Their new money and new anger had culminated in the incident

“The town, green and hilly and with streams running through it, though not far from an abandoned steelmill, had been discovered by these hordes and their anger, and all their new money and new anger had culminated in the incident, the Bike Pump Maiming - only Josie called it this, but still - in the middle of town. The incident involved a man in a pickup truck and a man on a bicycle, and the result had been a fight that left one man half-dead. But it had not been the pickup man who had beaten the bicycle man, not at this moment, in this town - no, this was the contemporary inversion, the version where the bike-riding man, wearing spandex and riding a five-thousand-dollar machine, triumphs over the kindly lawn-cutter in his rusted truck. The bicycle man had apparently taken umbrage at the pickup driver, who scraped out a living trimming grass and doing one-man landscaping gigs, who apparently had not given the bicyclist wide enough berth while passing. They were both on the road, traveling along the tiny pond that an environmental group had preserved for migrating ducks and stationary herons. So at the stop sign, the bicyclist pulled up, yelled his choice words, at which point the pickup driver stepped out and was promptly struck in the head with a bicycle pump. The driver went down and was struck again and again until the bicyclist, in his spandex and tiny special shoes, had fractured the lawn-cutter’s skull and blood covered his face and spattered on the rhododendron that had recently been planted on the median by the Retired Gardeners’ Club (RGC), which had supplanted the Association of Green Retirees. It was inside out, utterly backwards but perfectly emblematic of these new angry people rushing. to and fro, always rushing to angrily go jogging, to angrily explain, to angrily expound, to explode when interrupted or slowed down, ready to be disappointed. These were the people! Josie made a mental note. The bicycle man, the maimer, would be in her Disappointed musical. Could there be some nod to Mame? Would that be too much?”

- Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier, 2019

Georgia, 2017, 2018, 2019

pink = where I went

I made three trips to Georgia while doing this project. In 2017 my wife and I went to Savannah. In 2018 on my way to Chattanooga, I visited the house where my wife grew up in a suburb of Atlanta. On that same trip, a student of the University of Tennessee - Chattanooga gave me a whirlwind toor of Chickamauga. In 2019 my wife and son and I visited her parents at their house in the mountains.

A few special times when we’ve visited Anna’s parents in Florida, Asher has stayed with them while Anna and I go to Savannah for an overnight trip. On this trip, her parents treated us to a night in a B&B for our anniversary.

After dinner, we wandered through the stores along the riverfront. At a hat store, we talked with the woman working there. I asked her if there was a place meaningful to her that she thought we should visit. She knew right away where we should go. Her grandmother lived at 318 W. Park Ave in a little yellow house. “It’s been many colors in the past, like green and pink, but now it’s yellow.” Her grandmother was someone who took care of everyone. “If you needed a meal, a place to stay, you went there.” When she was a baby coming home from the hospital, she went there; this was true for all the kids in her family, the first place after birth. The first time she was homeless, after 5 months on the street, she found shelter and love at her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother, Viola, passed in 2007. Unfortunately when Viola died, the house passed into hands that haven’t been as welcoming. “The house was like a living body. Now it’s just dead.” She showed me the “Viola” tattoo on her leg.

The next day, in the morning, it was just the two of us eating, so I went into the kitchen and asked the two women working there if they had a few minutes to talk.

I asked them if there was a place in Savannah that is special to them, that they think we should see. One woman said the First African Baptist Church is important to her, and that we should go there. We talked about traveling to new places. She just turned 40, and she said that since her children are grown, it’s time to start living her life. She really wants to go to Miami and Africa. She is a new cook at the B&B. She also cooks at the local school.

The austere exterior of the church is a reasonable defense for the tenderness of the inside, which is like a cake whose frosting tells the story of the hands that smoothed it. The least smooth places are where it tries to be flat.

The church was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Holes in the floor gave air circulation to the 4’ high space where runaways hid. The church website shares that the holes “are in the shape of an African prayer symbol known to some as a BaKongo Cosmogram. In parts of Africa, it also means ‘Flash of the Spirits’ and represents birth, life, death, and rebirth.”

The pews were built by enslaved Africans. Markings of ancient African languages on the side of each pew were given by their maker to reflect their own tribal ancestry.

The 3 x 3 grid on the ceiling told all who spoke the language of the Underground Railroad that this was a stop.

In fall of 2018, when I stopped by Anna’s childhood home in Gainesville on my way to Chattanooga, her parents had just put it on the market. So, even though the house still technically belonged to her parents, it felt like it was in limbo, and I felt voyeuristic as I walked through the backyard. The house is at the top of a slope which winds down into woods with a little creek running through. She had told me about a spot she used to play as a child. I found where I thought it was and later sent her a picture; she said I had had gotten it right. In that place, I felt like I was meeting child Anna, like I had been transported in time. I watched her make mud pies and forts.

After my talk in Chattanooga, many students came up afterwards to talk to me and tell me where I should go in their state. Alex, a sophomore at UTC, begged me to let her take me to Chickamauga, Georgia. Right now. It’smyhometownanditsanamazingplacewithlotsofhistoryithasthebattlefieldofoneofthebloodiestcivilwarbattlesanditonlytakes30minutestogettherebutwehavetoleaverightnowIwillskipmynextclassandtakeyoubutwehavetoleaverightnowiwilltotallytakeyouitwillonlytake30minutestogetthereitisanamazingplaceyouhavetoseeitbutwehavetoleaverightnow. So I went to Chickamauga with Alex.

Our first stop was the Coke Ovens. In the early 1900’s coal was burned in these beehive ovens to create a purified coal substance called coke, which was used in foundries to make steel and iron. Alex told me the setting is a popular place for prom pictures.

Alex, like all the UTC students I talked to, was so respectful and polite, attentively answering my questions with “Yes, Ma’am.” Once when we were getting back in the car after a stop early in our journey, a song came on forcefully with “hey motherf*!#er…” and she was mortified. She couldn’t turn it off fast enough and apologized profusely. She was saying, “I can’t believe that just happened, I am so sorry it’s what I listen to in the morning to wake up, I am so embarrassed,” and I was, “Oh my, do you think I am an old lady?”

