Ted Landphair's America: May 2009

Friday, May 29, 2009

Paradise Redefined

Wh`y Hawai`i?

The Hawaiian state flag is certainly a curious one for a U.S. state. It’s actually a hybrid of the British Union Jack and the American standard’s stripes, with blue ones thrown in

Until relatively recently, most Americans, including me, have identified our 50th and newest state – if you call admission to the Union in 1959 “new” – as Hawaii.

Nope. America’s most ethnically diverse and distant state – farther from another landmass than any other inhabited place on earth – is Hawai`i.

And yes, what appears to be an apostrophe in “Hawai`i” is facing the wrong direction, according what English-users are used to.

It turns out that the reasons for the distinction – Hawai`i rather than Hawaii – are a lot more complex than I imagined when I began asking about them.

This is the breathtaking view from Kaua`i's Pu`u o Kila Lookout

I didn’t pay much attention to, or try to make sense of, any of it until the last time Carol and I traveled to the archipelago of eight inhabited Pacific islands a couple of years ago. Then we noticed that these odd words with their backward apostrophes – odd if you’re from Ohio – had sprouted like wild Hawaiian orchids: Pu`u o Kila Lookout and the Nu`alolo Valley on the “Garden Island” of Kaua`i, and Pu`uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park on the volcanic “Big Island” of Hawai`i (like the state), for example.

No apostrophe needed in this commonly seen Hawaiian sign, for a Wiki-Wiki (quick-quick!) convenience store

No longer, in blissfully incurious tourist fashion, could we chalk up all these apostrophes to “local color” and pay them no mind. And here’s what we found out:

Hawaiian – one of the state’s two official languages, along with English – has Polynesian roots, tracing to the settlement of the archipelago by Marquesans and Tahitians from even more distant Pacific islands beginning about 300 A.D. When certain vowels in certain places within certain words bump into each other in Hawaiian, those who are speaking the word take an almost imperceptible breath – something that linguists call a “glottal stop.” You hear it in English, for instance, when one puts a brief, breathy pause in “Oh-oh!”

The human throat isn’t all that attractive, but as this old Grey’s Anatomy sketch illustrates, it’s functional. The glottis is the expanding and contracting opening leading to the trachea

“Glottal,” in case you’re curious – and even if you’re not – derives from the glottis. That’s the space in the back of the throat that’s created when one’s vocal chords open and quiver.

The glottis produces that slight sound during that ever-so-brief interruption in some

Here’s Arthur Godfrey in 1953, strumming his ukulele. Godfrey was a headstrong fellow who routinely fired others on his show, including singer Julius LaRosa once, on the air!

Hawaiian words. You can almost hear the fleeting exhalation that turns the common English pronunciation of “Huh-wy-ee” into “Huh-WHUH,ee,” with a little puff of air between the “whuh” and the “ee.” Native Hawaiians prefer “Huh-VUH,ee” – with a “v” – but still with the tiny pause toward the end of the word. For those of us long-toothed enough to remember: Arthur Godfrey, the venerable, red-haired radio and television personality who wore a gaudy, floral Hawaiian shirt, didn’t miss the authentic pronunciation by much when he sang about “going back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Huh-vuh,ee” while strumming his ukulele.

Now that you’re up to speed with the glottal stop (aren’t you?), a word about that funny apostrophe. It’s not an apostrophe at all. “Well I’ll be,” I can hear you saying.

That’s the okina key, shared with the tilde (~). Usually it’s overlooked, up there next to the much more useful No. 1

It’s an “okina” – a mark that exists specifically to indicate those glottal stops within a word. Most English computer keyboards do park an okina symbol way up on the far left corner of the “numbers” row, on the key that also houses the tilde diacritical mark (~) , not that you ever notice them up there.

All of this, including the reference to a radio guy who’s been dead for 26 years, would be mighty arcane if it weren’t associated with a highly serious nationalist movement in the Hawaiian Islands. (The adjective “Hawaiian,” by the way, isn’t spelled with the okina – it’s not “Hawai`ian” – because it’s a purely English word; there’s no direct equivalent in the Hawaiian language.)

This is a 1778 illustration, “An Offering Before Captain Cook in the Sandwich Islands,” by Andrew Middleman. Cook made three trips to Hawai`i. He was killed in a fight onshore after the third one

This all goes back to the islands’ colorful history. They were ruled by one Polynesian monarch or another until British naval captain James Cook “discovered” them in 1778 and named them the Sandwich Islands, after his patron, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. It wasn’t long before other European ships stopped there on voyages to and from the Far East. They brought wondrous new goods, Christianity, and diseases that killed a huge proportion of the indigenous population.

King Kamehameha I – Kalani Pai`ea Wohi o Kaleikini Keali`ikui Kamehameha o `Iolani i Kaiwikapu kaui Ka Liholiho Kūnuiākea in Hawaiian – whom Hawaiians consider a founding father equivalent to the first U.S. president, George Washington – unified the islands in 1810 into a new and independent country, and his descendants and their families maintained control for a century.

This view of a Hawaiian pineapple harvest was shot about 1920. The backdrop is beautiful, but the work was grueling

The 19th century also brought foreign “investment” to Hawai`i in the form of vast sugarcane and pineapple plantations, owned and run by whites, and worked largely by a steady stream of imported Asian immigrants. Remember, the Hawaiian population had been cut to one-sixth its original size by disease, and most of its survivors preferred the traditional life of subsistence farming and fishing to backbreaking work in the steamy sugar and pineapple fields.

In 1893, a revolution led by American pineapple baron Sanford B. Dole deposed Queen Liliuokalani and brought forth a short-lived Hawaiian Republic.

Three guesses as to its president.

You got it on the first guess: Sanford B. Dole.

This takeover, more than a century ago, infuriates Native Hawaiians to this day. To them, it represented a theft of their kingdom, their lands, and their identity. That identity is re-emerging, at least symbolically, with the appearance of so many Hawaiian word forms in official parlance.

In 1898, 11 years after King Kalakaua had given the United States exclusive use of Pearl Harbor as a naval base, the American Stars and Stripes replaced the Hawaiian flag when the United States, with President Dole’s blessing, annexed the islands as a territory.

Another guess: Who was the first territorial governor?

My, you’re a sharp one: Sanford B. Dole.

Sanford Dole takes the oath of office as territorial governor of Hawai`i in Honolulu in 1900

The islands have a rich 20th- and 21st-century history, too, of course, notably including the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that

Fireboats pour water onto the U.S.S. West Virginia, burning at Pearl Harbor following the surprise attack by Japanese planes on Dec. 7, 1941

brought the Americans into World War II, and a different kind of explosion – of the tourism industry around Honolulu’s Waikiki beach and beyond. For Native Hawaiians, the indignities of life at the bottom of the archipelago’s economic barrel only intensified as prosperity for others swelled. On islands so far from Asian and continental-U.S. supply lines, life is inordinately expensive, even for the handsomely employed. Haoles (Caucasians, who constitute 25 per cent of the population), those of Japanese origin (16 per cent), ethnic Filipinos (15 per cent), and people of mixed race have cornered the lion’s share

Dancers entertain at a luau on Maui, known as the “Valley Isle” or the “Magic Isle.” It’s the archipelago’s second-largest island, after (of course) the "Big Island"

of good jobs, including federal government positions that make up one in eight jobs in the islands. So prevalent are low-level tourism gigs – as waitresses, busboys, porters, luau hula dancers – among full-blooded and part-Hawaiians that many have moved to what some call “the ninth Hawaiian island” – Las Vegas, Nevada, deep into the U.S. mainland, to find better jobs in casinos, and more affordable housing.

Even though full-blooded and part-Hawaiians now make up only 6 per cent of the state’s population, their nationalist movement, embodied in the prideful expansion of the Hawaiian language into official commerce, has grown many tentacles.

Native Hawaiians have so far successfully fought off court challenges to their Kamehameha School program – a system in which money from lands once ceded to private interests, such as big hotel chains, is set aside for excellent private schools exclusively for Hawaiians.

At one Hawaiian-rights protest, “Mele Welte, a former Kamehameha teacher, carried a placard reading, ‘Honor, preserve, protect and celebrate the Hawaiian people,’ as she gave a mini lecture to a couple of tourists,” the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper reported. “’I feel that people who attack Native rights need to consider the diversity of our country,’ she said.”

Water drops 134 meters (440 feet) down Akino Falls on Hawai`i’s Big Island. This is the island from which lava flows spectacularly into the sea from one of many active volcanoes

In 1997, the University of Hawai`i Hilo, in the Big Island’s largest city, established a College of Hawaiian Language. “`O ka ‘ōlelo ke ka`ā o ka mauli,” reads the first line of the online description of the program. “Language is the fiber that binds us to our cultural identity.”

And as a result of recent amendments to the Hawai`i state constitution, Hawaiian-studies programs are proliferating in lower schools and government departments as well.

This was considered an “Eskimo” family when this photo was taken in 1929. Now these Alaskans’ own word for their people – “Inuit” – is preferred

These developments dovetail with those by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks among the Inuit people – also called Eskimos, though activists in the population consider the term, applied by outsiders, to be insulting – by the University of Montana and Montana State University among other western American Indian tribes, and through worldwide higher education programs called WINHEC – the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, based at Sámi University College in Norway. Its charter reads:

“We gather as Indigenous Peoples of our respective nations recognizing and reaffirming the educational rights of all Indigenous Peoples. We share a vision of Indigenous Peoples of the world united in the collective synergy of self determination through control of higher education. We are committed to building partnerships that restore and retain indigenous spirituality, cultures and languages, homelands, social systems, economic systems and self-determination.”

Ice fishers make a good haul of muikku – a small but tasty variety of fish that they bake, fry, or pickle and eat whole – in the Lapland region of Norway

Sámi University College, in frigid northern Norway where the Sámi people, once known as Lapps or Laplanders, have hunted, trapped, fished, and herded reindeer for centuries, has developed a Sámi-language preservation program, just as the University of Hawai`i Hilo has done on the temperate coast of the Big Island, 11,000 kilometers (6,800 miles) away.

And Carol and I could not help but notice another of the world’s notable and impressively successful language-preservation efforts on a trip that was closer to Norway than Hawaii – back to my ancestral home in Wales. There, Welsh names and signs and language courses are everywhere, not just as a matter of pride, but also as government policy bent on saving the difficult language at all costs.

Did I say difficult? Let me tell you, a few sprightly okinas stuck into prominent words in Hawai`i are a piece of cake to comprehend, compared with what those Welshmen have going. Try this one on for size: “Cynhaliwyd Eisteddfod Genedlaethol yn Llanelwedd.” I have no idea what that means – and no clue how to pronounce a single one of those words – but it has something to do with the town from which the first bunch of American Landphairs came: Llanfair-ym-Muallt.

Aloha!

