Category Archives: travel

Some Reflections on Memorial Day, Part Four:

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Hundreds of people were at the Speedway as I drove out of town last Monday morning. A few were at the start-finish line—Felix Rosenqvist, his owners and crew for the annual victor’s picture taking. The rest, armed with brooms, shovels, and other equipment, were cleaning up the 500 tons or so of trash left behind by Sunday’s huge crowds. The speedway pays volunteer groups $125 per person to do the cleanup work.

 

Several years ago, I narrated Aaron Copeland’s A LINCOLN PORTRAIT with the Jefferson City Symphony and some of the words began to come back to me as I drove through the rich, flat prairies of the two states.  “He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and grew up in Illinois….” 

The way to Indianapolis on I-70 takes people through Vandalia, once the state capital of Illinois.  The old capitol still stands, and the House of Representatives where Lincoln began his political career has been recreated.

I wanted to go on a northern route home that would take me through Springfield, where Lincoln lived and owned the only house he would ever own, where he prospered as a railroad lawyer, and from which he left to become President.  This trip, however, was to take me to the little village to the west where he grew up.

New Salem.

Lincoln struck out on his own after his brief stay in the Decatur area and spent several years in this little village as a laborer, and as an unsuccessful store owner.  It was in New Salem that he began the study of the law and began to practice as a lawyer.  It was in New Salem that Ann Rutledge entered his life and departed from it, a relationship romanticized by many through the decades.

Abe Lincoln was a quiet man; Lincoln was a quiet and a melancholy man.

However deep the Lincoln/Rutledge relationship was, it has been recorded that her death left Lincoln deeply depressed, depression being a condition he dealt with throughout his life.

One of the recreated buildings in the little village is the Rutledge Tavern where Lincoln stayed—a “tavern” being a place offering room and board for visitors and travelers (Missouri’s first official state historic site is the Arrow Rock Tavern, if you want to see what a tavern was in the early 19th Century).

The park was closed the day I stopped on the way home, “closed” meaning the visitors center, restrooms, and the village buildings were unoccupied by staff and reenactors.  But visitors could take a quiet walk among the businesses and homes, the mill and the gardens and the stores.  And I did.

Copeland’s narration and his music went with me.  The composition was created in 1942 but its passages from Lincoln’s speeches seemed appropriate that day as I walked where he had walked. I remembered pieces of the narration and when I got home I pulled the script from that performance with the symphony.

The first segment:

Fellow Citizens, we cannot escape history.  That is what he said. That is what Abraham Lincoln said.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. We — even we here– hold the power, and bear the responsibility.

The second:

He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and grew up in Illinois. And this is what he said. This is what Abe Lincoln said:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.  

Both were from his 1862 message to Congress, what we call the State of the Union today.  The third segment:

When standing erect, he was six feet four inches tall. And this is what he said:

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Lincoln said that during his last debate with Stephen A. Douglas, in Alton, Illinois in 1858. Lincoln lost the race for the U. S. Senate that year but his debates with Douglas brought him national attention.

Segment four:

Abe Lincoln was a quiet man; Lincoln was a quiet and a melancholy man. But when he spoke of Democracy, this is what he said. He said:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Again, from 1858.

And the concluding segment:

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of these United States, is everlasting in the memory of this country.  For on the battleground at Gettysburg, this is what he said:

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“That cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” he said—-referring not to the war but to the re-commitment to the document that created the Union, that created a government “by the people, for the people,” the Declaration of Independence.

I have had a front row seat to the operation of the people’s government for many decades and as I walked the quiet streets where Abraham Lincoln walked I was reminded that the people’s government requires a people’s responsibility whenever there is a “stormy present…piled high with difficulty.’

“We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country,” Abe Lincoln said.

Today, it seems, we are locked in “the eternal struggle of these two principles—right and wrong…The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings.”

“Disenthrall:” —to free ourselves of the present condition, “and then we shall save our country.”

This, again, is what Abe Lincoln said to us in 1862:

The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. We — even we here– hold the power, and bear the responsibility.

Tens of thousands of ours have died creating this country, creating and defending a nation that can celebrate its holidays with great noise, great drama, and frivolity while pausing for a few minutes to be grateful for their sacrifices and recommit to keep their faith—–

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

After about an hour or maybe an hour and a half, I resumed my drive home. I crossed the Mississippi River with my dashboard telling me I had seventeen miles worth of gas left in the tank. A hundred yards from the bridge at Louisiana Missouri, I put 15.6 gallons of cheaper Missouri gas into a tank that’s supposed to hold 15.5 gallons.

And then I came home.  I had decorated no graves on Memorial Day but I was glad that I lived in a country that those in their graves protected for us, a united nation despite our differences that  pauses for a  gaudy celebration of its existence even in a “stormy present,” knowing that we have the power to restore our nation to one that is of the people, by the people, and has the ability to be made better—-

—-for the people.

(Various prominent people are on YouTube narrating A Lincoln Portrait. I suggest you look at one, or some, of them.)