Her old school is the place Alex was most eager to show me, though the school she really wanted to show me isn’t there anymore. Not up to code and too small, the old school was torn down and now a brand new school stands in the fresh rubble. Like much of the town, she was heartbroken when the school was torn down. I told her we could still go to the new school; I would take pictures of the rubble. She wanted to introduce me to her art teacher but couldn’t get into the school without arranging for someone to let her in. Because of the increasing frequency of school shootings in the U.S., the new school was designed with security as a top priority and is locked to all unplanned visitors.

Amazingly, Alex’s former art teacher was standing in the main office right by the window and let us in!

Alex introduced us, and Mrs. Stansell brought us up to her new beautiful art room, which she explained is a big step up from her old room. The students were so enamored of the new rolling chairs that she had them roll around and around the room on the first day of school to get it out of their systems.

I asked if the school was very diverse and Alex said no, as far as she knows all the students are white; it would be very out of the ordinary for a Black student to come here. She explained that it is a public school, but you have to apply to go there. 

Across a vast lawn from the school is Gordon Lee mansion, which served as an over-stressed hospital during the Civil War. In high school Alex had a job giving tours of the mansion and pointed out blood stains on the hardwood floors as we peered in the windows.

She said that doing their best to prevent the spread of disease while treating too many patients, medical staff had no choice but to dispose of body parts by throwing them out the window. This window.

In November of 2016, Alex was one month away from her 18th birthday so she was unable to vote in the presidential election. I asked her if she would have voted had she been able to, and she said no. She said she felt a lot of pressure from peers on both sides and didn’t know what to do. She said she, like a lot of people she knows, wanted to stay out of it. Yet, as she watched Trump win the election, she cried and said, “We’re going straight to war because he doesn’t know how to shut his mouth.”

We stopped by Crystal Lake and walked down to the clear water whose source is an underground cave. In the background stand chimneys from the old textile mill, which was once the city’s industrial center. Alex said the lake has always been a favorite place to come to be alone. 

Chickamauga is the site of the bloodiest battle of the civil war. We climbed Wilder Tower and looked out across the miles of battlefield where the Battle of Chickamauga was fought. 

Alex said people still go out with metal detectors and find things from the Civil War. Her step-grandpa had a whole cabinet full of stuff, mostly bullets.

The monuments dotting the landscape represent both Confederate and Union battalions that fought in the battle. Alex is passionate about preserving the monuments and believes they are an important part of history that should be studied rather than erased.

We ended our tour with a stop at her house. I met her mom, who let me help dole out cheerios to their two dogs and a chinchilla. 

The larger white dog with the striking eyes is Alex’s service dog, Obie. He senses when she is about to have a panic attack and pets her with his paw until the early symptoms subside without escalating. Alex's mom usually isn't home this early in the afternoon. She was home that day because she had lost her job just a few days before. She was an Appeals and Denials Coordinator, and her position was eliminated.

On our way out of town we drove down part of the Trail of Tears, which goes right through the battlefield. Now, it is a frequent stop for people playing Pokémon.

I have been to many towns, cities, states, and countries. I have never met anyone more excited about where they are from than Alex. She was exuberant with pride for her hometown and the hours we spent together were barely sufficient for her breadth of knowledge and love of this place, which is undeniably hers. The history and stories she shared were all in the first person and began with “my” or “our”: That’s our funeral home; this is where we take prom pictures; our school was torn down to build a new one; we do candlelight tours at the mansion. I am so grateful to have spent time with this generous young person who inspired me to think about both my hometown and my chosen town in a new way.

Finally, my last visit to Georgia during this project was to Anna’s parents’ house in the mountains in Helen, in the summer of 2019. Our last family trip before the pandemic. This visit was the first time we got together with her siblings and their families after a falling out about politics that happened in November 2016.

Asher was really happy to be with his cousins– Anna E, Thomas, and Mary Michael.

Anna’s brother Michael’s wife, Jeannine, made a bundt cake that she is famous for.

I shot a gun (Thomas’s BB gun) for the first time in my life. Surprisingly, I hit a coke can with each shot; five out of five.

I asked Michael and Jeannine where we should go while we were there, and they invited us to visit them in Gainesville and go on their boat on Lake Lenier! We went the next day.

Michael was really sweet with Asher. He let him steer the boat. We took turns getting whipped around in a water ski tube. Afterwards we went swimming at pool at their country club.

This visit was big in our family story. There wasn’t any processing about what happened three years earlier, but there was kindness and generosity.

Near Helen is the birthplace of Cabbage Patch Kids. Since Anna and I seriously mothered Cabbage Patch Kids in our youth, and Asher had grown fond of the one Anna’s parents kept from her childhood, we had to go.

I’m still trying to make sense of this somewhat disturbing peek behind the curtain. There are some babies with price tags, some that have fallen on the floor in the gift shop section, some emerging from cabbages nestled among magic crystals under a tree mother, and then some being cradled by human “nurses” in delivery room performances that happen on the hour. Despite (or maybe because of?) the fact that these hard-headed babies with signatures on their bottoms are “delivered” to Babyland General by storks, there is some complicit harmless obscenity I can’t place.

But it was fun, and weird, and maybe not any weirder than everything else I don’t have words for.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest

“Let me be honest with you - a feat which, by the way, I find of the utmost difficulty. When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happen to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I’ve been trying to look through myself, and theres’s a risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth… On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to ‘justify’ and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying ‘yes’ against the nay-saying of my stomach - not to mention my brain.”

- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1947

(Red Country Reading List)

January 20, 2021

The travel part of this project is over! The only state I made it to in 2020 was Texas, due to COVID.