***

A postscript

You might think that most Hawaiians would be pleased, or at least benignly tolerant, of the renewed emphasis on the Polynesian-based Hawaiian language. It’s still easygoing Hawai`i, after all, fifty years into statehood, where, as the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” reminds us, “Blue skies of Hawai`i smile” and “Clouds won't hide the sun.”

Because of its multiethnic population, Honolulu, on the Island of O`ahu, is one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities

But as I noted, many ancestors of the islands’ current population emigrated from Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific destinations. More than twice as many people of Japanese ancestry, and twice as many of Filipino origin as well, live in Hawai`i than do Native Hawaiians. These citizens of Asian extraction, whom Native Hawaiians call “Asian settlers,” argue that while the Polynesians got there first, everyone who arrived on the uninhabited islands and stayed was an immigrant, and that immersion schools in Japanese and Tagalog (the most widely spoken Filipino language) ought to be offered along with lessons in Hawaiian.

Especially, they argue, in one of the world’s most multiracial crucibles, where official discrimination based on race or national origin has long been unfashionable. Just ask U.S. President Barack Obama, now the world’s most famous Hapa (Hawaiian of mixed racial ancestry). Son of a black African father and white mother from the American heartland in Kansas, he was born in Hawai`i, returns whenever possible, and considers himself very much a kamaaina – a native or local.

***

Another postscript

Or “p.p.s.,” as I sometimes write at the end of my long letters, never having checked “Miss Manners” to see if there really is such a thing:

If you can’t get to sleep at night, worrying yourself sick wondering whether there’s a connection between the Earl of Sandwich of Hawaiian Islands fame and the everyday bite or two that we call the sandwich, there is!

At least according to legend. John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), was a gambler so inveterate that he did not want to step away from the action for a heavy, time-consuming British meal. Kidney pie, potatoes and a pint, and all that. Supposedly he asked a waiter to bring him a hunk of roast beef stuck between slices of bread, so he could balance this edible in one hand while holding his cards or rolling the dice, grease-free, in the other.

Voila! The sandwich!

As to which child in which country first corrupted this into wanting a “sammich,” you’ll have to do your own research.

This photograph, by Carol, of Hawaii’s “good life” has nothing to do with sandwiches. But I had to include it somewhere to illustrate, yet again, the beauty of this Pacific paradise

It’s a good thing for Sir John’s legacy that he ordered a snack. Sandwich was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, in the late 18th century, when Britain lost its American colonies in our revolution, and he was assigned much of the blame. Better to be known for roast beef on a roll than as the fool who lost New England. (I threw in the American Revolution reference to give his story a skosh of Americana so you’d not think this was Ted Landphair’s British Empire.)

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Crucible. In concrete terms, a crucible is a strong vessel, often made of porcelain, in which materials can be combined and melted, even at extremely hot temperatures. Metaphorically, one who is thrown into a crucible, say a roiling controversy, had better be ready for some heat as well.

Gig. As I’ve used the word in a mention of Hawaiian entertainers, a “gig” is a job, often in some form of show business. The online “Word Detective” notes that “Every job is a ‘gig’ today. Calling your job a ‘gig’ is a way of saying ‘I’m not really emotionally invested in my job, which I find boring and soulless, and I’m only doing it so I can act/write novels/play jazz saxophone on the weekends.’” “Gig” also has many other meanings. It’s a small spear used to snare fish, for instance, and it was once an object that spins, such as the child’s toy called a “whirligig.”

Luau. A Hawaiian feast, originally named after one of the dishes served there: chicken wrapped in Taro leaves and baked in coconut milk. Guests who arrive are often greeted with leis – necklaces of flowers or shells. One of the traditions at touristy luaus, in addition to the strumming and singing of soft Hawaiian melodies, is the dangerous fire dance, borrowed from the Samoan Islands.

Skosh. A dab, a touch, a teeny bit. People often ask their tailors for a “skosh more room” around the waist, for instance, when getting fitted. (I know I would if I could afford a tailor.) Skosh, pronounded "SKOHsh," is one of a few English words borrowed from the Japanese, where sukoshi means “little.” Supposedly, United Nations troops heard the word while on leave in Japan during the Korean War of the early 1950s and mangled it, and the shortened version of the word became part of military jargon.

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Remembering the War to End Wars

In 1917 and 1918, many ordinary Americans and most soldiers heading off to fight on the European Continent in World War I crossed the country by rail. And those who passed through Kansas City – once a brawling cowtown on the wide Missouri River that had grown into a brash city of a quarter-million people run by the Pendergast political machine – detrained into a magnificent new, Beaux-Arts terminal, the third-largest in the country.

This is a recent photo of Kansas City's Union Station and the city skyline, taken from the top of the Liberty Memorial. Closed for awhile, the station again serves Amtrak passengers and is full of shops, restaurants, and a historic museum

Directly across the street to the south, they first beheld a steep rise leading to an ordinary rock outcropping above Penn Valley Park, beyond which automobile enthusiasts had set up a campground at the time. Across Main Street, they saw rows of decrepit buildings and billboards touting cheap bourbon and cigars, moustache waxes, nickel-beer joints and the like.

But that hill in Penn Valley Park would soon be the site of something special, unique in fact, worth a long look on Memorial Day weekend in 2009.

Worth a second look, too, because of what has happened there recently as well.

I should begin with an explanation of Memorial Day, which to the average American, regrettably, has become less a tribute to fallen servicemen and women in America’s wars than the unofficial kickoff to summer and the beach season – another three-day dispensation to eat, drink, relax, shop, and make merry.

Girl Scouts salute at a Memorial Day gathering in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1943

As you’ll read later, the holiday traces to tributes to the fallen that began in the somber days that followed America’s bloody Civil War almost a century and a half ago. Interest in the tradition surged again half a century later during the conflict that the world idyllically called “The Great War” – four years of carnage now barely remembered and rarely commemorated.

German troops get a break in their trench near St. Michel, France, about 1915

It was the same war to which American “doughboys,” pausing at Kansas City’s Union Station, were heading in 1917 and 1918. A war of barbed wire and mustard gassings, hand-to-hand combat and tank attacks in the stagnant trenches and deadly “no-man’s lands” of Western Europe. This was to be the War to End All Wars but instead spawned the conditions for a deadlier spate of conquest, destruction and death two decades later.

Kansas Citians were front and center when it came to supporting war-bond drives during the Great War

Patriotic fervor for the Great War effort swept the Kansas Cities – for there are two separate and distinct ones: the larger, citified hub in Missouri and a smaller satellite city across the Missouri River in Kansas. Kansas Citians, who lost 441 of their neighbors in the European fighting, gave bountifully to war-bond drives and remained in a thankful mood when an armistice was declared at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

The following year, in a span of just 10 days, even more remarkably while an influenza epidemic was sweeping the city, 83,000 contributors – about one in every four persons in town – kicked in $2.5 million for an amazing tribute to the nation’s war dead. That’s about $30 million in 2009 dollars.

The fund drive’s slogan: “Lest the Ages Forget.”

Kansas City outdid itself with its Liberty Memorial, which towered over any other structure in town

With the money, the city demolished a few houses and mangy trees up the hill in Penn Valley Park and erected Liberty Memorial, a 66-meter (216-foot)-high limestone shaft that dominates the city’s southern skyline to this day. Designed in the Egyptian Revival style by New York architect H. Van Buren Magonigle, who won the commission following a nationwide competition, the memorial features four stone guardian spirits – representing courage, patriotism, sacrifice, and honor – sculpted by Robert Aitken. (He is even better known for his “Equal Justice Under the Law” pediment above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington.)

And the great tower is further protected at its base by two giant stone sphinxes. One, facing Europe, is shielding its eyes from the horrors of war. The other, facing the opposite direction, also hides its eyes, but from the unknown future. Given the events that followed World War I, apparently it knew something that the world did not.

These are models of Robert Aitken’s guardian spirits that appear facing each direction of the compass at the top of the Liberty Memorial

Among Kansas City folk, the memorial is most appealing at night, when a series of pipes carries steam from a subterranean boiler up the tower and past a series of yellow and red lights. The long-range effect is that of a flame rising into the sky, and it takes $65,000 to pay the utility company to produce it. That’s why there is now a “Save the Flame” campaign for financial support to keep the steam rising.

The tower is fully accessible, by the way. An elevator whisks visitors to a floor near the top; 45 steps later, they are standing on an observation platform, gasping at one of the most spectacular skyline views in North America. There’s no fear of scalding from the steam! It doesn’t start spouting until dark, after closing time.

This is Washington State’s inspiring, but modest in scope, World War I monument outside the capitol in Olympia

The Liberty Memorial is not America’s only monument to those who fought and died in World War I, but it is the most prominent. Many of the nation’s cavernous old “memorial stadiums,” including Soldier Field in Chicago, were named in tribute to service in the Great War, a fact that likely escapes most modern-day sports fans.

The intent and scope of Kansas City’s memorial, however, were unmistakable. Architect Edward Durrell Stone, who designed Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and other acclaimed buildings, called the Liberty Memorial “one of the country’s great memorials, in a class with the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.”

Just look at the throng that turned out for the Liberty Memorial dedication in 1921!

A crowd approaching 200,000 people, including American Expeditionary Forces commander John J. “Black Jack” Pershing and military leaders from four other Allied nations, packed the grounds for the groundbreaking ceremony in 1921. And a like number returned to hear President Calvin Coolidge speak at its dedication five years later.

Today, in the words of writer Michael Braude of the Kansas City Business Journal, the Liberty Memorial “stands as a proud symbol of human dignity and the love of liberty for all.”

Kansas City’s devotion to preserving the memory of the First World War was all the more impressive to Carol and me because we have visited, and she has photographed, so many magnificent war memorials here in Washington and elsewhere. Indeed, visitors to Washington’s National Mall will find spectacular and moving monuments to the fallen of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War; and the city is replete with stone and brass tributes to Civil War heroes and battles.

Bright sunshine and a pretty snowfall spruce up the drab World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C., built in 1931 as a bandstand

But the only nod to World War I hereabouts is a small District of Columbia Doric temple, dedicated in 1931 and now nearly hidden in the trees of West Potomac Park. The monument’s peristyle, or ring of columns, encircles what was designed as a bandstand, not that very many people know there were concerts there or, indeed, even know there’s a World War I monument in town at all.

The neglect of this once-handsome structure “is due in part to the fact that its history had been forgotten by most, both by the federal government and local D.C. citizens” according to The National Coalition to Save the Mall preservationist organization. “The memorial has no signage or explanation except for that carved in the white marble. Part of the problem was that until recently, it seemed unclear who was responsible for maintaining the structure . . . . The [National Park Service] felt it had responsibility for the grounds, but not the structure.” Only after a park service cultural resource specialist examined early records was it determined that the nearly hidden memorial is that agency’s responsibility.

‘Over There’ Over Here!

Neglect of World War I and its everyday heroes is certainly not the case in Kansas City, where, you’ll remember (won’t you?) that I mentioned that something else quite special has happened on that hill above Union Station.

Directly below the Liberty Memorial, in fact.