(Picture credits: City of Vandalia; Bob Priddy)

 

 

Some Reflections on Memorial Day, Part One 

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This was a Memorial Day that has taken some time for us to process.  The holiday’s origins are easily overlooked each year by the rush of noisy celebrations that seem far removed from the original intent of the day.  I was awash in those contrasting “celebrations” that have overshadowed the “observance” and “commemoration” originally intended. But I found toward the end in a closed state park a quiet reminder of why Memorial Day is and should be recalled for its origins—and why this contemporary noisy version of Memorial Day anticipates the next great holiday that this year will challenge our honesty about who we have become.

This might be written more for my benefit more than for yours and I hope you will excuse me for these ruminations.  I didn’t plan on them stretching into four chapters but a lot was going on, not the least of which was “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”

We’ll talk about the race but this series is not all about racing for the race is only part of the story.

The weekend had been spent in a city that observes/commemorates Memorial Day throughout the entire month of May. I know of no other city that rivals Indianapolis’s Memorial…..Month.

Indianapolis is a prototype that diminishing cities might use to reinvent themselves.s  through the course of several decades and several setbacks, Indianapolis has emerged as a dynamic, livable place of major league proportions in spirit and enterprise. And each year it throws one big party in May.

Reconciling the big party in that prototype city with the solemnity the holiday was originally created for, reconciling what men and women in the military died for in the war that created Memorial Day dwith what we are and what that the city is provided the ingredients for a lot of thinking on the long drive back to Jefferson City on Monday that took me through a lot of American history and some of my own.

I was born in Decatur Illinois, a town where Abraham Lincoln’s family briefly lived after moving from Indiana. I was raised in two small central Illinois towns, Mt. Pulaski (population about 1,500) and then Sullivan (a bigger place of about 3,300 when we moved there in fourth grade). Abraham Lincoln practiced law in both places as a circuit-riding attorney.

Lincoln scholars point to 1843 as the first time Lincoln and a couple of friends first quoted the phrase from three of the Gospels that “a house divided against itself can not stand” as they helped organize the Illinois Whig Party.

Fifteen years later, he spoke them again in accepting the nomination to run against incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. . . .A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”  He lost that election but it paved the way to the presidency two years later and the great test that followed that determined the correctness of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and by 1858 Abraham Lincoln.

A civil war that tested that assertion took Lincoln to Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, where more than seven-thousand soldiers from both sides had been killed and more than forty thousand had been wounded. He paid tribute to those who died defending the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that our nation had been “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

He called upon the nation that day to complete what he called the “unfinished work”  and “the great task remaining before us,” not referring to the war but to the words of the Declaration. He called for the people to recommit themselves to that cause so the nation should have a “new birth of freedom” flowing from, by, and for the people—a united people, a house NOT divided.

A 1904 newspaper article reported that in October 1864, almost a year after Gettysburg and about six months before the Civil War ended, three women in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania decorated the graves of Union soldiers.  Boalsburg, an unincorporated area of 4,600 today, makes the disputed claim that the event was the earliest documented observance of a memorial day.

On May 1, 1865, just three weeks after Lee’s surrender and two weeks after Lincoln’s death, as many at 10,000 people in deeply Confederate Charleston, South Carolina dedicated the graves of Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate Prison. Reports tell us many in the audience were Black.

Waterloo, NY claims to have held the first FORMAL annual observance of a memorial day on May 5, 1866. Local druggist Henry Welles is credited with thinking of the event.

The first national observance was on May 30, 1868 when former Illinois white supremacist John A. Logan, who had become became strong Lincoln supporter at the start of the war and abandoned his racist sentiments after fighting alongside black troops, issued a national proclamation calling for “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country. ” Logan, a wartime Union General, was the Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union Army veterans such as my great grandfather. The day originally known as “Decoration Day” was expanded after World War I to honor all of our country’s military dead. It officially became Memorial Day in 1971 when it became a national Monday holiday that now is most often considered the unofficial beginning of summer.

Logan County, where Mt. Pulaski is, was named after Logan’s father. My great grandfather enlisted in the Union Army in Moultrie County, where Sullivan is.

My journey Monday, the now designated Memorial Day, took me back through that area of Lincoln and Logan, and Private Robert T. Priddy—who served under General Sherman at Vicksburg—where Logan was with another Union Army unit.  I had been thinking a lot about the cacophony that the holiday weekend had become as the miles of pavement disappeared beneath my car, I found myself in a quiet place that helped me put the day, the weekend, into a context.  I’ll take you from the cacophony to the quiet in succeeding chapters.

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Sister State

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I want to tell you about a special place that should be our sister state.

Most of us are familiar with sister cities and other sister states—-usually, in Jefferson City’s case, a town with similar cultural roots in Germany.  Missouri has a sister state relationship with Nagano Prefecture in Japan. Jefferson City’s sister city is Munchberg, Germany.

Missouri, a state, should have this place as a sister CITY for a reason I’ll mention later.

The scenic town is six-thousand feed up in the Himalayan foothills of India, about 180 miles north of New Delhi and is known affectionately as the “Queen of the Hills.”

It’s a Hill Station, a British phrase used to describe a popular tourist town at higher elevations where people who visit to escape the summer heat in the valleys below. Although the phrase has been used in other countries, India has more hill stations than any other country.

The city has been a popular tourist destination since a British miliary officer established it in 1825.

Seven years later, the Surveyor General of India, George Everest, wanted to make it an anchor of the Great Trigonometric Survey that provided a detailed map of the Indian subcontinent.