Michigan, April 2019

pink = where I went

I went from our family road trip through the midwest to a five-day residency in Michigan at the Flint Public Art Project. The residency house was closed due to plumbing issues, so the director invited me to stay with him and his husband in their home in Carriage Town, the historical neighborhood in Flint.

The beautiful old house was formerly owned by a church and was the home of nuns. Joe and Phillip live there with their four dogs and cat. In my time there I became especially friendly with Leo and Toro, the big dogs. 

Another artist, Agenor, was there at the same time. He was quiet and always working in his room but joined us for dinners. Joe and Phillip welcomed us like old friends, cooking us dinner and introducing us to their friends.

One night their friend Janet, an actor who teaches at the University of Michigan-Flint, joined us. She grew up on the west side of Flint, which in the seventies was a tight-knit community of families. She said that then, GM was committed to the quality of life for their community of workers. Community education started here, with the community college model. Then, when it wasn’t economically feasible anymore, they stopped. Now she lives twenty minutes away in Flushing, in a house on the river. She said she can’t live in Flint now. “It’s the place of my home. To see it in its current state is too hard. I’m too much of an empath.”

Phillip grew up in Byron, Michigan. His mom worked at Buick. He is a program manager for the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence. Joe grew up in Metro Detroit. He is writing a book with a friend about haunted Flint; he shared an early draft with me. He tells stories about the town like they’re old family stories.

Joe and Phillip and their friends care deeply about Flint and are invested in updating the story that is told about the town. The water crisis has branded it a site of systemic failure, but this is not what they primarily want to talk about. They want to talk about their artists, history, and community.

They explained that people here are deeply skeptical of outsiders who have money or a solution to the water problem, which still hadn’t been solved. The city remedied the situation in the parts of town that had the fewest lead pipes first. They still hadn’t done Carriage Town yet.

Joe said I should go to Donna’s Donuts by the old GM plant. He said there would likely be a crew of guys from the factory sitting and talking. The morning I went, there were people sitting around tables, clustered together, talking, drinking coffee, eating donuts.

There was a guy sitting at a table by himself near the group, and an empty table next to him. I sat at the empty table next to him. Then after a few minutes I got up and went over and told him I was doing an art project and asked him if I could sit with him. He said yes, and when I got my things and joined him at his table, one of the old guys at the group table said, “Hey how come you always get the good lookin girls coming to sit at your table?” and then we all started talking.

I told them about my project, and about how I’m doing it as a way of dealing with how divided our country is. One man said, “So are you doing this to kind of point out how great it is that Trump is bringing everyone together?” Oh wow! Well, no. I said I’m really just trying to meet people and have my own experiences in different states in our country. Then they started happily telling me where to go. 

Basically, it was obvious where I should go. I must go to Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth, an enormous store for Christmas ornaments.

The parking lot (which is also on board with never-ending Christmas time; nay, CHRISTmas time) was made for a season that wasn’t this one. Its vastness was a preface to the size of the store.

I stumbled through the wide aisles for over an hour, passing every imaginable kind of ornament.

I covered the same ground several times, forgetting where I was while trying to pick out one ornament to buy. At last I found an RV, to commemorate our big family road trip.

I know stores like this must exist (right?), and that they need to be open all year (right?), but it also felt like a newfound, aggressively festive argument with Time itself. It is April. It is Christmas. It is April. It was more spiritually confounding than it should have been. I wondered about the souls of the people working in this Holiday version of Groundhog Day. I asked the woman who rang up my RV ornament if Christmas was still special for her. Without humor, she said yes, she just doesn’t decorate as much as she used to. 

That night at dinner, the night Janet came over, Phillip brought palm fronds to the table. He had gotten them at mass for Palm Sunday, and folded them into crosses as we talked about growing up Catholic and religion. Janet said she is Christian but can’t bring herself to describe herself that way because of the alt-right and what the word Christian means today. Phillip goes to St. Paul’s Episcopalian. Eating dinner with them while the dogs asked for bits of our pasties felt like a balm after my time in the Christmas wonderland.

you think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God

"It's a odd thing when you come to think about it. The opportunities for abuse are just about everwhere. There's no requirements in the Texas State Constitution for bein a sheriff. Not a one. There is no such thing as a county law. You think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God and there is no requirements put upon you and you are charged with preservin nonexistent laws and you tell me if that's peculiar or not. Because I say that it is. Does it work? Yes. Ninety percent of the time. It takes very little to govern good people. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it." 

- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

(Red Country reading list)

failed to eat even one bite of the “salad”

“For a moment it seemed to Chip that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher. The last time Chip had visited his parents in St. Jude, four years earlier, he’d taken along his then-girlfriend Ruthie, a peroxided young Marxist from the North of England, who, after committing numberless offenses against Enid’s sensibilities (she lit a cigarette indoors, laughed out loud at Enid’s favorite watercolors of Buckingham Palace, came to dinner without a bra, and failed to take even one bite of the “salad” of water chestnuts and green pease and cheddar-cheese cubes in a thick mayonnaise sauce which Enid made for festive occasions), had needled and baited Alfred until he pronounced that “the blacks” would be the ruination of this country, “the blacks” were incapable fo coexisting with whites, they expected the government to take care of them, they didn’t know the meaning of hard work, what they lacked above all was discipline, it was going to end with slaughter in the streets, with slaughter in the streets, and he didn’t give a damn what Ruthie thought of him, she was a visitor in his house and his country, and she had no right to criticize things she didn’t understand; whereupon Chip, who’d already warned Ruthie that his parents were the squarest people in America, had smiled at her as if to say, You see? Exactly as advertised. When Ruthie had dumped him, not three weeks later, she’d remarked that he was more like his father than he seemed to realize.”

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, 2001

Red Country Reading List

Wisconsin, April 2019

pink = where we went

Wisconsin was state number four on our family road trip in an RV.

My dad grew up in Wisconsin. In my childhood imagination, Wisconsin was a mythical homeland, a state innately more special than the other 49.