That soaring memorial was built upon a flat stone deck, next to two small, bunker-like buildings. One became a meeting place, and the other a sort of “relic room,” crammed with World War I souvenirs that soldiers and their families had sent in.

This shot by Carol gives you a good look at the Liberty Memorial, the supporting platform, the two sphinxes, and the old buildings that once housed Great War artifacts

Over the decades, the mementos kept coming and coming as Great War veterans died, to the point that Kansas City found itself holding the nation’s largest Great War collection. Too much stuff, and much of it too enormous, to fit into a single, drab room. Meantime, stonework on the tower’s support deck deteriorated to such an unsafe level that the platform had to be fenced off in the 1990s.

What had been a Kansas City treasure became an eyesore once again.

Repairs were urgently needed, but, true to its gung-ho spirit, Kansas City did not stop there. Citizens approved a sales-tax increase that raised $106 million to fix the memorial and build an entirely new, dramatic museum underneath it.

A lovely reflecting pond, out of sight from a distance, graces the below-ground entrance to the National World War I Museum

So impressive was the result, designed by Ralph Applebaum, who also drew the plans for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, that Congress designated it as The National World War I Museum. Yet its opening in December 2006 came as a surprise to many Kansas Citians, since it’s only when you’re upon it that you realize there’s something deep in the hillside, hidden down a long ramp beneath the great memorial.

Inside, its story begins with two movies, one an orientation and one that explains why the United States was drawn, most reluctantly, into the European conflict. After all, President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”

The museum offers several timelines to help modern-day visitors grasp the increasingly horrifying events of almost a century ago

Exhibits trace the story from the war’s precipitating event – the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, the capital of Boznia-Herzogovena – through the early years of the conflict among European Great Powers, to the impact of U.S. involvement, beginning in 1917, at home and abroad.

These are sort of “living exhibits” at the museum – volunteers dressed in 1915 German and French infantry uniforms, respectively

There is a host of other things to learn beneath the Liberty Memorial as well. A haunting factoid, for instance: One of three Frenchmen ages 18 to 30 died on battlefields of World War I.

Poignant quotes, too, greet many a step through the exhibits. Here’s just one, from Ernst Bergner, a German infantryman:

The Western Front was a living hell of artillery barrages, machine gun bullets, and sniper fire. Quiet sectors existed, however, where units on both sides, either through exhaustion, poor leadership, or apathy, tried to avoid conflict. ‘Live and let live,’ a phrase coined by a British war correspondent, took a variety of forms. Troops in the frontlines would sometimes refrain from firing at mealtime or on holidays. . . . Night patrols would spot each other in no-man’s land and quietly move away to avoid an encounter. Commanders detested ‘live and let live’ and took various measures to stamp it out.

Now it is Christmas time for the second time in this war. Along the front line all is quiet, only some rifle bullets are crossing the air like lashes. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. I have to look for a Christmas tree. Without a tree, there is no Christmas.

This flag, displayed at the museum, flew over the U.S. Capitol on the day of the nation’s declaration of war against Germany, on April 2, 1917

The opening of the nation’s new World War I museum fueled thousands more donations – 3,200 in the first 29 months alone. “One person gave us his entire hand-grenade collection that he had been amassing his entire life,” museum vice president Denise Rendina told me. One specimen is a British rifle-fired grenade with a cloth “ballerina skirt” that helped guide it aerodynamically. Another gift, Rendina says, “was pieces of fabric that people had put inside cigar boxes, denoting flags from all the nations participating in the war. Someone had taken those and quilted them, and they had been in their family for generations, and they just gave them to us. Both are examples of the personal way in which people experienced the war.”

At some point, museum officials must tell veterans and their families, discreetly, that they have reached a limit on certain kinds of gifts. Rendina wouldn’t specify, but I’m guessing it has all the helmets and buttons, belt buckles and certain uniform patches that it can handle, lest this sweeping museum turn into a crowded “relic room” once again.

This is the “good side” of the prized, French-made tank – the side that’s still intact and doesn’t have a gaping shrapnel hole

The National World War I Museum does occasionally purchase an item, such as its one-of-a-kind, two-man, camouflage-painted Renault FT-17 tank – notable for the huge shrapnel hole on one of its sides. And it didn’t come cheap. The museum paid a collector in Montana a quarter of a million dollars for it.

In just over two years, more than 300,000 visitors, including about 35,000 school kids, have toured the museum. “A lot of them knew next to nothing about the Great War,” Denise Rendina says. “I see people moved to silence, because of the horror of this and all wars, and because of conflicts around us right now.”

This is Frank Buckles next to an ambulance inside the museum a year ago. We should all look so good at 107!

One visitor who arrived by special invitation last Memorial Day.: Frank Buckles, now 108 years old, is the last known living American veteran of the War to End All Wars. Buckles enlisted at 16 – lying about his age– and drove ambulances and motorcycles in the conflict.

Entirely cognizant, he remarked approvingly about the museum’s collection. There was little time to dwell on most of the 52,000 objects, but he was impressed with the re-creations, stretching into several rooms, of the crowded and shell-pocked trenches in which so many of his comrades lived, and lost, their lives 90 years ago.

Naturally, Buckles liked the museum’s ambulance and motorcycles, too.

***
More About Memorial Day

There are varying explanations as to the origins of Memorial Day, which used to be celebrated in the United States every May 30th. Since 1971, the holiday has been observed on the last Monday in May, whether or not it falls on the 30th, in order to create a three-day holiday weekend. This year, it falls on Monday, May 25th.

The main federal observance of Memorial Day is held at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The president or his designate places a wreath of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknowns, honoring all of the men and women who have died in America's wars. There’s a celebrity-studded Memorial Weekend concert, too, and a Memorial Day parade, featuring patriotic floats and helium-filled balloons, up Constitution Avenue.

The Grand Army of the Republic, a unit of which is seen here parading up Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in 1865, was enormously influential

It’s generally accepted that Memorial Day dates to just after the Civil War, which ended in 1865. According to one of many versions, the tradition was established when the people of Waterloo, New York, gathered at the local cemetery the following year and placed flowers on the graves of local men killed in the Civil War. Later, the Grand Army of the Republic – or G.A.R – an organization of northern veterans, endorsed ceremonies that honored the dead and suggested that its members take up the practice. In 1868, General John Logan, a former Union army general who commanded the G.A.R, designated May 30th as the day to decorate graves.

Indeed, the holiday was long called “Decoration Day.” Even before the Civil War had concluded, women’s groups in the South were laying flowers below their loved ones’ tombstones, and an 1867 hymn, “Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping,” carried the dedication “To The Ladies of the South who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead.”

This was actually an Independence Day parade in my current hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1922. Decoration Day festivities had the same corny trappings

Eighty years later, as a child far to the north in Cleveland, I was festooning my bike or my wagon with crepe paper streamers for the neighborhood Decoration Day parade.

As I mentioned earlier, following World War I Congress set aside May 30th as a day to honor the dead from all American wars. That was the war in which a Canadian field artillery surgeon, John McCrea, wrote the moving poem “Flanders Fields” at a burial ground near Ypres, France. It reads, in part:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Two days before the armistice quieted the fighting, Moina Michael of Athens, Georgia, a Civil War veteran’s daughter working at the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries’ office in New York, got an idea. She had long treasured the last line of McCrea’s poem – we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields – and when she saw the poem once again, she sat down and wrote a short verse of her own:

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

A member of a Veterans of Foreign Wars delegation pins a poppy on the lapel of President Calvin Coolidge in 1924

Moina Michael vowed to wear a red poppy in memory of Flanders Field each remaining day of her life, and the idea of marking Decoration Day with the sale and display of red, paper poppies soon spread among the former Allied nations. In Britain, Australia, and Canada, the poppies appear on Armistice Day in November. Less so, any more, on November 11 in the United States, where the holiday has been broadened into “Veterans’ Day.”

On the days that I was whizzing down Winton Avenue on my dolled-up bike each Decoration Day, nearly all the cheering adults along the way proudly wore red poppies. Now, as my cynical friend and colleague Art Chimes points out, a poppy in one’s lapel might be viewed suspiciously as some sort of homage to the opium trade.

This is the poppy field at the National World War I Museum

Poppies have their day at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City as well. Just inside the door, one crosses a glass bridge over an entire field of red, paper ones – 9,000 of them: each representing 1,000 combat fatalities. No doubt only a few of the older folks who visit, and perhaps some history-savvy students, know why poppies were chosen to tell this story.

***
Looking Sharp

Everything really is, as the song goes, “up to date in Kansas City.” Carol and I couldn’t believe the difference between this vibrant, clean, architecturally exciting city and another U.S. city of almost identical (475,000) population: my tired, sad-looking hometown of Cleveland, which, you may recall, we had visited a few weeks earlier.

How’s this for funky? It’s one of several giant badminton shuttlecock sculptures outside K.C.’s dynamic Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza district, with its Spanish-inspired architecture, brims with activity – shopping and dining, mostly – day and night. Besides the remarkable World War I museum, one can find delights like the American Jazz Museum and Negro Leagues baseball museum, plus the astounding new Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, whose eerily illuminated façade shimmers at night. I can’t rave too conspicuously, though, about “K.C.’s” famous barbecue, having waxed so lavishly about the barbecue that they cook up in North Carolina, half a continent away. (But the heartland variety is pretty good.)

Refreshing, eh? Through this fountain spray, you get a glimpse of a tower in Kansas City’s genteel Plaza shopping district

One delight from our Kansas City visit wasn’t exactly up to date, since most of the city’s 200 or so fountains – more than anywhere outside Rome, it’s said – go back a ways. The first, built for the locals’ horses and dogs and for wild birds, was erected in 1899. And I learned something about the early fountains: the reason one sees water flowing from nymph and lion and fish figures high above the fountains’ pools was a sanitary one. Animals drank from the reservoir; humans could dip their hands or cups into fresh, clean water streaming from those figures before it fell to the fountain’s floor below.

Today, there’s an unwritten policy in town that a fountain be incorporated into the design of every significant new public or commercial building project.

In fact, one might say that Kansas City is a “font” of such good ideas.

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Friday, May 15, 2009

The Thin Place

On the banks of the Wabash River that separates southern Indiana from Illinois, there’s a community of 915 people unlike any other small town in America. Different – and unforgettable, too.

The easiest, though not cheapest, way into town is across the Wabash River on a toll bridge from Illinois. The toll is only a buck, however!

New Harmony, Indiana, is clean, safe, historic yet artistically spunky, free of chain fast-food restaurants and mammoth retail stores. It’s a peaceful place in the old-fashioned meaning of the term: restful, contemplative, even spiritual.

As a group of screenwriters who go there each year to write told the locals, they can feel their blood pressure dropping the minute they drive into town. Residents and some visitors, including seminary priests from Austria who journeyed to New Harmony last

That’s New Harmony in the distance, though the beautiful trees obscure much of it

year, call it “The Thin Place,” a rare spot on earth where heaven and earth come close together.