The what? It was a comprehensive survey that used mathematics to provide a precise map of the whole Indian subcontinent. It was started in 1802 by the East India Company in the days when the British Empire was being put together.  The company was created in 1600 as a trading company that at one time controlled the subcontinent and Hong Kong and was the largest corporation in the world—so large that it had its own army of 260,000-man army, double the size of the regular British Army at times.  The survey took almost seventy years. Its most important feature was the first measurement of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, including the one named for Surveyor General George Everest.

By the start of the Twentieth Century, the town had about 65-hundred permanent residents. But the population more than doubled in the summers. Among the prominent families to spend summers here were the Nehrus. For a time, the Dalai Lama lived there. The population in the first decade of the Twenty-first century had gone past 30-thouand.

It is said that a good set of binoculars will provide a nice view of the Himalayas

Visitors today can travel on Camel’s Back Road, named for a rocky outcrop that reminds people of a camel’s hump. It’s a popular hiking trail that includes the oldest Christian Church in the Himalaya Mountains, on a nearby road.  The snowy peaks of the big Himalayan peaks are visible through binoculars from the road.

The forty-foot high Kempty Falls, one of several waterfalls in the area, is about nine miles from the town, and Lake Mist, where the Kempty river flows, is a popular stop for hikers and other tourists. There’s a municipal garden and a lake where visitors can rent padd  boats.

The remains of Sir George Everest’s laboratory are in a park. Happy Valley includes an academy, a municipal garden and a Tibetan sanctuary. An ancient Hindu temple dedicated to the Snake God Shiva is nearby.

And then there is Cloud End, a dense forest, and Van Chetna Kendra, a bird sanctuary that was the last refuge of the now-extinct Mountain Quail.

One of the oldest and most highly-regarded colleges in India, St. George’s College, is there. It’s been run by the Patrician Brothers since 1893.

There’s a lot more to see and to do in the multinational community of Mussoorie, the “Queen of the Hills” of India.

Sounds like an interesting place.  Maybe we should get to know it better.

Save me a place on the flight, Governor.

 

I Have a New Necktie

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–and I’m going to use it to make a point (other than the one at the end of the tie).

You probably have heard the old saying about a person who wears his (or her) heart on his or her sleeve.  How about wearing some of your family heritage around your neck?

It can become a reminder of who you are, or part of you.

While we were in Scotland last summer, we went into a couple of tartan shops.  Knowing that the older I get, the older my knees look, I knew that I could not wear the kind of clan tartan my Scottish ancestors wore.

I hinted broadly that a tartan shirt or a tartan necktie would look pretty good, though, as a Christmas present. But, alas, my Lady was too distracted by starting our eventual move to a new zip code to remember my hints.

(Actually, Nancy is recognized in Scotland as a Lady, which makes me a Laird, because she owns some land there.  She has read all of the Outlander books and we watch the TV series each week, which led me a few years ago to buy her a piece of land in the auld country.  I think it is an entire square foot of land in a Scottish land preserve.)

Anyway—

A few weeks ago I took the matter into my own hands and I ordered a tartan- patterned necktie.

This is the ancient tartan of MacDonald of Clan Ranald. A more modern tartan is available, but this great grandson of Ranald McKechnie, a Scotsman who arrived in Kansas in the 1870s via Canada, wanted to wear his older roots around his neck.

We are a very old batch of folks, all the way back to the 12th Century, and we were somewhat inhospitable. In fact, we were downright hostile.  We were known as being warlike. In fact—and this might mean something to Outlander followers—my ancestors helped defeat the Clan Fraser in the 1544 battle of Kinloch Lochy, also known as the “Battle of the Field of the Shirts” because the warriors fought on such a hot day that men on both sides discarded their shirts. When this vicious battle was over, only five Frasers and eight MacDonalds were still alive.

The home of my clan was Castle Tiorim. It remains, although it is unhabitable.

The MacDonalds were on the British side during the Jacobite rebellion that was dramatized in the books and on Outlander. Scottish Prince Charlie made a bid to get his father installed on the British throne but was routed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, fought on a field near Inverness that we visited last June.

After hearing our tour guide describe the battle, I remarked that the circumstances reminded me of the American Battle of  Bunker Hill (which was fought on Breed’s Hill). He commented that the sons and grandsons of the MacDonalds at Culloden were part of the victorious British forces that day in Boston.

So much for any hopes of being a member of the Sons of the American Revolution.

The point of this journey through a family history that probably holds little interest for you is just this:

History, your history, can be an exciting thing to explore if you look beyond dates on tombstones and, instead, at the events of the dash—the mark between the dates  of birth and death—because our ancestors did not exist in a vacuum. Learning about the events they witnessed either in person or from a distance humanizes them, brings them closer, and often explains why they wound up where they did—and an understanding of how  you wound up where you are.

The history most of us took in elementary and secondary school, the kind taught chronologically while ignoring the social and economic issues that drove the nation to be what it was, earned the reputation of being boring.

It is like Kansas, or at least the popular view of it.  Kansas, however, is NOT boring.

I-70 is boring.  But a few miles off it is where you will discover life, past and present.

So it is with genealogy. Dates are boring most of the time. But what those ancestors did and what was around them in the years of the dash is where you will find understanding of them and maybe a bit of yourself.