In fifth grade we could choose any state to do a project on, and I chose Wisconsin. Getting ready for this trip, I remembered the research I did when I was ten and drawing Swiss cheese on poster board. My dad’s five siblings still all live in Wisconsin. On this trip we got to see four of them along with their spouses and children and grandchildren. 

Maybe ironically, our entry into Wisconsin was utterly foreign to my concept of the state, and has changed my perception of it forever. The House on the Rock (in the southwestern Wisconsin) is the dream house of Alex Jordan, an inventor and artist of the 1960’s. Walking from room to room, you go from dream to dream. Holy Arts and Crafts cave with glowing windows and birch trees bursting through red carpet, then coin-operated handmade instruments, then bare-chested unicorn mannequins, then life-sized jaws of the whale, then an organ for the end of the world. I would love to go back. I could spend a week there.

Back in the real world, we went onward to Madison, where we celebrated our love of cheese and successful parallel parking of the RV with a fancy cheese platter.

We went to the UW Madison campus to meet my cousin Emily. We hadn’t seen each other since we were fourteen, but–as I later experienced with many cousins in the next few days–there was a familiarity that was a nice surprise. She took us to the top floor of the building where she works so we could see the view, and then for a walk on the waterfront of Lake Monona.

That night we met Emily and her kids, and my cousin James and his wife and daughter, at a pizza place. Asher was so excited to meet his second cousins. One of the kids brought a wind-up mouth which made its way around the table all night.

In the mornings in the RV we played a Powerpuff Girls card game and drank tea.

From Madison we drove to Waukesha, where my dad grew up. It started snowing as we reached his childhood home. He has shared many memories with me of his home and neighborhood. Standing now on someone else’s sidewalk, it was weird to know things about the place that the people living there now don’t know.

We went to the church where my dad was an altar boy. I was confused by the 1960’s architecture and so I called my dad; it turns out the church was rebuilt on the same site. Some of his siblings still go to mass there.

In Milwaukee, we met many cousins and aunts and uncles at a pizza place for dinner. It was such lovely chaos having everyone in one place for such a short time, I forgot to take pictures. Politically, this is a diverse group spanning the full spectrum. They were curious about my project and were comfortable bringing up politics. My uncle John (my Aunt Meg’s husband) said he would be happy to meet up another time if I wanted to learn more about where voters like him are coming from. We met at the Milwaukee public library the next day.

We sat at a table not in the quiet section and talked for about an hour. John was raised in a conservative family. In college, he became liberal. After college he said he drifted back to the conservative side. He said he cherishes the rule of law. He sees conservatives as upholding the law, whereas liberals want to use it creatively. He admitted that “Trump is a piece of work,” but this is an issue of “form versus substance.” He said that while he doesn’t like Trump’s style (“brash, loose cannon”), he loves that he has supported the military, and that his judicial appointments are the best ever. He’d love for him to tone it down, but most of what he’s done has been “really good.” I asked him if Trump’s ethics bothered him at all. “A bit. You kinda have to swallow hard on that. Give something to get something, I guess.”

He shared his strong conviction that the right to bear arms must not be restricted. I asked him what he thinks about the scale of gun violence in America. He said that violence is really bad in other places too, they just use different weapons; “I would rather be shot than stabbed!” He said that if he saw someone whose life was in danger and needed help, he would be the guy to step up and save them. He said knowing that many of his fellow citizens are armed makes him feel safer.

He is concerned about illegal aliens voting illegally in California, and said that just because they aren’t being caught doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. He said you can’t blame people for wanting to come here. He told me how the guy in charge of maintenance at his church is an undocumented immigrant, but he could never turn in someone he knows. “I’m all for people coming into the country, but do it legally.” I noted that he called the people he didn’t know “illegal aliens” and the man he knew personally an “undocumented immigrant.” He knows someone from Sri Lanka who employed lawyers and worked hard for years to get citizenship, “and then you get these people getting the same thing without working for it.” He admitted “a bit of hypocrisy. Yeah, I plead guilty.”

He told me how he and Meg have evolved on their opinion of gay marriage and that he’s glad they have. He told me he doesn’t see my marriage as any different from his marriage. He said there has to be a way for a non-traditional couple to have legal protections. “You have to love your neighbor. You can’t do that if you’re denying them things they need.”

I asked him what news sources he trusts. He said he doesn’t really trust any of them. He keeps up with Fox News and NBC. He respects Lester Holt, and appreciates that he tries to be fair. He reads The Week, which he says probably leans a little bit left, but it seems fair. What about the New York Times? “It’s probably the best quality newspaper, but the liberal editorial is hard for me.” He said he loves having these deep conversations. “If you want to learn something, talk to the guy that disagrees with you.”

I hope I adequately expressed my appreciation that he was willing to sit down and talk with me. I have had a lot of fear for our country and have felt vulnerable doing this project. I could see his fear, too.

Anna and Asher and I went for a walk at Klode Park with my aunt Kathy. At the big family pizza dinner, my aunt Meg had told me that Klode Park is one of her favorite places in Milwaukee. It’s hilly, with a path down to the lake. She told me about a little tree that’s crooked. She puts her back up against the crooked tree and looks out at the water. She used to collect stones from the park, perfectly smooth and polished from many years of being tossed and pummeled by the lake. She would collect the stones and put them in a jar, until she filled it up.

Our last morning in Wisconsin, at the RV park in Milwaukee, a tornado siren sounded. The weather had been changing constantly our whole time in Wisconsin–beautiful sunny, then snowing, then rain–so it seemed plausible that now a tornado was happening. As we left the RV and walked briskly to the shelter on the campground (aka the bathhouse), I marveled at the luxury of these minutes of warning. Having spent almost my entire life on the Pacific coast (and currently live in the region now woefully known as the “Cascadia Subduction Zone”), I have made some level of peace with the knowledge that the earth and everything on it might be tossed up with no prior notice. Now, here we were in a land where you have many minutes to prepare for a natural disaster. How amazing! What a mind-blowing ability to be able to locate at least one morsel of predictability in this world. It turned out that our tornado siren that morning was just a test. But the feeling of safety stayed with me all day.

the mosquitoes were like real terrible, so he gave up

“Her name was something like Stacie McDougald, and she. had run away two days earlier with another girl who returned home by bus after the first night. Stacie then hitched a ride with a boy who brought her down the back road.