It isn’t heaven on earth, of course. New Harmony has its squabbles, especially between those who wish to preserve its remarkable historic character and those who grump that when they buy a house or a store or a lot, they should be able to do what they damn well please with it. But if clean air, verdant surroundings, a measured pace of life, and culturally and intellectually enriching colloquy are parts of your definition of heaven on earth, New Harmony comes pretty close.

The 1819-22 David Lenz House is a typical example of Harmonist architecture. The walls inside its frame exterior are insulated with kiln-dried bricks

And a little bit of paradise was exactly what the town’s Christian founders sought when they arrived 195 years ago. They were convinced that the Rapture – an-end-of-the-world scenario in which Jesus returns to call deceased as well as living believers to his side – was at hand, and they wished to create a perfect society in which to welcome Him.

So the settlers created their utopia on the Wabash. The first of three quite different utopias, as it turned out, if you count New Harmony today as one of them.

The founders called themselves “Harmonists” and their town Harmonie. There were native Indians in the area – hence the name “Indiana” – but most had moved north and west, away from the onrushing white settlers in what was then the Northwest Territory, 10 years before Indiana became a state.

The Harmonists were German “pietists” – Lutheran separatists who sought to create a simple, strict, hardworking community free from the ceremonial flourishes and what they considered the mystical mumbo-jumbo of their faith. Logical pragmatists, they did not buy the notion, for instance, that an unknowing baby could receive faith and salvation with a few sprinkles from a baptismal font. Baptism should come later in life, they believed, as one’s conscious choice, an acceptance of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Johann Georg Rapp told a town official in Malbronn, Germany, “I am a prophet, and I am called to be one.” The official promptly had him arrested

The Harmonie Society, as it was called, was led by Johann Georg Rapp, a charismatic, though stern, taskmaster who considered himself a prophet and had the followers to prove it. In 1803, he led German pilgrims to western Pennsylvania, near what is now Pittsburgh, and founded a colony. These were not ragtag dreamers, scratched out a living. The first Harmonie prospered as a communal society in which property was held jointly, and the considerable profits from their vigorous labor on the land and in small craft shops were shared. Even married people lived, or were supposed to live, celibately as brothers and sisters in dormitories. Babies were born, assuredly, but Rapp asked his followers to give up whiskey, tobacco, and pleasures of the flesh as purifying measures in anticipation of Christ’s coming.

The Harmonists were standoffish German speakers who inspired envy among their less industrious English-speaking neighbors. And after 10 years in Pennsylvania, and Rapp’s vision of an even better life on the frontier, Rapp sold Harmonie, “lock, stock, and barrel,” as the saying goes, to local Mennonites – also Germanic but better assimilated into the overall culture – for 10 times what he had paid for the land.

And off they went, down the Ohio River and up the Wabash.

Rapp may well have chosen the location for another reason besides the fertility of its fields. Three years earlier, the area had been riven by a powerful earthquake, centered in New Madrid, Missouri, not terribly far away. (Indeed, one sees sensors, placed by seismologists, at various spots throughout still-tremor-prone New Harmony today). Some say Rapp considered the New Madrid cataclysm another sign from God that the end was near, and his followers might as well get as close to the action as possible.

Harmonie’s earliest cabins were called “blockhouses” because they were made of square timbers. The originals do not survive. These similar examples were imported from a nearby farm

In Harmonie, The Rappites’ pattern of sturdy settlement and curious abandonment repeated itself, almost to the day. They also stayed 10 years in Indiana, built cabins and dormitories and a big church, and prospered to the point that they were soon making rope, bolts of prized textiles, candles and other goods that they sold in 22 states and 10 foreign countries. Somehow as they bustled about, they found time to come together for prayer three times a day.

Then, no doubt to the surprise of their Indiana farmer neighbors, they up and moved again – back to Pennsylvania, founding yet a third town called Economy.

Although some things had changed between Harmonie’s founding and the taking of this photograph in 1892, it gives you a flavor of the old days

“Our [orientation] film says they left because it was tough to get their goods to eastern markets,” Linda Warum, a New Harmony town council member who conducts many tours of the community, told me. “I doubt that was the reason, since they knew that would be the case when they came here. Reading between the lines, I think they felt the town was simply done. These were builders for whom busy hands were happy hands. It doesn’t take the energy to run a town that it does to build it.”

Once again, the Harmonists preferred to sell every stick and stone in New Harmony for a tidy profit and go away.

And in their place came an entirely different sort of utopians: secularists rather than a religious bunch, driven to create human happiness in a communal cooperative based on high-minded ideas and ideals rather than the search for a closer walk with God.

Up the Wabash, to the neat and tidy town that Rapp and his followers had built for them, came what today’s townspeople call a “boatload of knowledge.” It was a barge, actually, carrying Robert Owen and a collection of his very smart friends: scientists, philosophers, educators bent on creating the nexus of a new moral world built upon equal education and social status.

Robert Owen was a brilliant and daring social reformer who brought his ideas, and many idealistic followers, to the Indiana prairie

Owen was a socialist long before the word became fashionable and years before Marx and Lenin came along. Like Rapp, Owen was an immigrant – a Welshman who had prospered as an industrialist in neighboring Scotland. There, in his woolen mills and the company towns that housed his workers, he tested social experiments, including the free public education of children and Chautauqua-like learning opportunities for adults of both sexes.

The Chautauqua movement was a series of assemblies that met each summer for more than 50 years, spanning the turn of the 20th century. Named for the town in New York State where they were first held, away from the smoke and bustle and cares of the big city, Chautauquans sought to impart intellectual enlightenment, oratorical inspiration, artistic and musical enjoyment, spiritual enrichment, and physical rejuvenation. It was an idea that Robert Owen had tried in New Lanark, Scotland, almost a century earlier.

Owen believed that his ideas would flower even more profoundly in adventurous America, where radical ideas found nourishment. Owen met some Rappites, visited New Harmony, bought the place from Johann Rapp and his followers for $135,000, and invited other eminent thinkers to move there. Many, beginning with those aboard the “boatload of knowledge,” accepted.

Gardens were not hobbyists’ playgrounds in busy Harmonie. Their bounty was an important part of the economy

In New Harmony, Owen established a system of “time money” and “time stores,” classic utopian concepts in which citizens were issued local scrip instead of U.S. currency based upon their labors. The currency was then exchanged for goods at the colony’s stores.

But a problem developed almost at once. Unlike Rapp’s Harmonists, Owen’s brainy band had no unifying religious bond; they were individualists with headstrong ideas on how things should run. Rifts developed. So deep, in fact, that roughly half the town, south of Church Street, was occupied by Owen’s family and his disciples; and the neighborhood north of this main street by William Maclure and his followers.

Maclure was a Scottish-born philanthropist and naturalist from Philadelphia – a man so renowned that he was known as “the Father of Geology.” Maclure opened the “Working Men’s Institute,” in a building that still stands, in which common laborers were invited to borrow books and attend lectures aimed at elevating their lot in life. The institute is now the town library.

Robert Owen headed off in search of more intellectual settlers, leaving New Harmony’s management to one of his sons, 23-year-old William Dale Owen. In a piece of local fascination, it is noted that all four of Owen’s sons – Robert, William, David, and Richard – shared the middle name “Dale,” after their mother’s maiden name. Son Robert became a diplomat and U.S. congressman who introduced the legislation that established the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. William ran the local newspaper in addition to the town. David, a geologist for whom the granary was a laboratory, became the state, and then the nation’s official geologist. And Richard, also a geologist, became the first president of Purdue University, up the road in Indiana.

New Harmony was awash in accomplished thinkers, all right, but there weren’t many doers willing to break a sweat tilling the land or producing food and crafts. According to the Web site of the Robert Owen (the elder) Museum in Wales, “Settlers flocked to New Harmony, but most were unsuited to community life, and very few had the necessary skills to farm the land or run small industries. As the settlement became overcrowded the chaos developed. William had to write to his father urging him to send no more settlers.”

Geologist David Dale Owen used New Harmony’s first level for shops and workrooms and the second and third floors for his laboratory and lecture hall

The colony structure collapsed within three years, but many of the intelligentsia stayed put, preserving some of New Harmony’s remarkable early architecture, including the granary, Working Men’s Institute, and several cabins and houses.

Thus the town never fell to rack and ruin. Twice it flowered anew, first during a late-19th-century agricultural bonanza in which many Victorian-style downtown banks and mercantile stores appeared; and then during an oil boom in the 1930s and 1940s that attracted fresh out-of-state capital and talent. In that wave, in 1942, came Kenneth

Downtown New Harmony in 1942 looked a lot like any American small town, though perhaps a tad tidier

Dale Owen, a great-grandson of Richard Owen, the Purdue president. Kenneth Owen had been born in New Harmony but moved away. Upon the couple’s return there, Kenneth Dale’s wife Jane – wealthy from her family’s Esso Oil ties – fell in love with New Harmony and became its biggest investor and preservationist. Still living, she owns a company that runs a cozy inn, small conference center, and little restaurant.

And another entity helped return New Harmony to what some would say is a third utopian epoch. It is the Historic New Harmony Society, originally a private, nonprofit preservationist operation that is now a part of the University of Southern Indiana, based in nearby Evansville. Historic New Harmony has helped restore, or keep

This Harmonist labyrinth, re-created in 1939, is planted in accordance with a Harmony Society plan in concentric circles of privet hedge leading to a stone temple

ship-shape, such local landmarks as the opera house, a double log cabin, a foliage labyrinth on the site of one constructed by the Harmonists, as well as a remarkable, 1960-vintage “roofless church,” designed by noted architect Philip Johnson and funded by Jane Owen. Inside, where the sky is the roof and interdenominational, Easter morning, and wedding services are conducted, stands an unusual – covered – central altar in the shape of an inverted rose.

There’s also another labyrinth in town. This one, flat on the ground, is made of rose granite, not twigs and leaves. It’s identical to one at Chartres Cathedral in France.

Drawing from the Harmonists’ trademark, the golden rose, architect Philip Johnson created a dome in the shape of an inverted rosebud inside his Roofless Church

New Harmony also found donors for other structures, including an atheneum – a place where learned reading materials (and some less-weighty tourist brochures) are available. This shining-white building, which vaguely suggests the structure of a ship, was designed by acclaimed architect Richard Meier. It serves as the visitor center and vantage point for the townsite and the Wabash River Valley, and it’s the envy of small towns across the country. The atheneum is the most prominent modernist example in an

The New Harmony atheneum contains several levels of historic galleries containing artifacts and town models

otherwise historic town; sculptures that pop up in unexpected places and modern additions to traditional homes are others.

New Harmony has a few of the accouterments of any small town, including a kindergarten-through-12th grade school, a movie theater to go with the opera house, and a bandstand in Maclure Park. The town’s abundant supply of local musicians makes sure there are plenty of accessible performances there or under the granary’s 205 tons of oaken beams. One in each location takes place on American Independence Day, July 4th, following the annual parade of “floats.” I put the word in quotes because the vehicles are decorated golf carts! – about 50 of them. These carts are the preferred mode of transportation in town, even though there’s no golf course on which to ride them.