 

 

Erifnus Caitnop

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I spent a few minutes with an old friend at another old friend’s funeral a few days ago and we wound up talking about his car that he affectionately calls Erifnus Caitnop.  John Drake Robinson has written some books about the adventures he and Erifnus have shared through the years.  Erifnus has 313 miles on the odometer and John told me his mechanic thinks the car can hit the half-million mile mark.

John doesn’t think he can last that long, though, but he agreed with me that Erifnus is a historical automobile that deserves to be in a museum.

John is a Jefferson City native.  He and his parents attended the same church we go to. His father, B. F. (“Buford,” John fondly calls him) Robinson was a fixture in the state education department for many years and was a beloved and friendly doorkeeper for the Senate for many ears in his retirement. So I have known the Robinsons, father and son, for more than fifty years.

I always feel strange saying something like that—knowing someone for fifty years.

Erifnus is historic because it is the only car that has traveled every mile of every highway in Missouri. 

At least, we think so.  We can’t imagine anyone else being that interested in doing something such as this.  Or maybe as crazy.

But we all have goals in our lives, some more expansive than others.  Driving on every mile of every highway in Missouri became John’s goal, especially while he was the State Tourism Director and had a reason to do all of that traveling.  I suppose he could have used a car from the state motor pool, but he chose Erifnus and, I have been told by one of those who worked with him, he did not always take the most direct route.

John is one of the most personable people you could ever hope to meet. And a lot of people had a chance to meet him in his odyssey.  His biography on Amazon notes:

He penetrated beyond the edges of civilization, peeked into the real American heartland, and lived to tell about it.

His books are “on the road” adventures blending local characters and mom-and-pop food into an archipelago of tasty stories. He dives deep into the wilderness, where the nearest neighbors are coyotes, and the bullfrogs sound like banjo strings.

When an interviewer asked if he ever “heard banjo music,” John replied, “Sure, all the time. And when I do, I grab a big bass fiddle and join in.”

Through all his travels, John shows a deep respect for history, and for the environment. As a former state director of tourism, he heard the question a lot: How can we balance tourism and the environment? His answer: “If we don’t preserve our natural heritage, and put back what we take out, these attractions won’t be worth visiting.”

Called the “King of the Road” by Missouri Life Magazine, John Robinson lives in Columbia, Missouri when he isn’t sleeping in his car. His articles and columns are regularly featured in a half dozen magazines.

This is Erifnus:

It’s a Pontiac Sunfire.  Spell it backwards.

I have been thinking a museum in Jefferson City would be a great place for Erifnus to continue telling its story, and John’s.  Unfortunately, there is no such museum.  We have two historical organizations in Jefferson City but neither has a museum that can accommodate Erifnus—or other historical city and county artifacts for that matter.  I think it’s time we have such a mseum, but that’s a separate discussion.

I’ve contacted a friend at the National Museum of Transportation in Kirkwood to see if Erifnus might find a place in its collection of automobiles, trains, and airplanes.  Jefferson City’s loss could be Kirkwood’s gain.

There’s another historic vehicle in central Missouri that HAS been saved although it’s not on display.  That’s William Least Heat Moon’s Ghost Dancing, the 1975 Ford Econoline van he used in compiling the stories in his famous Blue Highways. It’s in the storage area of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri’s Academic Support Center.

Both vehicles need to be displayed where people can appreciate them, the men who drove them, and the stories they have told that enrich us all.

John lives in Columbia so maybe Erifnus could find a home there, too.  But as a Jefferson City resident, I wish we had a place for it here because this is where John grew up and where his service as Director of the Division of Tourism did so much to create the tales of Erifnus and the stories its driver has written.

Notes From a Quiet (and Boring) Road

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Just got back yesterday afternoon from visits to relatives in New Mexico and Colorado, where the dry heat was wonderful and where you could almost hear your flesh sizzle if you stood out in that dry heat too long.

It was so wonderful to drive a couple thousand miles and see few billboards. If other states operated as Missouri does, the majestic windmills of Kansas and Colorado would have been obscured by junk roadside art and I use the word “art” advisedly.

Nancy has a new car. It has adaptive cruise control that keeps you a safe distance behind a car or truck in front of you. I thought I wouldn’t like it. I do.  I set the speed at 85 and let the control run the car with the traffic while it maintained appropriate intervals between our vehicle and the ones in front. It even threw on the brakes if somebody swerved into our lane.  An interesting experience.

I did turn off the feature than keeps the car between the lines. I don’t weave but it was still irritating.  We did not try to find out how many miles we could go on the interstate without touching the steering wheel.  Cars are close to that, but we don’t trust the system yet—plus this car demands you put hands back on the wheel in a short time.  It also keeps track of what you are looking at and if you aren’t eyes-forward, you get dinged.

Ding.  And there’s a message between the speedometer and the tachometer telling you to keep your eyes on the road.  And open.  No sleeping while driving this car.

Got home and found a message in my email (hadn’t checked it today) from Amazon wanting my opinion on something I had bought before the trip—a new lens for my camera.  Both of us find these messages irritating.  Everybody wants to know if we are joyful about our purchase. I’ve ignored many such solicitations, but Amazon was persistent wanting to know how I used the item and was I happy. So yesterday I told Amazon:

I used this lens to take pictures. 