‘He never said anything, but when he stopped by the lake I got scared and ran. He looked for me in the woods and stuff, but the mosquitoes were like real terrible, so he gave up.’

She had hidden in the trees all night, eaten a couple of Ho-Ho’s, and finally put her head in the knapsack to escape the very. mosquitoes that had saved her.

‘Sorry my clothes are so gross.’ She took a vial from her jacket. ‘Only three left.’ Vacantly she stared at the vial, shook out a pill, and swallowed it with a swig of Pepsi.

‘What’s the pill?’

‘Gotta take them. I’m hyperactive. They’re Ludes.’

The vial had no label. ‘Prescribed?’

‘Oh, sort of. Like they used to be. I took Ritalin when I was little.’

‘Have you eaten anything besides the kiddie junk and Quaaludes?’

‘If I eat too much I get gross and fat.’

East of Hayward we drove into resort country where billboards and small, tacky motels lined the highway. The pavement rose and dropped, up and down, and the van rode like a cockboat. The girl fell asleep. At Park Falls, I stopped for gas. She woke up and disappeared into the restroom with her backpack. She came out wearing clean clothes, her long blonde hair wet and tied behind. Except for the insect bites, her face was smooth and bland and of an unnatural pallor like the underside of an arm. I suggested she telephone her grandmother, but she refused. At Fifield we went east toward Minocqua. The Chequamegon Forest was trees and sandy soil blooming with trillium. ‘Can you tell me why you took off?’

— William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

When everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness

“Mother didn’t want to be a midwife. Midwifery had been Dad’s idea, one of his schemes for self-reliance. There was nothing he hated more than our being dependent on the Government. Dad said one day we would be completely off the grid. As soon as he could get the money together, he planned to build a pipeline to bring water down from the mountain, and after that he’d install solar panels all over the farm. That way we’d have water and electricity in the End of Days, when everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness. Mother was an herbalist so she could tend our health, and if she learned to. midwife she would be able to deliver the grandchildren when they came along.”

- Tara Westover, Educated, 2018

like an over-wrapped present

“Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself. Some spoke of specific and certain evils. Some lived in tight-lipped and cheerful denial. Others simply had no desire to relive what they had already left. The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.”

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 2010

(Red Country reading list)

Only stopping for Faygo and pee breaks

“There truly ain’t no party like a Turner house party. Like a single-celled organism, it can change shape and reproduce itself with little fuel. The food runs out by 9pm, no matter how much they make, but the booze never ends. The children, in a pop- and candy-fueled ecstasy, will do doughnuts on their Big Wheels in the basement. Or, minus miniature vehicles, they’ll play video games on the old big screen down there, standing up, jostling one another, fighting the big screen’s static, and only stopping for Faygo and pee breaks. In the absence of any toys at all - which is unlikely because Cha-Cha’s basement doubles as a toy graveyard - Turners under the age of twelve may resort to old school play, linking arms and running as fast as they can in a circle until someone vomits, playing tag in the dark until someone gets a minor concussion, or simply screaming at the top of their prepubescent lungs until an adult comes down and threatens them into silence. The adults will play dominoes, bid whist, and Po-Ke-No. They tell the same embarrassing stories about one another and guffaw as if they’re new. They make liquor runs; they make new boyfriends uncomfortable; they make neighbors consider calling the police. They will eventually kick the children out of the basement, tuck them away upstairs, and dance in the belly of Cha-Cha’s house to classics from the disparate decades fo their youths.”

- Angela Flournoy, The Turner House, 2015

Iowa, April 2019

pink = where we went

My time in Iowa was part 3 of our big family road trip.

We parked our RV at Shady Brook campground. Staying at these campgrounds in the midwest in cold muddy early Spring felt like we were catching them off guard. They are designed to be in their glory in the summer, with swimming pools, picnic tables, fire pits. We saw the opposite of what most people see, which felt both like an embarrassment and a privilege. I felt like I should apologize to the vulnerable off-season actors at rest. I’m sorry, empty pools and ruts of mud; I’m sorry neglected cabins and leafless trees.

I wanted to say sorry to the man we met who owns the campground, who emerged from his dark home office, also sleepily caught off-guard, a bear hibernating with cigarette smoke blanket. I asked him where he thought we should go and he recommended the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, where he, and John Wayne, are both from. I asked him if he was a big John Wayne fan. 

“Oh yeah.”

“What was it like growing up where he was from?”

“Pretty neat. It was also pretty neat when Clint Eastwood came to town.” (For the filming of The Bridges of Madison County.) 

He said that lots of town people met Eastwood. Friends said he was a real nice guy. He played golf in town one day, walking around and meeting people. 

In Winterset, the woman at the Chamber of Commerce said we should go by the old jailhouse, which is now an artists & makers collective. We went there and a woman gave us a tour of the small old jail, which was connected to a house. She told us how a woman in town in her 80’s grew up in the house. She said one prisoner made her a dollhouse, which she still has. Her mother would make Sunday dinner for their family and the prisoners. One man would get himself arrested every Sunday for public drunkenness so that he could have her mother’s Sunday dinner. 

We had lunch at Montross, a soda fountain in the back of a pharmacy on the town square.

We sat at the counter and had different lunches that all came with fries. A 79 year old man named Bobby sat next to me. He told me how he comes there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner nearly every day. His mom used to work there.