It wasn’t New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or New York City’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but New Harmony’s July 4th golf-cart procession was a hoot

The humming carts contribute to the sense of quietude. Kids walk or bike to school. Signposts direct visitors along numerous nature walks. Meditation is encouraged at the roofless church, in gardens, on or in the town labyrinths, and in New Harmony’s eight traditional churches that do have roofs. Johann Rapp might be pleased to learn that not a one of them is Lutheran.

“I live in paradise,” Linda Warum told me. “On Granary Street.”

Stephen de Staebler’s sculpture, “Pieta,” in a courtyard off the Roofless Church, epitomizes New Harmony’s modernist touches in a historic setting

Is it utopia, heaven on earth? Well, Carol and I didn’t see a black or brown face in town, and the only ones that local residents could think of belong to the family from India who run the local grocery-deli and live in a rented apartment. If devouring a double cheeseburger is your idea of ecstasy, the closest place to get one is on the west side of Evansville, 20 minutes away. And there aren’t many rock concerts or hangouts for young people or, come to think of it, all that many young people past high school age at all. They tend to go off to college and not come back.

Of course, that keeps the noise level down and contributes to New Harmony’s air of contemplation.

Former President Taft arrives in New Harmony for the town’s centennial

In 1914, upon the 100th anniversary of New Harmony’s founding, William Howard Taft, who had just left office as U.S. president, and other luminaries visited and spoke. “No town or city in the United States boasts a history of greater romantic or sociological interest,” the opening statement in the centennial program read. That may be a stretch, but perhaps not too long a one.

The year 2014, just five years away, will mark the bicentennial of this remarkable utopian experiment in the wilderness. By then, the Historic New Harmony Society should have plenty of ideas to work with, including those taken from a wall in the atheneum on which, beginning just this month, visitors have been encouraged to leave their thoughts about what makes a place “utopia.”

New Harmony is a sort of Tranquility Base – not on the moon, but here on earth

Carol and I were running around shooting and gabbing, and we forgot to scribble something on that wall. I doubt it would have been very original anyway, since it seemed to both of us that this serene and prosperous spot on the Wabash is about as close to utopia as you’re going find in today’s tumultuous world.

***

More About Utopia

This is Utopia? I don’t think so!

“Utopia” is a Greek word, used by Plato to describe an ideal, almost unreachable and unrealistically perfect state of communal living, especially for the ruling class. Subsequently in the European Renaissance of the 14th to 16th centuries, when dreamers reconnected with some of those ideals from ancient Greece, the French satirist Voltaire and others wrote of two kinds of idealized places – El Dorado, a “land of milk and honey” where streets were paved with gold, and a plainer Utopia in which humans are held in equal esteem and live free from worries. Both wonderlands, Voltaire realized, were unachievable. Later philosophers, including Marxists, stretched the concept to describe a utopian political system in which life’s fruits and benefits are shared but require a degree of regimentation and even totalitarianism, since too much individuality cannot not be tolerated if a utopia beneficial to all is to be achieved.

Utopian wistfulness reappeared in the 1960s, when communes returned to fashion and eastern mystics and songwriters wrote of the triumph of peace and love over cynical political power. Some say that the vegetarian and “green” environmental movements of today have utopian elements as well.

But before we drift too far off into idyllic reverie, we must remember the words of Clayton Cramer, the California author, historian, and software engineer: “Abandon all hopes of utopia,” he wrote. “There are people involved.”

***

Three Other U.S. Utopian Experiments

This is a ca. 1900 shot of the busy Amana Colonies

Amana Colonies. One of the most familiar of America’s utopian communal societies was the Amana Colonies settlement, begun in the 1850s in Iowa. Best-known today because tourists flock to Amana’s seven villages to enjoy the groaning board of homemade food still served family style, and because of the famous Amana refrigerators and other appliances that one of the society’s members began producing in the early 1930s. This settlement of dissident Lutherans, like Harmonie’s Rappists, was an outgrowth of religious persecution and an economic depression in Germany. These colonists, who called themselves “Inspirationists,” founded a communal farm and series of craft shops at a place they called Ebenezer near Buffalo, New York. A decade later, seeking more land to work, the Inspirationists shifted operations to eastern Iowa. Seven villages, including East Amana, West Amana, High Amana, and Homestead, were established to supply the colonists’ farms.

Clockmaking and the production of wool and calico augmented the agriculture, and income was shared communally. According to the colony’s Web site, “Amana churches, located in the center of each village, built of brick or stone, have no stained glass windows, no steeple or spire, and reflect the ethos of simplicity and humility. Inspirationists attended worship services 11 times a week; their quiet worship punctuating the days.” More than 50 kitchens, plus a dairy, smokehouse, ice house, gardens, and orchards kept the colonists amply nourished.

The Amana Colonies lasted a long time by utopian society standards. It was only in 1932, during the Great Depression, that the colonists abandoned communal living in favor of the private enterprise that rewards individual achievement, as practiced in the country at large. But the Amana Church survives to this day in the little Amana villages. So do the village store, blacksmith shop, an original 1858 barn, and those tables piled high with hearty food.

This is an early advertisement of the Oneida Community’s Flower de Luce artist-designed silverplate from Good Housekeeping magazine

Oneida Community. This group was founded by an American, John Humphrey Noyes, the son of a U.S. congressman from Vermont. In 1826, the younger Noyes attended a Christian revival meeting that changed him from a religious cynic to a fanatical believer. He developed a theory of salvation called “Perfectionism,” under which people might live free from sin in a perfect world. This wild-eyed notion got him kicked out of Yale Divinity School, in which he had enrolled in hopes of a career in the ministry. He hit the road in search of converts but found few. So Noyes began writing in a publication called the Battle-Axe. It brought him notoriety and generous financial contributions from a young woman whom he would soon marry. They and other followers began a commune in Putney, Vermont. Their lifestyle, including some unorthodox sexual practices, outraged the surrounding community, so the group moved to what they called “The Promised Land” in Oneida, New York, near the Canadian border. There, the community grew, even as it practiced “complex marriage,” in which every man was married to every woman. As Randall Hillebrand writes on the New York History Net, “no two people could have exclusive attachment with each other because it would be selfish and idolatrous.” While engaging in practices such as “ascending fellowship,” in which virgins were introduced to this “complex marriage,” the group farmed, cut wood into lumber, and made silk thread, animal traps, and silverware.

The Oneida Community was governed by various committees and by the righteous hand of Noyes himself. At its peak in 1878, it counted about 300 members. By this time, John Noyes had moved to an offshoot commune in Brooklyn, leaving the Oneida leadership in the hands of his son, Theodore. But the younger Noyes was anything but a true believer. He was an agnostic, and a poor administrator to boot. Even though John Noyes hurried back from Brooklyn, the community tore asunder, with many members marrying and leaving the fold. John Noyes fled town after the sheriff knocked with an arrest warrant charging statutory rape. Remnants of the community hung on, making what became world-renowned silver cutlery. The last original Oneida Community member died in 1950, and manufacturing of Oneida silverware ceased in 2004, ending a 124-year tradition.

This Shaker woman was photographed at the Hancock, Massachusetts, Shaker Village in 1935

The Shakers. About two centuries ago, followers of “Mother” Ann Lee, founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, or “Shakers” as they were better known, in England established communal settlements from Maine in the U.S. Northeast to Kentucky in the mid-South. One colony, in Ohio, lent its name to what is now the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. Onlookers gave the sect its name as they watched its believers twitch and clap loudly – shaking off the sins of the world as they sang and danced. Since the sect, like the Harmonists, was celibate, Shaker missionaries walked the countryside seeking converts to keep their ranks full.

Less than a handful of Shakers remain in the world, at least as of 2006, at this site in Maine

After the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, tens of thousands of Americans headed westward in search of fortunes and a new life, and lots of Shakers left the fold to join them. It was the beginning of the steady demise of their sect. Some Shaker settlements became museums that still draw visitors, curious to find out what all that moving and shaking were about. In 2006, the Boston Globe newspaper found what it described as the last Shakers – two women, ages 67 and 79, and two men in their 40s, who were still meeting and praying though not dancing and twitching while the Globe reporter was present – in Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in southern Maine.

Thus it was a thin place, too, in quite a different sense.

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Friday, May 8, 2009

San Francisco Treat

In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck, the great American novelist, wrote, "San Francisco put on a show for me." And it is still true much of the time, though perhaps a little less predictably, for the countless visitors to California’s "City by the Bay" today. There are still plenty of geological and meteorological curiosities, examples of iconic architecture, and delightful eccentricities. But also a growing shabbiness that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits.

Since San Francisco is a city of hills, there are plenty of good vantage points to photograph the skyline

Anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco understands its enticing ambiance: the dappled lemon light or the swirling summer fog rolling, in Steinbeck’s words, "like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city'; the pelting rain or the multiple rainbows that burst above at once through the streaming sunshine. And there is the city's unique topography of roller-coaster hills and lush green parks, and the dignified and tightly packed "painted lady" houses, rouged in creams, pinks, and roses. As O. Henry, the famed short-story writer, so scrupulously pointed out: East is East "and West is San Francisco” ─ a city that, even more than star-studded Los Angeles, seems to encourage people to “do their own thing.”

While the rest of California curls around it, San Francisco is tightly compressed onto a 121-square-kilometer (46.6-square-mile) peninsula. Thus San Francisco can only go up, not out, and that’s a twofold problem:

The populace likes things as they are and doesn’t want a lot of new buildings ─ especially high-rises. And there’s the little matter of earthquakes. More about them in a bit.

This is a classic San Francisco view, showing handsome row houses against a backdrop of the cityscape

San Francisco’s compactness makes it a frightfully expensive place to live, and certainly to buy a home or rent an apartment. Yet almost no incentive could lure the city's citizens to the suburbs. "It's so livable," San Franciscans say. Behind the Victorian doorways are some of the most creative living arrangements in the nation: opposite and same-sex partnerships, roommate groupings of all descriptions, and fewer nuclear families than in other American cities. Fewer than half the married heterosexual couples in town have children, and schools are relatively lightly populated. Adult San Franciscans seem especially dedicated to careers, avocations, club memberships, entrepreneurship, and cultural affairs.

It’s doubtful that these beautiful hotels and office buildings along the Embarcadero would not had risen had an ugly freeway run along the path

While most Californians drive cars that belch exhaust, San Franciscans whir about on electrified trolleys, motorless cable cars, and gliding BART subway trains. And bicycles, even on those hills. Although every house and every place of business in the city’s 20 or so neighborhoods seems to have one or more cars squeezed in front of it ─ with wheels angled to the curb to prevent run¬aways down the pitched avenues ─ trucks are a rarity, and traffic moves rather briskly. One or two freeways lurk among the city's eucalyptus trees ─ outraged citizens scuttled another one destined for the Embarcadero, the long roadway along the Bay ─ but they use them mainly for jaunts to the airport, nearby wine country, or to Southern California’s cities and desert. In town, they dash up and down the city's 43 identifiable hills ─ two of the hills present a 31.5 percent grade! ─ usually without much complaint.