I also am tired of every Tom, Dick, and Harry company I do business with asking if I’m a happy customer.  If I am, I will express it by buying something else later.  If not, my silence will be sufficient.  Quit wasting my time by begging for a compliment.  It’s as irritating as the restaurant bill that gives me choices for tips.

After all—what the heck does one do with a camera lens?  Swat flies?  Roll out a pie crust?  Punch cookies out of the cookie dough?  Make biscuits?  It might make an ashtray with the lens hood screwed on.

Okay, I was a little cranky.  We had driven through rain from Salina to past Kansas City after a long previous day of watching I-70 disappear under the hood of our car from the Denver area to Salina.

People think Kansas is boring.  We, from two families with Kansas roots, respectfully disagree.  INTERSTATE SEVENTY is boring.  But Kansas is a pretty interesting place—as are all places if we give ourselves the chance to travel some smaller roads.

Anyway, we finished the rest of our trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City on highways—particularly I-70—that are uglified by billboards.

Now, if billboards obscured views of the advertised adult entertainment stores that also highlight our Missouri roadways, we might soften our opinion of them.

The great American poet Ogden Nash once channeled Joyce Kilmer (who was a man, in case your schooling never mentioned that) when he wrote:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree

Perhaps unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all*

It has taken more time than usual to prepare this meditation.  Minnie the cat has been extremely glad to welcome us home and has insisted on several re-acquaintance lap times. Brother Max, the mellow one of the pair, is happy to sit in a box on the table next to the desk and be quietly close.

Pets make coming home even better.

*Another of Nash’s non-Nobel Prize works of literature is:

The only thing wrong with a kitten

Is that

Eventually,

It becomes a cat. 

(we do not share that opinion. Most of the time)

 

The Difference 

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Tomorrow is Independence Day, the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Only two people definitely signed it that day, The President of the Congress, John Hancock, and Secretary Charles Thompson.   Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams claimed they signed it then, too, but historians have disagreed for decades on whether they did and when the other signers added their signatures.

The course of human events had made it necessary to dissolve the political bands that had linked the colonies with Great Britain.

What of the people from whom we separated?  Are they different from us after almost 250 years?

We recently spent two weeks sharing streets, buildings, restaurants, and other places with them, people differing from us only in accent, the side of the road on which they drive, and dogs.

The people of the United Kingdom do love their dogs and they take them everywhere. It’s a rare restaurant that has a sign we are familiar with: “Service dogs only.”   We saw one sign that told us we could buy vegan ice cream for our dog inside.  One of our hotels had a kiosk with a dog menu.

We loved our exploration of their country.  We enjoyed meeting the many people we met. Our guides were incredible.  Every citizen was friendly and courteous and proud to show us things or explain things—-as we would be for those from England who visit our country. They, like us, are free people.  But our definitions of freedom are a little bit different—-which is why our country got its divorce in 1776.

But few citizens of this country likely would want to trade places with those good folks as far as government is concerned and as far as the citizen’s voice is heard in government.

Much of our system of government and laws is based on the centuries-old policies born in England starting with King John I’s acceptance of demands by several of his Barons at Runnymede in June, 1215 in the Magna Carta. The document placed the King and all the Sovereigns who have come after him within the rule of law, a concept we are arguing in this country more than 800 years later.

The document remains a symbol of freedom from government oppression. It’s philosophy was brought to our shores with the early English settlers and was a precedent for the Declaration of Independence.

But our founders took the concepts far beyond the Magna Carta, and we were surprised by how hard our differences in approach to rule hit home with us during our visits to two places within the last month.

This is the Tower of London:

And this is Edinburgh Castle in Scotland:

What is inside these two structures says much about our differing national concepts of government.

The Tower of London, among other things, is the home of The Crown Jewels.  Edinburgh Castle houses the much smaller Honours of Scotland, that country’s crown jewels that date from the days before Scotland became part of the United Kingdom. When a new monarch is coronated, these items are ceremonially donned to symbolize the monarchy’s rule over all of the UK.

We would like to show you pictures of this collection; it’s overwhelming. But photography is not allowed in the darkened rooms where spotlights illuminate the sparkling and glowing treasured regalia that is kept behind enclosures. Visitors can purchase a $10 guidebook, however.  Although it devotes fourteen of its eighty pages just to the various crowns in the collection, it cannot carry the impact of walking into dark rooms with illuminated display cases filled with large sparkling items of gold and jewels.

The guidebook to the collection at the Tower of London tells visitors:

Kings of England had a crown for everyday use, and the coronation crown that was worn rarey but was the ultimate symbol of their sacred and regal authority. The crowns were accompanied by other symbols of power: a sceptre indicating control over the realm and royal rights; a rod representing the responsibility to protect the people; a decorated sword for military strength; and an orb; a globe representing the world with a cross on top symbolizing Christ’s power over all creation

The Crown Jewels include more than 23,000 gemstones and more than 100 objects. The value of the collection is placed as much as six BILLION dollars, although officially they are considered priceless. One diamond, the Cullinan, has an estimated value of $430 million

The collection says everything about the difference between our system of government and the English system of government.