Bobby drove a semi for 59 years and shared memories of driving through Seattle. He told me to look at the last stool at the end of the bar. “See that stool? I have a long back. That stool is two inches shorter. It’s my stool.” He wasn’t sitting there for lunch that day because when he got there a woman was sitting there. He ordered a piece of the pecan pie and the waitress motioned like she was going to plant it in his face, which thrilled Asher. He said, “DO IT! It’ll be a funny scene!” Everyone laughed. 

As we left, Bobby said he had been feeling low when he came in for lunch but that he felt better now. 

We went to the Iowa Quilt Museum, where a woman named Sally gave me white cloth gloves so I could turn quilts with her on a queen sized bed like pages in a book. 

On our way out of Madison county we thought we’d see one or two of the picturesque bridges. This part of Iowa (along with the parts of Nebraska and Kansas we traveled through) had recently flooded, and so we held our breath as we rolled gingerly through the mud and slid down gently rolling hills in the RV which felt like an elephant on roller skates. This made our experience of the bridges of Madison county more suspenseful than expected.

We spent the night in Pella in the beautiful 1875 Victorian home of friends of a friend. Shelley and Derek were so warm and welcoming, and staying in their home was luxurious after many nights in the RV. Asher was hatching schemes for how we might all stay there the rest of the trip. “Maybe I’ll meet some people that speak a foreign language that you two don’t speak and I’ll tell them in this language that they should take us back to Pella.”

We all walked downtown for pizza for dinner and on the way home Derek got a rental bike and rode it with Asher in front.

Pella was settled by Dutch immigrants; it is a charming town with Dutch architecture, a tulip festival in May (complete with 300,000 tourists per weekend) and a fully functioning windmill that grinds the wheat used in the local Dutch bakery!

Derek works at the mill. In the morning he gave us a special insider tour of the mill before it opened for visitors. Built in 2002, it is a replica of a mill in the Netherlands. We got to go all the way to the top! It was like being inside a giant old clock.

Back on ground level there is a gloriously intricate miniature Dutch village that was started by “a couple of old guys in the 30’s who didn’t have anything else to do.” 

On our last day in Iowa we drove north along the Mississippi River before crossing it into Wisconsin.

We stopped at the National Mississippi River Museum, which felt like a love song to the nostalgic American story of the river as the keeper of the landscape. On display are relics of things the river has kept: furs of skunks, skins of otters, arrowheads, egg shells of the Red-bellied Woodpecker and Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Mannequin white settlers and Native Americans barter their wares (guns, beads, respectively) in a grotto of pretend rocks. I wonder if they will barter there forever.

If the North had won the war

“The history books insist that the North won the war, but in the South it’s very hard to find the evidence. If the North had won the war, there would not be statues and street names honoring the defeated leaders. If the North had won the war, our monuments would be to the suffering of slaves and their struggle to be free. If the North had won the war, the Confederate flag would be a symbol of shameful beliefs and military defeat, seen only in museums. If the North had won the war, the war would be over. Or so I thought, coming to the South as an adult unaccustomed to encountering that flag and those monuments as an ordinary part of the civic landscape.”

Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, 2018

(Red Country reading list)

In fact, today might be her birthday

“Jockey had a good birthday plan, Cora thought. Jockey awoke on a surprise Sunday to announce his celebration and that was that. Sometimes it was in the midst of the spring rains, other times after harvest. He skipped some years or forgot or decided according to some personal accounting of grievance that the plantation was undeserving. No one minded his caprices. It was enough that he had survived every torment big and small white men had concocted and implemented. His eyes were clouded, his leg lame, his ruined hand permanently curled as if still clenched around a spade, but he was alive.

The white men left him alone now. Old man Randall said nothing about his birthdays, and neither did James when he took over. Connelly, the overseer, made himself scarce every Sunday, when he summoned whatever slave gal he’d made his wife that month. The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.

One day Jockey was bound to choose the correct day of his birth. If he lived long enough. If that was true, then if Cora picked a day for her birthday every now and then she might hit upon hers as well. In fact, today might be her birthday. What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing to remember. More like to forget.”

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, 2016

Red Country Reading List

Kansas and Nebraska, April 2019

pink = where we went

Kansas

Nebraska

During my then-11-year-old son’s spring break, our family went on a three-week road trip in a rented RV through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin. 

Before our road trip, I had been in Missouri doing a residency and the day before had driven across the state to Kansas City, where I returned my rental car and then picked up Anna and Asher at the airport. They had gotten up very early in the morning for their flight. We took a Lyft to a muddy storage lot in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where we picked up our RV.  

Anna nor I had ever driven an RV. We knew nothing about RVs. The lady at the storage lot place went very quickly through not everything we would need to know about our RV. Something about propane, something something sewage empty, something make sure you don’t ever turn this off. We did not absorb much of what she said. 

We sat in the RV in the muddy storage lot and ate lunch. 

We decided I would drive.

After we’d driven a block away from the parking lot, water fell on me from the ceiling. It was startling and I nearly drove into a ditch. It happened again a block later. We hoped it was just rain that had gathered in an awkward place in the skylight. It didn’t happen again, so we guessed that’s what it was. 

Our maiden voyage was to Target, which thankfully had a big enough parking lot to steer our ship safely to shore without doing damage. Asher seemed to not be feeling great (we thought he was just tired from getting up early) and curled up in the bottom of the vast Target cart. Our plan was to cook and eat most meals in the RV. We bought some Amy’s frozen dinners and toilet paper and a lot of other stuff. 

We drove to our campground - the KOA in Lawrence, Kansas. Anna delivered the various hoses and cords from the bowels of the RV and the KOA manager kindly showed us how to hook things up. Orange pink sunlight made fields glow and I felt optimistic about our journey to come. 

Above waist-level the RV was equipped with many cubbies with doors that latched closed and we organized everything into them -  our clothes in the cubbies above our bed,  Asher’s collection of books in the one above the door. We made our beds and ate our Amy’s frozen dinners and drank beer. Asher didn’t want much of his pizza, which was odd. I settled into low grade anxiety that he was sick. 