Per capita, San Francisco has twice as many neighborhood restaurants as New York, and San Franciscans spend more money each year dining out than do residents of any other American city. One can go from high tea to dinner featuring every cuisine from Zairian to ancient Mesopotamian ─ American chain fast-food joints are rare. They also enjoy a seemingly infinite supply of laundries, corner pubs, coffee and "smoothie" bars, body-piercing parlors, and eclectic art galleries.

This is one of the newest additions to San Francisco’s museum scene. It’s the Academy of Sciences’ “living roof” with biotic domes that metaphorically lift a piece of the park and put a building underneath it

By the way, the city should always be called "San Francisco," not "San Fran" or "Frisco," if you want to keep peace with a native. The city and its people consider themselves too civilized to accept a nick¬name. Surprisingly for a Californian city, there are tens of thousands of indigenous San Franciscans to be found, even several generations of them. San Francisco remains the magnet, the crown jewel, the place with "character," although surrounding Bay Area cities have added a museum here, a gallery there, a restaurant row, a glittering new skyscraper, or a hockey team. San Francisco's ballet company, for instance, is the nation's oldest, second-largest, and among the most enthusiastically supported and endowed. Quite simply, San Francisco is "The City" for 10 million people from California's agricultural Central Valley to the Oregon line.

Uniquely, San Francisco is also the nation's most tolerant urban place. The city openly encourages mixed-race and homosexual pairings. Indeed, in 2004 in a stunning act of civil disobedience by a top elected official, Mayor Gavin Newsom directed city agencies to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples; that lasted a month until state courts put a stop to the practice.

The Castro Theater is more than a movie theater. It’s a center of activity in the largely gay Castro District

Beginning with its acceptance of homosexuals forced out of the military services during World War II, as well as those who had endured "gay bashings" in other cities around the country, San Francisco ─ and especially the Castro neighborhood out toward Twin Peaks on Market Street ─ became universally recognized as the nation's gay capital. It was here that the sewing of the gigantic AIDS memorial quilt sponsored by the NAMES Project ─ perhaps the largest community art project in the world ─ began in 1987 and continues today. Estimates of the actual number of openly gay citizens in San Francisco vary, but they have become a powerful, entrenched political and social force here as nowhere else in America. The presence of 100,000 or more avowed gay individuals also accounts for the remarkable percentage of single people in San Francisco (at or above 40 percent in most surveys).

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the largest outside Asia

The clout and power of another minority group, the Asian community, is also growing strong in San Francisco. Asians outnumber blacks in San Francisco by more than two to one ─ and Hispanics by the same margin ─ and many forecasters predict that they will be the city's largest ethnic group by 2020. In many neighborhoods outside Chinatown, Asian banks and restaurants offering "fusion" Asian-American or Asian-European cuisine are flourishing. In addition, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians have swelled the number of Asians beyond the confines of Chinatown and Japantown.

The Peace Pagota in the city’s Japantown neighborhood was a gift from San Francisco’s sister city of Osaka, Japan, in 1968

San Franciscans bemusedly tolerate an endless variety of entertainment presentations, streetcorner evangelists, motorcycle menageries, and the gaggles of beggars and sleeping-bag assemblages on the streets and in the parks. Driving through Golden Gate Park the other day, Carol and I noticed a well-dressed drummer, whacking away on a full set of snare drums, in a field far from anyone who could toss him a coin. “Only in San Francisco,” we both remarked.

Someone took an old hotel in a rundown part of town to display funky “art” out of several windows. But the street scene below, of grimy homeless people sleeping on grates, is anything but artistic

The homeless situation, however, is beginning to wear on the patience of even San Franciscans. For reasons (other than that tolerance) that no one can seem to explain, since San Francisco is no balmy place to spend a night on the street, the city is a magnet for homeless people, and the many missions can hardly keep up with the demand for beds and services. San Francisco’s own daily newspaper, the Chronicle, has referred to the situation as “squalor in the streets,” adding that the city budgets more than $200 million annually to address the problem. Tourists leaving even the finest hotels downtown find themselves stepping around and over a sad assortment of the displaced. It is disconcerting to sightsee and conduct ordinary business among people who are swilling alcohol, begging, relieving themselves, cursing and shouting and talking to their demons. “You walk down Market Street and step over comatose bodies, debris and human waste,” the Chronicle quoted a visitor. “It's just not a pleasant experience."

The problem only intensifies, critics say, because the city is committed to “breaking the cycle of homelessness" rather than instituting a New York City-style sweep to rid the streets and parks of people wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags. More recently, locals blame the charismatic, 41-year-old Mayor Newsom, who, they say, is spending too much time out of town, talking up his run for governor, than tending to business back home.

You’d never know that a counter-culture revolution, albeit brief, took place at this corner and in nearby parks

But San Francisco's fabled tolerance does not always equal permissiveness. After the beatnik craze of the 1950s in North Beach (only in San Francisco could one attend a "Be-in"), the neighborhood around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in the 1960s became the center of San Francisco hippie "flower power." But it was purged of most vagrants and drug dealers when the Haight's "peace and love" devolved into decadence and violence. Tour buses still roll along Haight Street, and visitors can still spot a few “head shops” that sell hashish pipes and patchouli oil for incense burners. Otherwise, the little shops and Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream parlor look no different than stores elsewhere in town.

Most San Franciscans loathed the Transmerica Tower when it was designed and built. Now, they adore it

So many interest groups have coalesced ─ around issues, causes, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations ─ and grown in political power in San Francisco that any change can trigger paroxysms of protest, even over such minor issues as the closing of a tattered greasy spoon or the removal of a single parking space. For example, in 1971 many San Franciscans mightily opposed, then jeered as unsightly, the 260-meter (853-foot), pyramidal Transamerica Corporation building that rose on Montgomery Street ─ the "Wall Street of the West." Of course, that tower ─ along with the city's cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Colt Tower ─ is now one of the most treasured and photographed landmarks in San Francisco.

The Golden Gate Bridge is said to be the most-photographed structure on earth

A heavily unionized city (even body piercers have a union), San Francisco is accustomed to perennial civic and labor unrest. The people of the city accept this as a tolerable price for its numerous charms: the freshest seafood, sourdough bread, and exotic international cuisines; (nippy) ocean bathing; world-class theater and art, ballet and opera; the lushest landscaped parks west of Philadelphia; and everyday vistas that prompt even lifelong San Franciscans to gasp in amazement. In 1997 the Chronicle extolled the "glory of living anywhere in the Bay Area," where there is always a convenient peak offering a spectacular view. "From the hilltops," gushed the newspaper, "the congestion that makes metropolitan life maddening becomes invisible."

San Francisco temperatures, while averaging out to a pleasant sixty degrees or so, can swing wildly with no notice. "The coldest winter I ever spent," goes one refrain, "was a summer in San Francisco!" Spared the desert winds that can sizzle Southern California, San Franciscans swelter only in late September and early October's Indian Summer, when the air is mysteriously still and humid. Otherwise, dressing in layers is wise advice, for a toasty day can turn dank and frigid in an instant when the fog rolls in. How foggy does it get, and how often? It's notable that there are 26 separate foghorns and other fog signals in the San Francisco Bay alone. In wintertime, waves of rainstorms sometimes roll off the ocean, to be followed by inexplicable periods of climatological perfection.

Perfection? What about those earthquakes? Only tourists ask such questions, as natives are calmly stoical on the subject. Their attitude is: "What will be will be." However, that has not stopped them from strengthening the city's buildings or nailing bookcases to the wall, or staying clear of grocery stores and pottery shops when the occasional temblor turns one's footing to jelly.

Citizens wearily admit that San Francisco lies within trembling distance of not only the great San Andreas Fault but also several parallel fault lines in the earth's crust. You'll sway 10 feet at the top of a downtown skyscraper during a quake. (On a previous trip to town, Carol and I stood on the roof of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, high, high above San Francisco. Carol was photographing the skyline, but all either of us could think about was earthquakes.)

The Great Quake of 1906 left little standing in the eastern part of the city. Masonry structures, including grand hotels, collapsed, and fires consumed wooden buildings

Yes, the Great Quake of 1906 killed perhaps 1,000 people (the actual number is inexact because many undocumented residents were killed in Chinatown) and destroyed nearly every structure east of Van Ness Avenue. "City practically ruined by fire," read the last message coming from the city's main telegraph office nine hours after the quake. "No water. It's awful.”

But it was the fires from ruptured gas mains and fallen lanterns, not tremors or giant cracks in the earth, that produced such horrific loss of life. What about the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 that flattened part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, darkened the city for days, and sparked fires that consumed much of the Marina District? More lessons learned, say the natives. And what about the "Big One" that many seismologists believe to be inevitable, perhaps in the foreseeable future? Would downtown skyscraper office space have quadrupled in 20 years if smart money were worried about such things?

What will he will be.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, gorgeous at dusk, wasn’t so attractive after whole chunks collapsed in a devastating earthquake in 1989

Ferries at one time carried 50 million passengers annually from one point to another across the Bay. In its heyday, the great 1898 Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, with its familiar clock tower and steel-framed concrete piers, was the busiest transportation terminal in America. However, with the opening of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936, ferries no longer served as the only link across the Bay. And when the Golden Gate Bridge was finished a year later, a trip up U.S. Highway One no longer required a ferry crossing from Fisherman's Wharf to the Marin County shore. The bridge, which can sway more than 7.5 meters (25 feet) in a gale, rise two meters due to expansion on a hot day, and drop five meters on a cold one, is a triumph of modern engineering—especially considering the swift currents of the 200-foot-deep water below. So popular is the Golden Gate Bridge today that one survey found it was the No. 1 attraction among foreign visitors to the United States.

This old postcard shows Mission Delores, one of a string of Catholic missions built up and down the coast when California was part of Mexico

To go back the city’s beginnings, in the 1500s, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, sailing under the Spanish flag, and Sir Francis Drake, the British explorer, both managed to miss San Francisco Bay as they poked around the California coast ─ perhaps because of the fog. It would not be until 1769 that the first Spanish galleon sailed into the bay that American adventurer John C. Fremont would later call "the Golden Gate." Seven years later the first Spanish colonists arrived from Mexico. They established a presidio (fort), a mission (one in a string of 21 along El Camino Real ─ the Royal Highway ─ from San Diego to Sonoma), and a pueblo adobe village.

Not until Mexico gained control of California many years later did the settlement get a name, Yerba Buena ("Good Herb") ─ not San Francisco, honoring the Franciscans' founder. The Spanish paid the place little mind save to keep a wary eye on the Russians, who had established a thriving trading post 111 kilometers (60 miles) north at Fort Ross. Besides, the land surrounding Yerba Buena was largely covered with sand, including gigantic dunes stretching six miles from the ocean, clear across the peninsula.