These jewel-encrusted items are symbols intended to make it clear that power is separate from and far above the people, and that it is blessed by an official national church. Only three people are permitted to handle these treasurers—the King, the Royal Jewler, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Contrast those museums with a museum in this country that shows us the symbols of OUR system. We have one room displaying, not jewels but a few pages of paper:

—Four pieces of paper in particular.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, D. C. has rules about cameras, too.  Take them in.  Use them. Photograph the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  Don’t use flash or other supplemental lighting, selfie sticks, monopods or similar equipment. But otherwise, snap away.

If you want real detailed images of the documents, you can download free scans of them, buy facsimiles in the museum store or online, or download closeups of the documents and other features in the rotunda. You can have the symbols of our government in your own home or your office. You don’t have to go hundreds of miles, get tickets, and stand in lines to see them. They belong to YOU. You do not belong to them.

The words of the documents describe the gulf between this country and the home country we left in 1776:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands….”

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…..”

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: and as extending the ground of public confidence in government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  

In darkened tight rooms of ancient buildings in London and Edinburgh are housed symbols that display the power of government OVER the people who are not allowed to even take photographs of those symbols

In the bright, light-filled rotunda of a public building in our country are the documents that describe the power of the PEOPLE over government.

We, the people of the United States, elect a President and two houses of a Congress that represents us. The people of the United Kingdom have little voice in picking those who will rule them.

The Constitutional Monarchy that is the United Kingdom considers the King, an inherited position, the head of state although not the head of government. Political decisions have been left to the government and Parliament since the Magna Carta but the people’s involvement is relatively minimal.

The top officer in the political system is the Prime Minister, who is not elected by the people. By tradition, the PM is a member of Parliament answerable to the House of Commons. The King has “Royal Prerogative powers” that include the power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister. However, it is customary that the Sovereign (King or Queen) appoints someone from the majority party in the House of Commons.

And the way those representatives of the people are elected seems by comparison to our elections to minimize the power of the voter.

The 650 members of the House of Commons are elected from districts in a “first past the post” system of voting that pits all candidates together regardless of party with the candidate getting the plurality, not necessarily the majority, winning the position.  The “first past the post” concept is likened to a horse race finish in a multiple horse field. Members of the House of Commons are called MPs, Members of Parliament.

The members of the House of Lords are not elected.  They are appointed and serve for life. The custom of people serving by inheritance was ended in 1999 but Lordships are determined by in-house elections. There is no fixed number of members and not all who are members are allowed to attend proceedings.  Last year there were 261 Conservative Party Lords, 185 Crossbench Lords, and 174 Labour Party members.  A year earlier, the total was 798 but only 755 could take part in the proceedings. As many as 26 members are bishops or archbishops of the national church.  The people have no voice in selecting members of the House of Lords..

We describe all of this, as far as we are capable of understanding it, given our background in our own form of government, to point out how distinctly different things are for us, and to underline how those dark rooms filled with billions of dollars of jewelry symbolize power that does NOT flow from the people but clearly reminds the people how superior the government is over them, how separate government power is from the consent of the governed.

Those rooms remind us that government of, by, and for the people is a concept that was stated in Philadelphia by traitor radicals who knew the personal danger they faced. Many have died to protect that traitorous system. Many have died in the country’s uniforms as well as in civilian attire on battlefields and in city streets to protect and expand that concept for everyone.

We left those darkened rooms in England and Scotland with even greater appreciation for being a citizen of a country that trusts the people to define governmental power. In doing so we are not criticizing the system that the people of our Mother Country have; we are only pointing out the differences with which both we Americans and our British cousins are comfortable having.

On this Independence Day, we need to ponder the power—and especially in this year the responsibility—we have to determine the kind of government we will allow and the kind of people we will choose to operate it on OUR behalf, not on THEIR behalf.

Symbolically, we are facing a choice between going to a dark place or staying in a place of light, of retaining the power of government that serves the people or giving it up to those who seek power to serve themselves.

We the people are the crown jewels of this country.

And this country is the crown jewel of freedom for the rest of the world.

Never, ever, forget that.

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Before We Were What We Are

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For most of us, particularly those in mid-Missouri, the Lake of the Ozarks and all of its allure has always been here.  It’s hard to imagine when the Osage River wound through the valleys of the ancient mountains and when generations of people lived and died along its banks.  One long-ago summer night while going door-to-door selling encyclopedias in Columbia I knocked on the door of a man who had been a riverboat pilot on the Osage at a time when he could take his boat all the way to Warsaw.  It was the only door I knocked on that night because of the stories he told me. It’s a shame the young encyclopedia salesmen didn’t carry a recorder in those days.

(Actually, there wasn’t such a thing as a portable recorder, at least not one that could record a couple of hours of storytelling back then.)

Let’s go farther back, to 1931, and a time when Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor best known for Mount Rushmore, came to Jefferson City to testify in the lawsuit of the Snyder family against Union Electric.  The Snyder family owned Ha Ha Tonka, now a state park, and they charged UE had damaged the intrinsic beauty of their property to the tune of one-million dollars by building Bagnell Dam and backing up Osage River water into their area.

(Kansas City businessman Robert M. Snyder had fallen in love with the location early in the 20th Century and built the mansion. He never got to see if finished because be became one of Missouri’s first traffic fatalities, in 1906.)

