe the world would be better if all of us followed the lead of Deputy Sheriff Jamar Cotton.
At halftime of the New Mexico State University men’s basketball game on February 24, he hugged 112 people in sixty seconds, believed to be a new world hugging record, smashing Jason Ritter’s record of 86 set last October during a taping of “The View” television show in New York City. He could have hugged more if he could have moved, but the rules say he had to stay in one place and let the hugees come to him. He’s sending the paperwork to the Guinness Book people for proper certification. “This isn’t just about breaking a world record,” he told the Las Cruces Sun-News, “This is about something that we need in our community: Unity, love, compassion, caring about people, bringing people together.”
But there was a little drizzle on his parade. Cotton’s hug record took up three columns above the fold of the newspaper on Monday after the event. The fourth column was about the city police department paying a $1.4 million dollar settlement to a former Las Cruces couple who accused city officers of brutality and civil rights violations.
(Hereford, TX)—Out here in the Texas Panhandle, the land is flatter than a possum after ten days in the truck lane. The trains seem to go on forever. We saw four Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives pulling a string of cars so long that it disappear into the vanishing point. And it seemed only a minute after one train went past that another one rumbled by behind it. Some have a couple of locomotives at the end as pushers. We caught up with one westbound train that was probably going about 70 mph. We were running about 80—you can do that out there; the flat distances entice you to do it—and it took us the better part of five minutes to go from the pushers at the end to the team of locomotives at the head of it all. Wish we could have counted the cars but we preferred staying in our lane. Some of the trains were hauling container cars—two stacked big boxes on flatcars that would somewhere be unloaded and mounted on the wheels of Lord Knows How Many Trucks and hauled away.
(Erick, Oklahoma)—There is some melancholy news to report for our generation from this little town of about eleven-hundred people a few miles east of the Texas-Oklahoma border (we are told it is just about halfway from Asheville, NC and Barstow, CA if that helps you locate it). The Roger Miller Museum closed just before last Christmas. Not enough people turned off of I-40 to go into downtown Erick, the town that Roger Miller called his hometown—although he was born in Texas.
The Museum had operated since 2004. The building is now the 100th Meridian Museum, which marks the Texas-Oklahoma boundary. The line (of longitude, west of Greenwich) was identified by John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, as the line between the moist east and the arid west.
Erick was planning to continue the annual Do-Wacka-Do Trail Run if the public was interested. All of Roger Miller’s memorabilia was being returned to his widow, Mary.
Most of those who read these entries will remember Roger Miller and his wacky country songs of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly “King of the Road,” that reached number one on the country charts and number four on the pop charts. He died at the age of 56 in 1992, lung and throat cancer.
Before he left us, he created a Broadway musical in 1985 that was one of the few successful American Broadway musicals in an era when British productions were gaining popularity. “Big River,” based on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ran for a thousand performances in New York and won seven Tony Awards. And those of us who enjoy the music of “Big River” are left to wonder what else he could have done as he moved farther away from the novelty songs that were so popular earlier in his career.
The 100th Meridian Museum is open now on the corner of Old Highway 66 and Sheb Wooley Boulevard in downtown Erick. (Sheb, another country singer from Erick, is remembered also as the first of the Frank Miller gang killed in the shootout with Hadleyville Marshall Will Kane in “High Noon.”)
(Itsnotsnow, NM)—The drifts were taller than our car and the road was covered. But we didn’t slide and the weather was warm. And nothing was melting. Welcome to White Sands National Monument.
Fine gypsum sand stretches for miles, creating interesting light and shadows. Bushes dot the landscape. Desert animals survive in that environment somehow. We didn’t see anyone doing it, but we were told that some folks go snowboarding or dog-sledding in the comfort of the desert warmth. It’s a bit of an adjustment to be surrounded by so much whiteness but not be cold and wet. Not a place to visit in the heat of summer, though, we were told.
(Peoria, Arizona)—The Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners in their fifth exhibition game of the season on a mild and lovely Arizona day. Royals won. The same field is used by the San Diego Padres, who beat the Royals the next day. Royals diehards know that former Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer now plays for the Padres.
In the teams store at the stadium, they sell baseballs. If you want to spend some extra money, you can buy game-used balls with a tag attached that tells you who hit that ball and what the play was—foul ball, single, and so forth. Most of the game-used balls went for forty bucks. But there was one that was a foul ball struck by Hosmer in his first at-bat as a Padre. The price tag on that one was $80. Gotta sell a lot of foul balls to make back that $144 million the Padres are paying him. Wonder what a fair ball would cost.
(Unidentified Flying New Mexico)—We found ourselves face to face with aliens one day. The folks in Roswell, New Mexico do a pretty good job of trying to convince visitors that a spaceship with intergalactic aliens crashed near their town seventy-one years ago.
Roswell is bigger than we expected—almost forty-thousand people. The museum appears to be in an old theatre and it has copies of newspaper accounts of something that somebody claims happened and accounts of the disappearance of all of the evidence, including the purported remains of the ship and its occupant(s), and government agencies and officials telling people who supposedly knew something they better not talk. There are life-size figures in the museum of the purported aliens. Oddly enough, it seemed to us, there did not appear to be any female aliens. Or male aliens. They were just aliens. There was no indication of reproductive apparatus or of different genders. But, hey, these are serious aliens and they might be so advanced that such things are not necessary. If I see one for real, however, I’m not going to shake hands.
Did something really happen out there and at Area 51? There’s only one person who has the authority to find out. And with his abiding interest in getting to the bottom of all things aliens, we’re sure he’ll soon tweet a definitive answer to seven decades of questions. He also might think about increasing the height of his wall.
(Albuquerque)—We filled up the car’s gas tank for $2.03 a gallon. When we got home we filled it up for $2.29. Just for the record.
(Toiletsnake, Arizona)—Just inside Arizona there was this rest stop. Note the sign along the sidewalk suggesting people step carefully no matter how badly they need to go.
We don’t know why, but the sign left us wondering:
“In groups that practice snake-handling, if a young woman breaks her engagement can her former fiancé ask for his Diamondback?”
(Photo credits: Las Cruces Sun-News (Cotton) and Bob Priddy)