By the time Mexico lost California to the United States in 1848, following a brief and disastrous war over Texas, Americans had already settled much of Northern California and changed the city’s name to coincide with the name of the bay that surrounded the peninsula.

In 1897, streetcars ─ not cable cars ─ rumbled near a new monument marking California’s admission to the Union in 1850

San Francisco became a port of moderate importance with about five hundred souls, and 150 buildings and tents. But in 1848, James Marshall, a sawmill operator, found gold on a farm owned by John Sutter more than a hundred miles (almost 200 kilometers) away in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. The discovery quickly ended the city's days as a muddy shantytown, where one downtown corner was marked with a sign reading, "This street impassable, not even jackassable." Gold fever, too, quickly roused interest in full-fledged statehood for California. After vigorous debate over whether the territory should enter the Union as a free or slave-holding state, California was admitted as a free state in 1850. In the two years that followed, 125,000 more Americans left their homes in search of the Spanish Conquistadors’ elusive City of Gold, making the arduous journey across the continent, by ship around Cape Horn, or over the swampy Isthmus of Panama and then by ship to San Francisco. Ironically both Sutter, the owner of the mill on which gold had been discovered, and Marshall, the discoverer, would die penniless after the frenzied prospectors overran the goldfield.

Though not a nugget of gold was ever unearthed in San Francisco, it was the City by the Bay that was transformed into the true City of Gold. San Francisco supplied the transportation, foodstuffs, clothing ─ including Levi Strauss's blue-denim work pants with copper buttons and rivets ─ tools, whiskey, bawdy entertainers, and financing that fueled the boom.

These were raucous times, during which the city's abundance of singular characters and unconventional lifestyles was most likely born. Boom times, too, from which emerged a self-confident, world-class city that could afford to create Golden Gate Park, a giant horticultural showcase atop those dunes in the western part of the city. In 1894, Golden Gate Park was the site of the first of three great San Francisco world’s fairs.

One of San Francisco’s favorite tourist attractions, the cable car, turns around prior to another ascent of one of the city’s steep hills

Mobility around the city was greatly enhanced with the development of the cable car ─ the ingenious invention of Andrew Hallidie, a transplanted Englishman who was already making cable for use in the mines. After he successfully demonstrated that streetcars might traverse the city’s hills by simply grabbing on to an endlessly moving cable running beheath the street in 1873, eight separate cable-car companies sprang up, and the idea was copied in cities from Sydney to Washington. Not just the middle class benefited from the cable cars. So did the wealthy who built mansions on Nob Hill and financed housing developments in what would otherwise have been inaccessible hillside areas.

The stunning building that houses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit opened in 1905 and survived the Great Quake a year later

These were the days when San Francisco was by far the dominant city of the West Coast ─ Los Angeles was little more than a sleepy citrus center. The early years of the 20th Century in San Francisco were marked by the explosive growth of unions, built upon resentment of the city's capitalist elite. Strikes, rioting, wild newspaper wars, and waves of reform swept the city. Then came the terrifying '06 Quake that would destroy four-fifths of the city and leave an estimated 250,000 residents homeless. But within three years thousands of homes and businesses were rebuilt, and as a symbol of its rebirth, San Francisco's flag features a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Alcatraz Island, whose federal prison was deemed “escape proof” because of the cold, fast-moving waters of the bay, looms behind Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill

Along came the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and the art deco Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill. Offshore, Alcatraz Island ─ long a military prison ─ was turned over to the Federal Government to house the "worst of the worst" federal prisoners. Such infamous criminals as Al "Scarface" Capone, George "Baby Face" Nelson, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, and Robert Stroud were among the new inmates.

This is one of 20 or so murals painted on fences and garages in a Mission District street called “Balmy Alley”

The years since World War II have solidified San Francisco's reputation as a cultured, comely, and occasionally kooky place. The beatniks were followed, in the 1960s, by the New Left protesters ─ centered, actually, across the Bay in Berkeley ─ the hippies, and the psychedelic "San Francisco Sound" rock groups like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. Writer Joan Didion wrote that San Francisco was the flash-point of the nation's "social hemorrhaging" during the hippie years. Then in 1978 came citywide disquiet following the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay supervisor, by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. White and Milk seemed to embody the fractiousness of San Francisco politics, as each represented a different ward and vocal constituency. 'William Saroyan once described San Francisco as "an experiment in living."

This is San Francisco new and old. Both are beloved

San Francisco might give Paris and Venice a run as the world's favorite city. No visit seems to cover it all. When one must leave, it's with the feeling of privilege at having met this unforgettable grande dame. Suave yet naughty, winsome yet brawling, seagazing as well as seagoing, courtly yet avant garde, San Francisco seizes the senses. Tony Bennett, the great crooner, in his famous rendition of the song about this city, left his heart here. It's little wonder, for, even in its current run of frowziness, San Francisco is a siren, whose song once heard is not forgotten.

***

Red Rockin’

On one of our stops heading east from San Francisco, Carol got the chance to snap some lovely photographs in and above Sedona, Arizona, an increasingly popular resort area tucked in a valley below some stunning red-rock formations. I thought you might like to see some of her images, so Internet guru Anne Malinee has replaced Carol’s slide show in the column to the right with her Sedona photos.

***

Got Some ID, Bud?

Finally, in my last opus about the evils of air travel, I forgot to mention a brief but charming moment during our layover in Los Angeles. While Carol was tapping away on her computer, I strolled down the concourse to a little burrito joint and ordered a beer. The perky waiter, about my age, looked at me with what I thought was a twinkle in his eye, and said, “See your ID?” “Yeah, right, sure,” I replied with a chuckle, since it’s been a couple of generations of time since I’ve been “carded” to be sure I was old enough to buy alcohol.

“Seriously,” the waiter replied. I pointed to my gray hair and his, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Policy,” he said. “Everybody shows ID. Saves us the hassle.” I fished out my license, he gave it the most cursory examination in alcohol-regulation history, and I got my beer. And it put perhaps a bit more spring in my step the rest of the day.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

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Friday, May 1, 2009

Airborne America

I’m writing from crisp, clear, cool San Francisco, after a day’s slog by air ─ yes, as you’ll see, it is possible to slog via airplane ─ from muggy, cloudy, hot Washington, D.C. Once I’ve poked around a bit and reacquainted myself with the distinctive “City by the Bay,” I’ll give you a report and some history in my next posting.

In the meantime, I suggest a name change for the blog ─ this time only ─ from “Ted Landphair’s America” to “10D’s America.”

To you, this is a jet airplane or “big bird.” To me, a high-flying, fast-moving stress machine

Humans with names are reduced to alphanumeric characters in today’s world of air travel. Carol was 10A, and I was 10D, not just at the airport and on the jumbo flying shoebox into which we were stuffed for more than five hours in the air from Washington to Los Angeles, but also from the moment we booked the flight and got our “seat assignments.” (Carol wanted a window; I wanted an aisle, and I ended up across the aisle in the same row.)

From the moment the reservations and seats were confirmed until we landed in San Francisco, we lost a good chunk of control of our lives.

What took over that control, for me more than Carol, was STRE$$.

(The $$ of air travel accrues from the cost of tickets, transportation to the airport, a growing array of booking and baggage fees, various gratuities, meals that used to be free, headset rental charges, and more.)

My stress level elevates according to the air travelers’ axiom, borrowed from “Murphy’s Law”: “What can go wrong, will.”

Carol, bless her, is possessed of an annoyingly sunny outlook best summarized with another cliché. Unfailingly she “makes the best of a bad situation.”

At least she agrees with me about the “bad” part.

What’s so tough, you ask, about waking one day on America’s right coast and drifting off to dreamland that same night in a comfortable hotel bed on the left one?

Everything in between, that’s what. Let me count some of the ways:

• The up-and-at-‘em-at-4 a.m. routine for a 9 o’clock departure. Why so ungodly early? Because paranoia about missing the flight strikes deep. There are pets and self to be fed; final packing and last-minute computer work that you meant to finish the night before but didn’t because, gracious, it was midnight already. And since one always “wants to come home to a clean place,” time must be found for light laundry and dishwashing and pick-up-around-the-house duty before the taxi or kind friend is tooting the horn in the driveway in “plenty of time” to get you to the airport.

My preferred plenty of time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Carol’s: 30 minutes.

So you have to catch a flight? No hurry, no worry. Take your sweet time

• The knuckle-gnawing ride to the airport, sure to be in rush hour, when a single closure or fender-bumper or drop of rain (Washingtonians drive like sniveling cowards in the rain and severe catatonics in snow) sends the blood pressure to alarm-bell levels.

Why not take trusty public transit?

Because there’s nothing “trusty” about it when you’re in a hurry. Repeat after me: What can go wrong . . .

This fellow is obviously watching one of Carol’s smaller bags for our next trip

• Packing. You have not traveled with Ms. Highsmith, whose photo endeavors require a safari-worthy assortment of steamer-sized trunks. Luckily, she’s an all-digital “photog” these days. Oh, how I remember the days when we’d set off with 13 elephantine cases bulging with lenses, tripods, battery packs, cords, filters, special umbrellas and backdrop cloths, 200 or so packs of 4”x5” large-format film, 300 boxes of Polaroid film, plus whatever clothes and cosmetics and mosquito repellent could be stuffed in between.

In the years since, the parsimonious airlines have whittled their world down to one permitted checked bag per person, and it had better be a little featherweight thing or EL$E.

Do you think all these bags can fit in the overhead luggage bin? Of course they can, with a little ingenuity and the ruthless scrunching of every purse and hat and backpacks that get in their way

That has prompted the flying public, otherwise known as sardines with boarding passes, to cram three lifetimes’ worth of possessions into the “one carry-on item” and one additional backpack, purse, or briefcase permitted on board. Thus, passengers lining up to board resemble stevedores tugging freight containers that onboard, they are repeatedly warned, “must “fit securely in the overhead bin or under the seat in front of you.”

Bag limits, bag sizes, bag bins. Bag stress, as I’ll explain.

Yeah, getting through security may take you a few extra minutes (or days). And yes, those folks up on the walkway are in line. But be patient, and you’ll be just fine

• “Clearing security” at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, or is it Washington National Ronald Reagan Airport? Since its name was changed from just plain Washington National over a decade ago to honor the late president, I can never get it straight. Sometimes I call it “Washington Ronald National Reagan Airport,” just to be ornery.

Imagine the confusion up the road at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport. And I didn’t even scramble that one.

I won’t belabor the security ordeal ─ the shoeless, belt-less, have-your-boarding-pass-ready-for-inspection, hands-out-in-front-like-an-undead-zombie pass through the magnetometer under the watchful eye of Mr. or Ms. Uniformed Personality. It’s the same in any large airport. Sometimes the scowls and reproaches for packing a shampoo container larger than a thimble are surlier, sometimes they’re not. Depends on how long the security agents have been on their feet and how many people with belt buckles the size of Rhode Island have set off the scanner that day.