Borglum came to Missouri to testify on behalf of the Snyder estate.  “My first impression of Ha Ha Tonka was that it was more like some of the ancient estates in England than anything I had seen in this country…I don’t know anything that has the dramatic possibilities and the permanent beauty that this place has,” he said when he arrived. He said the “very soul” of the place had been materially decreased by the lake.

“Gutzon Borglum, famous sculptor and connoisseur of beauty, sees a future for America’s Ozarks that is more promising than the wildest dreams of this alluring region’s inhabitants,” reported R. H. Slighton for the Jefferson City Daily Capital News on December 6.  “The people of the Ozarks, he believes, have inherited a blessing from the hand of the Creator that possesses a fabulous value.  The world as yet knows little of it, he believes, but once it is brought to their realization, and the need for what the Ozarks give increases the events that follow, he feels, will be amazing.”

Borglum “gazed out of his hotel window here one misty, wet day last week and peered into the future,” said the article.  And this is what he saw—or foresaw.

He spoke slowly, deliberately, carefully and precise.  We live in an amazing age. I can sit in my room and speak to New York, Chicago, Portland, any city in the country. I do it almost every day. What could be more amazing?  A few years ago I was driving across the country down into the Southwest. I asked along the way where the Ozarks were. ‘Oh, they’re off down that way,’ people would tell me. ‘Off there somewhere’ but no one seemed to know just where.  At. St.Louis they told me I would have to follow the highway and go around them.” 

He foresaw a time when the Ozarks would be what people were looking for.  And highways would take them there.

Where is it going? It is going away from the tenements and smoky cities.

When I started the Rushmore Memorial project in the Black Hills, I selected for my home a place about twenty-five miles from where my work would be. I did it unconsciously despite the fact that I knew I would be making from two to three tips almost every day. Now, what does that mean? With hard surfaced roads the trip is only a matter of a few minutes with an automobile. In the Ozarks, it will be the same. 

The time will come when people will be living within a fifty-mile radius of Jefferson City and drive in every day to their place of business. That time is not far off.

He thought the skyscraper was out of date. He thought people would tire of crowded cities and seek out quieter places such as the Ozarks.  He knew that “common earth, rocks, trees, and grass,” as Slighton put it, might be worth billions to the city dweller seeking relief from the dirt, smoke, and noise.  He used New York’s Central Park as an example.

Why won’t they sell it?  Because it is worth more to the people of New York City as a place just to walk through in the evening when their day’s work is done.  Borglum recalled a man the previous summer caught with a half-gallon bucket full of Central Park soil leaving the park. He told the judge he needed it for a flower in his penthouse apartment, an argument Borglum used to emphasize the human longing for an out-of-doors. Good roads, he argued, would provide an answer for that longing.

The Snyders lost their lawsuit.  Their great mansion in Camden County became a lodge where visitors could look out over the misty Ozark mountains on the other side of the dammed Osage River.  The house was gutted by a fire in 1942, its stone walls still standing reminiscent of Europe’s bombed-out churches after the Second World War.  It took three-quarters of a century before the state finally made Ha Ha Tonka a state park.

“Already the backwoods stage of the hill country is passing,” wrote Slighton in 1931.     

It’s what the whole world wants.

And what would “the whole world” do when it got to the Ozarks?  “Mr. Borglum believes the Ozarks are ideal for private estates and that before so very long they will be springing up with their private stock of game comparable to the old estates in England,” said Slighton.

We thought that mix of foreshadowing and philosophizing would be interesting to consider these nine decades later.

Forty years or so after Borglum granted that interview in the Jefferson City hotel room, one of the most passionate writers about the need to seek the out-of-doors, Edward Abbey, said in his book Desert Solitaire, “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” But then he noted the contradiction of people seeking that “necessity” when he continued: “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

The hard surface roads have, indeed, taken the city folks to the Ozarks in search of something basic that cannot be satisfied by the city life. But let us hope there always will be places in the Ozarks where roads don’t need to go.

(Photo Credits: Missouri State Parks, 417 Magazine (color aerial view), National Park Service–Borglum, in light suit, with son Lincoln, in tram inspecting George Washington, Edward Abbey at Arches National Monument)

Books and Beyond

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I am not happy if I do not have a book within reach.

I have upstairs books (Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers). I have downstairs books (Bob Edwards’ A Voice in a Box). I have doctor’s office books (finished reading Steve Inskeep’s Disagree We Must in an office this week). When we go on a trip, I pack at least two paperback whodunnits (John Grisham has shortened a lot of flights over water) that won’t be much of a loss if I leave one in a hotel room or an airline seat pocket.

The box next to the chair is waiting to be re-filled at the Missouri River Regional Library’s used book sale in a couple of weeks.  I have a porch book—-to take out on the screen porch on nice days and sit in the glider with Minnie Mayhem, one of our cats who likes to glide, and I read a bit, nap a bit, read some more and then come inside to write.  Or fix a salad for dinner or something. The book is called Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet by William J. Bernstein.

The preservation of language, he argues, did not begin with writing; it began with mathematics in “a small area of southern Mesopotamia about five millennia ago…The first writing arose not from the desire to record history or produce literature, but rather to measure grain, count livestock, and organize and control the labor of the human animal. Accounting, not prose, invented writing.”