Trains passed in the night and the heater came on and off. In the morning it became clear that  Asher had a stomach bug. He would throw up or have diarrhea and then wail, “I want to go HOME!” I had a panic attack. Clothes were thrown away. Road Trip in the RV Day 1!

Later in the morning Asher seemed to be feeling a little better and even ate some frozen blueberries. We thought maybe the stomach bug was over and looked at maps. 

We got acquainted with our RV. The wheeze of the water pump. The shift of every item in every cubby and the slam of the toilet lid when we started driving again. The rattle and crash of every pot and pan and piece of silverware as we turned corners.

We decided I would do all the driving and Anna would do all the hook-ups for water, electricity and sewer.

Asher loves history and particularly the Civil Rights Movement and so we drove eagerly to Topeka to visit the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. We were sad to find the old elementary school closed even though it was supposed to be open. So we walked on the grounds, read the outdoor educational signage, and enjoyed the nearby historical mural that was colorful underneath a bright blue sky. 

Asher’s favorite thing to do is go to the library, and he is fond of predictable things happening, so we vowed to go to one library every day we could, in every state we visited. The Topeka public library set the bar high. It was spacious and colorful and smelled of teenagers and there were many tables with kids reading. Asher found some books and sprawled out in the middle of an aisle, Anna read, and I wrote. 

That night we stayed at an RV campground in Wamego. The stomach bug returned for the night. More misery and screaming to go home. A bathmat was thrown away. We decided Asher will sleep in the bed with Anna next to the bathroom and I will sleep in the bed above the front seats. 

The lady at the RV campground was unhappy with us in the morning because we left their hose connected to our water hookup overnight. But people at the other campground said that’s what you always do so we were confused.

We went to the store and bought cleaner and more paper towels and laundry detergent. 

Leading up to this trip, Asher was most excited for us to visit the OZ Museum in Wamego, Kansas. This new morning, he seemed to be feeling better (again) so we went. We parked a block away from the museum near a park. Online we’d learned that the town of Wamego has little dog Toto sculptures of different themes located around the city and we thought some must be in this park. Sure enough, we found a gingham Toto, an American flag Toto, and an emerald green Toto. We walked on a well-worn yellow brick road to the museum, which is on the little town’s main street.

The museum was a spirited shrine to L. Frank Baum, his books and the movie, and featured humble artifacts lovingly displayed alongside details about his life. We learned that Baum was a feminist and greatly admired his mother-in-law, Matilda Josyln Gage, who co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton! Baum said Gage was “in the first rank amongst the thinkers of our age.” Asher and I had been reading the Oz books together and realized that all of the main heroes and villains are women. Unexpected gold nugget in Kansas!

We drove under bright sunny skies through very gently rolling hills of oat-colored prairie into Nebraska.

Our first stop in Nebraska was in Beatrice at the Homestead National Monument. Consisting of an education center and a historic cabin situated in a desolately windy tallgrass prairie, the monument commemorates the Homestead Act of 1862, whereby white settlers and formerly enslaved men and women were invited by the U.S. government to claim “free” land. On July 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln stated the purpose of the Homestead Act was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life." Of course “men,” “all,” and “everyone” did not include the Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, and Pawnee Indians already living on this land. 

Well-designed graphics told the story of the rugged pioneers. Dust danced in the sun and settled on plastic corn on the cob that laid rigid in blonde baskets on the carpet. A friendly young ranger gave Asher a workbook he could fill out while exploring the center.  

That night we stayed at Prairie Oasis campground in Henderson, Nebraska. So far we had not had many fellow RV campers, and the campgrounds had been surrounded by expansive farmland, so we were getting used to a feeling of being nearly alone in vast land and sky. 

The woman running the campground was friendly and brought us three freshly baked cinnamon muffins! She told me she had never been into Lincoln, which is sixty miles east. She’s originally from Colorado, and when she travels she always goes west. She recommended that we check out the Stuhr Museum. Anna went to her office twice and I went once while we were there and we encountered a mystery. There was a little wooden sign on a bookshelf that one day said JESUS and another day just said abstract symbols. We wondered, did this sign have two sides - one side with JESUS and the other with abstract symbols - and she could flip it around depending on her mood? If so, what mood elicited the abstract symbols? Or maybe she flipped it depending on who was coming in the door? Would she be going for assimilation or evangelism? Would we, the queers from Seattle, get JESUS or abstraction? Nearly a year later, I was driven enough to google “Jesus wooden sign two sides abstract symbols” and discovered that there is a market for JESUS optical illusion signs. Well done, crafty Christian puzzlers!

We decided to go to the Stuhr Museum even though it was in the opposite direction from Lincoln, where we were heading. We went inside and met Linda, who sold us our tickets. I asked if there was anywhere between here and Lincoln she thought we should go. It was hard for her to think of a place. She asked what we were doing there and I told her about my project. It turned out there was a huge crane migration happening right then! She couldn’t believe we were in southeast Nebraska and had no idea about the crane migration. Some stuffed animal cranes sat next to her. The two adult stuffed animal cranes had different markings and she said one was the more common and one was rare. She told us about a field nearby that would surely have cranes visiting. She seemed like she was thinking she was smelling something fishy about my being there and so in the spirit of full-disclosure I gave her a postcard with my website on it.

Anna and Asher and I made our way through the museum, marveling at relics of early American life. On our way out, I called out goodbye to Linda and she and another lady said in a knowing way, “Have an interesting time!” We wondered if she had been looking at my website while we were looking at early 1900’s electric devices that vibrated human flesh. 

On our way to Lincoln we tried to find the field she told us about but we didn’t see any cranes. It is very possible that we got the wrong field. 

Our first and only stop in Lincoln, aside from the KOA that evening, was the public library. We were so happy to see this sign in the door!

Asher gathered some books and laid down in the middle of an aisle. The ritual is the same no matter the geographic location. 