• Arrival at the departure gate. Naturally, in our case, approximately half of the passengers at Washington Ronald National Reagan had booked a single departing flight ─ ours, to Los Angeles. It was the usual assortment of grumpy “night people” who are grouchy any time before noon, plus what must have been 800 teenagers, chattering to each other or into their cell phones about J Lo and Brangelina, and a little bit about their big trip to SoCal.

(Don’t know from J Lo and Brangelina and SoCal? Like, you’re totally unclutch.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be boarding Flight 6787 in just a moment. I’m sure we’ll get most of you on. The rest of you can meet your luggage in Oshkosh if we can fit you on our next flight

• Getting aboard first. Even though everyone has an assigned seat, it’s important to elbow one’s way to the front of the line to be sure you’re a winner in battle for space in the overhead bin. One doesn’t want to have that maniacally packed carry-on bag banished to the cargo hold. Least of all Carol, who, you’ll recall, had crammed a small fortune in camera equipment, plus one-fourth of our other worldly possessions, into one unpleasantly plump bag.

Recognizing the likelihood of seating stampedes, airline computers now herd passengers into “groups” ─ numbered 1, 2, 3, sometimes up to 8 ─ so that the airplane can be boarded back to front. This makes some sense, since without such a plan, the stampeders would clog the aisles while trying to lift their overstuffed luggage into the bins.

In case you had any doubts, this is not the “back of the airplane” in coach

But the smooth boarding system never works, because the airline also sets aside early, “priority” boarding for a variety of people with potentate status, including the rich and famous in first class, plus “gold-medallion members,” “super-plus” frequent fliers, those who’ve earned points from the airline’s “travel partners,” people “needing assistance” or traveling with families, undercover security agents, and deadheading pilots and flight attendants.

For our flight, by the time all of these special folks had boarded, only those 800 chattering teenagers, Carol, and I were left to straggle onboard.

Making that Carol-like best of a bad situation, I was able to wedge 10A’s bag into the bin. Telling you how I did it would earn me a place on the airline’s “watch list” for future lights. 10A settled into her seat next to an empty middle seat, leaned her head against one of those brick-like airline pillows, and fell fast asleep. I, old 10D, could have moved over to 10B. But come on! Only contortionists, racetrack jockeys, and those who forget to get seat assignments take a middle seat for a five-hour flight.

• Traveling “neighbors” in the sky. You can guess who ended up in 10E and 10F to my right: two of those teen chatterboxes ─ hand-holding boyfriend and girlfriend who, it too quickly became clear, had given adorable pet names to each other. Pookie and Boo, or something. Hour after hour, save for the half-dozen times I “stretched my legs” in the slit they call an aisle or in the phone-booth-sized lavatory at the rear of the plane, I was regaled with sagas of teenage loves lost, found, and dreamed of; loyal and disloyal friends; good parents, bad parents, wicked stepparents, bratty brothers, sisters who get all the attention, and stepbrothers who, you know, are like weird; teenagers who are dorks and teachers who are hunks; and spring break binges and barfs. All this before the lovebirds opened a laptop computer and began aiming the built-in camera at themselves and at me. This produced an hour of giggles, possibly at my expense.

• Reading material. I had brought, but mistakenly stuck in a checked bag, an old-fashioned reading instrument called a book. So I bought one copy of each newspaper that the concourse kiosk offered for sale, save for one in what looked like Yiddish.

This is the kind of place the in-flight magazines want to send you. Right. I’ll pack my flip-flops and snorkel and be right over

The only onboard alternative would be the “in-flight magazine,” which obsesses on exotic or adventuresome destinations on the airline’s route. That would be engrossing if I were into touring lush villas in lusher rain forests or scuba-diving with piranha. I’m not, though, so I was left to read about airport gate alignments, the selection of cocktails and snacks for purchase, and advertisements for zirconium jewelry, golf clubs, and vibrating chairs.

Still, after the six papers, zirconium ads, emergency landing instructions, and T-shirt on the back of an enormous man in 8B, there was nothing left but further adventures of my traveling companions, Pookie and Boo. And this was just to Los Angeles. The dreaded “change of planes” lay ahead there before we could even aim for San Francisco.

Catch a nap like my wife, 10A? Not when the seat reclines only about seven centimeters, the hours are punctured with turbulence and seat-belt warnings from “the cockpit,” note is made on the speaker system of every location “on the right (or left) of the aircraft” of every natural wonder and community larger than Sheboygan, and Pookie and Boo are taking turns stretching their legs.

Fortunately, the layover in Los Angeles and flight up to San Francisco were nearly unremarkable.

Nearly.

The exception was the number of people on the flight whom we observed wearing surgical masks. We counted 20, compared with just 1 on the cross-country flight. Californians, already sensitive to airborne pollution and more attuned than easterners to good health, have been quick to note the recent spread of swine flu; as of this writing, 12 confirmed or suspected cases have been reported in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. Perhaps it was my imagination, but when a man several rows to our rear erupted into a coughing fit, the normal buzz of conversation dipped to an uncomfortable murmur.

Flu fear: one more stressor in the air.

All of this mitigates in favor of nice, sanely paced, drives across America, any time we have a choice. We’ll be driving, not flying, all the way back home over ten days, nabbing stories and photographs. No 10A and 10D going east. No Pookie and Boo, either.

***

‘Hello, Curly? This is 04582”

The front page of my San Francisco Chronicle shows the surprising fruits of recent searches of inmate cells in California’s biggest state prison in Vacaville.

Not guns or homemade knives, called “shanks,” fashioned from bedsprings or sharpened spoons. Not drugs or girlie magazines. Not contraband cigarettes or booze.

No, something thoroughly modern: cell phones! 1,800 of them confiscated since 2006. Plus another thousand discovered in the cells or on the grounds of California’s other prisons.

Cell phones in more ways than one.

Needless to say, easy contact with the outside world is not the ideal “perk” for incarcerated bad guys and gals. Not only can they merrily continue their criminal enterprises, such as ordering “hits” on the judges, jurors, prosecutors, and witnesses who put them away, but they can also use their cell minutes to plan such recreational activities as jail breaks.

You’d think it was girlfriends, boyfriends, gang pals, or shady lawyers who smuggled in most of these mobile phones. Naw. In more than half the cases, it was the prison staff ─ cooks, medical personnel, even guards, if you can call them that ─ who sold the phones to “cons” for $100 to $400 apiece.

This raises a question: How many cigarettes or extra bars of soap does a convict have to sell to earn $400 to spend on a cell phone? Apparently cash, as well as electronics, is finding its way behind bars.

Right now, the penalty imposed on a prisoner found hiding a cellular phone in California is the loss of 30 days’ credit for “good behavior.” That’s not exactly throwing them in “the hole” for a month like the good-old days. (Just kidding, prison reformers.)

Seeing the photo of the cell phone pile, the California legislature is springing to action. Bills have been introduced to make the smuggling, sale, or possession of a mobile phone in a state prison illegal.

That’ll put the fear of the law in those cons.

***
Boys in the Hoods

On my last trip, to Ohio and Indiana, I visited and wrote a VOA story about the small Indiana city of Kokomo, an industrial place that is battling economic gremlins. Kokomo’s largest employer is Chrysler Motors, which, after teetering for months on the edge of collapse, filed this week for bankruptcy protection. The gist of my story was that while Kokomoans are worried, naturally, they’re also in the early stages of re-inventing themselves as a model “green” city of biodiesel reactors, algae ponds, rooftop wind turbines and the like.

While there, I came across a fascinating historical oddity that I did not report because it has no relevance to the economic crisis or, that I can see, to the city today.

Kokomo sits in the northern part of a northern state ─ a good 270 kilometers (170 miles) from Kentucky, which was a “border state” between North and South in the American Civil War of the 1860s, and 850 kilometers (525 miles) from former slaveholding, Deep South states like Mississippi.

But it was not in Mississippi or Georgia or Kentucky but in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1923, where history’s largest gathering of the Ku Klux Klan took place. Klansmen were white bigots who paraded in white robes and conical white masks when they were not terrorizing, and sometimes lynching, African Americans, Jews, and other minorities. More than 200,000 Klansmen marched in that record-setting rally in Kokomo that year.

Ku Klux Klansmen couldn’t have been too proud of what they were doing, considering the lengths they went to hide their identities

An itinerant salesman named David Curtis Stephenson who had settled in Indiana also happened to be the Klan’s “grand dragon.” He spread hate while making a fortune for himself, selling Klan robes and hoods. Stephenson organized the big Kokomo rally at the apex of the Klan’s power. Two years later, he was off to prison for life after a conviction on a rape charge. And subsequent prosecutions of other Klansmen sapped the Klan’s appeal. Estimated membership in Indiana fell from 350,000 to 15,000 in a single year.

I asked the county historian, Fred Odiet, about all this, and he noted that Klan membership was a not-so-secret secret in many northern towns in the early 20th Century. Business leaders in Kokomo and elsewhere were not virulent “night riders,” he says. But they hired some, and they collaborated to keep Catholics, more than the few blacks in the area, in their place. Just about everybody knew who was Klan and who wasn’t, Odiet says, but nobody talked much about it. Some townspeople identified Klansmen by carefully observing their shoes, unhidden by the white robes, then matching the footwear against what “reputable” businessmen would wear to work or civic gatherings.

Kokomo today is still a “white bread” place ─ 87 percent white and just 10 percent African American. But there are countless signs of racial harmony in town, and nobody pays much attention to other people’s shoes any longer.

***
White Light

There are no chandeliers in this section of the massive, refurbished Grand Central Terminal, but there are still plenty of light bulbs to change

A quick thought about a clever New York Times story pegged to the old jokes about how many people of one sort or another it takes to change a light bulb. Six, it turns out, at the city’s Grand Central train terminal. There, just 10 gilt chandeliers alone carry almost 700 incandescent bulbs, and officials are replacing them and thousands of others with compact, screw-in fluorescents that, together, are expected to save the terminal $200,000 a year in energy costs.

Carol and I are sad to see this latest example of the switch away from incandescent lighting. She, as a photographer, because of the beauty of many traditional light bulbs and the sheer ugliness and sickening patina of fluorescent bulbs. And I because, in one motel and restaurant and streetlight after another, the warm glow of Thomas Edison’s invention is being replaced by an institutional, cool-blue sheen better suited to outer-space movies or those mobile-phone-equipped cells at Vacaville.

True enough, money and energy will be saved in the brave new, paler, sickly-looking fluorescent world. And one day, the warm glow of an old-fashioned light bulb will have gone the way of the floppy disk.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

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Friday, May 29, 2009

Paradise Redefined

Friday, May 22, 2009

Remembering the War to End Wars

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Thin Place

Friday, May 8, 2009

San Francisco Treat

Friday, May 1, 2009

Airborne America

More photos by Carol M. Highsmith

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More photos by
Carol M. Highsmith