It is a long way from then to now and our emphasis on technology and all of the uncertainties we feel as we plunge into worlds of information that we could not have imagined as recently as yesterday. Bernstein is an optimist:

“When viewed over the ages, technologies do matter; a writing system that is simple to master is inherently more democratic than one that is difficult; a printing press capable of inexpensively turning out thousands or millions  of tracts is inherently more democratic than limiting book production to a few Church-controlled scriptoria, and two-way cell-phone and Internet communications are inherently more democratic than mass-market one-way radio and television…Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an ever greater portion of the human race lives under democratic rule, and it is not difficult to credit this happy result to recent advances in two-way communications technologies.”

He concludes by noting that the technology of information distribution did not change much after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type moved Martin Luther’s status from being a dissatisfied German Catholic priest to being the creator of the Protestant Reformation and the 1840s that saw the development of the high-speed press and the telegraph. But the ongoing, though slow “empowerment of ordinary people” took a step back in the late 1800s and early 1900s—-an era most of us might think was a time of great growth in the flow of democratizing information. To the contrary, he argues, that era brought “the advent of the penny newspapers, radio, and television—expensive, complex media that could be controlled by only a few hands.”

But, “Fortunately, the new digital media have once again dramatically moved the empowerment needle back toward ordinary citizens. For the first time, a significant fraction of the world’s citizens can be in instant communication with one another.”

He is confident MOST of the changes affecting our political, social, and cultural lives will be positive.  But he warns this new world also could give governments more ways to control their citizens.

It seems from our high observation position that we are just entering that era in which we as free or potentially free people will be the determining factors in whether technology continues to enhance more democracy in our country and in the world—-or if we allow that technology to turn us against one another, which will only ennoble and enhance those who wish to use communication technology for repression and control rather than for Expression and freedom.

We have to control technology, not let technology control us.

Notes from a Quiet Street  (travels with Bob edition)

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The other day I heard a commercial on the radio for a securities investment firm.  It closed with the announcer cautioning, “Investment in securities involves the risk of loss.”

If investing in securities involves the risk of loss, why do we call them “securities?”

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I have been watching gasoline pump prices rise during the summer and have yet to hear anybody comment on a key supply-and-demand contribution to their rise.

It occurred to me as I drove along the newly-resurfaced street between gas stations on Ellis Boulevard to ask: How much petroleum is under our tires instead of in our gas tanks at this time of year?

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On a related note: When I was growing up on a small farm in central Illinois, there was an annual event (or maybe it was every couple of years event, memory isn’t clear) that we used to dread. Road-oiling.

We knew it was coming when the county road department came by our house and ground up the old surface into little pieces which would be rolled smooth or used to fill in potholes.   Then a few days later, a truck would creep past our house spraying a very thick coat of hot road oil on the surface. Another truck would spread sand on top of the gooey surface.  For the next sevcral days, cars and trucks would also creep down the road as the new surface hardened. But it was impossible to avoid the oil splattering onto the car or the truck—or the whitewall tires that were part of the automobile.

One positive that came out of that operation is that cars and trucks got a new undersealing to protect against the rusting salt that was spread on those same roads in the winter.

If often seemed that the crews didn’t re-oil the road past our place until the start of school—and the bus drivers undoubtedly cursed the practice as they cleaned the goop off the buses. And I’m sure the school didn’t appreciate all the tar that was spread into the school from the shoes of students who had to step on that surface to get on the bus.

This enlightening observation came one day on the way back from Columbia when 63 drops down to the flood plain and the ball diamonds and the turf farms and there was so much dust from the gravel side roads blowing across the highway as to make driving a tad bit more dangerous.

Gravel or oil?  I choose gravel.  I helped my father clean the splattered oil off our cars enough times to appreciate dust.

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I was on the Whitten Expressway in Jefferson City and in the lane to my left was a dump truck hauling an empty trailer.  Written in regular-pickup truck-size letters on the rear gate of the truck was, “Stay back 300 feet.”

I thought, “What an I supposed to be doing?  Wearing binoculars instead of my glasses so I can read something on a truck a football field away telling me not to get any closer?

And how would you pass such a vehicle?  Or is a 50 mph truck a rolling roadblock—albeit a safe one.

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Back in the Arab Oil Embargo times of the 1970s, I recall when the 55 mph speed limit became a standard.  Not only would it save petroleum, we were told, it would save lives.

I remember thinking, “If saving lives was the goal, why not set the limit at zero.  Parked cars don’t cause fatalities.

Unless, I suppose, somebody opens the door as a bicyclist is going past.

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We went to Kansas City for a meeting a few days ago.  The shortest trip, timewise, was on Highway 50. It’s four lanes from Jefferson City to California, two lanes to Sedalia and  four from there to Kansas City.  It’s also four lanes east to Linn although it doesn’t become four lanes again until the highway funnels traffic onto I-44.

We took 50.  And most of the time we didn’t have a lot of traffic.

We wonder if the Transportation Department has considered looking at two more lanes for those stretches of 50 as it launches its aggressive expansion of I-70, which already requires great courage and patience to use.  If the department hasn’t, we hope it doesn’t say anything that would make Highway 50 an alternate cross-state route while 70 is torn apart during the next several years.