 The stomach bug seemed to still be coming and going. At that night’s KOA in Gretna I did lots of laundry. The campground was run by a family with several little kids, the oldest of whom was zipping around in a golf cart. He was maybe 7 and plowed into a curb. He jumped out and replaced the rockery with such adeptness I wondered if this happened often. Asher made friends with the kids quickly and they bounced on a giant puffy mound into the sunset. In the morning we drove towards Iowa.

Missouri, March 2019

pink = where I went

This was my first time in Missouri. I stayed in St. Louis for a week doing a residency at Paul Artspace. I was not totally over the flu when I left for the trip and as I was getting into bed that first night I marveled that I had successfully gone through all the necessary steps to get myself there. Airport. Rental car. Drive. Arrival and tour of house. Dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. Grocery shopping at a discount store where thousands of wieners spilled out of cardboard boxes in teetering towers along a refrigerated wall, yet there was no garlic. Drive back to the house in a lightning storm with comical amounts of water hurled at the car from all directions. Bed! 

Paul Artspace in Florissant, Missouri

Paul Artspace is located in the childhood home of the director of the program. He named it Paul after his beloved uncle. I was there with Alexis Rivierre, a local artist doing the residency while also serving as the program coordinator. The house is in on a large piece (6 acres I think) ≠of undeveloped land, with trees, some sculptures and installations by resident artists, and even the director’s childhood treehouse.

There’s art everywhere by past residents

On adjacent plots of land are similar houses. Alexis said the neighbors are friendly and very curious about what goes on in the strange house with all the artists. She’s seen them creeping around, peering in at the windows, waving cheerfully/sheepishly.

Alexis grew up in St. Louis, all over St. Louis. Her family moved around a lot and she’s lived in every neighborhood. She did some of her schooling at predominantly white schools where she was one of only a few Black kids, as well as at schools that were predominantly Black. She told me I should go to Forest Park, one of her favorite places. The people who designed Central Park designed Forest Park; the two parks have a lot in common as vast green spaces in the middle of the city, lined with grand cultural institutions - which, in St. Louis, are taxpayer funded. Alexis didn’t realize St. Louis’s wealth of resources until she left and discovered that museums aren’t usually free. 

Forest Park is beautiful, and walking around fountains and over bridges I felt more like I was in Paris than the Midwest.

On my way back to my car I saw a man set up on the sidewalk painting. I went over to look at his painting and we started talking. When I got out my sketchbook to take notes while we talked he became concerned, “Are you a cop or something?” I explained what I was doing there, told him about my project, and showed him my website on my phone. We both love color. I was noticing all the different colors he used to make the green in his water, the blues in his sky. He was using a CD case as his palette. His name is Frank.

He told me how he has been scammed in his life and with his art. He said he feels like Job in the Bible. Knocked down over and over until you think you can’t be knocked down any more, and then you get knocked down again. “You reach the point where you got to change the way you think in order to cope with life.”

Once, a well-known local politician saw him painting at the park and wanted Frank to give him a painting for free, in honor of himself, the well-known politician. He said he saw the man walking towards him and his first thought at seeing a white man in a suit coming towards him was to run the other way. I had asked him early in our conversation if I could take his picture and he said no. Then after talking for a half hour he laughed and said, “Let’s take a picture.” He gave me his number to text the picture to him, and I did. 

Frank said I should go to Tower Grove Park, another expansive oasis in St. Louis

Nearly every evening, Alexis or I would walk in the door, meet the other in kitchen, and then sit for hours at the table talking. We talked about so many things: St. Louis, being an artist, our country as it processes its stories about race, day jobs, politics, representations of identity, goals personal and professional and the sensitive place where they intersect. It felt like the eager urgency of catching up with a dear friend except we had just met. 

One night she told me, “In St. Louis a lot of our issues hide in plain sight.” She paused. “We have a Workhouse.” I was confused as my imagination conjured a Dickensian horror, so she explained details of the contemporary American version. 

The police set up these zones with traffic cones and everyone trying to go down that road at that time has to go through them. They call them sobriety checks, but they check everything. If they catch you with no insurance and you can’t pay the fee, you go to the Workhouse. People get a parking ticket, can’t afford to pay, and end up there. These checks are most often performed in Black neighborhoods. There have been many protests of the Workhouse, and many efforts to convince the city to redirect its resources towards something more useful. 

I found the Workhouse. I parked and got out and took pictures. The feeling of stale dread was oppressive. Weeds grew in the two inches between landscaping fabric and the sidewalk. I got my hand slapped by a cop who’d probably thought he’d seen everything in his SUV, shaking his head, not amused by my explanation that I am just taking pictures to make paintings. He circled me in the parking lot until I got back in my car and drove away. 

In addition to Alexis and myself, there was one other artist doing the residency. Shawn’s residency was studio-only; he is a local artist with a house 30 minutes away. He came by one morning with his daughter Aurora, 7. He brought her because he didn’t realize her spring break was two weeks long, not one. The three of us sat at the kitchen table and talked for a bit. 

Shawn grew up in St. Louis. He said he’s always felt that St. Louis has a rural mentality, that even in the city there’s this pervasive idea that St. Louis is this small farm town. So it feels culturally very small. He goes to other cities to feel a connection to things he’s interested in. “We have to go to another city to see an exhibition that isn’t a big name artist.” He had a hard time thinking of a place to recommend, but then decided on his favorite record store, Planet Score, where he goes to escape. He described it so tenderly as the most honest record store. He said it’s owned by two guys. “I think that’s all they’ve ever done is work in record stores or own record stores. I don’t know their names. I used to be the guy that knew everybody who worked in the record store, now I’ve kinda scaled back. I kinda like the anonymity.” 

I gleefully note that I have been told to go to a record store. 

He said he knows it’s a really racist town, “But who are all these people? Where are all the people who voted for Trump? You know it’s here everywhere but you don’t see it.” Then a few seconds later, “You know what. I did see it.” 

Shawn’s family recently moved. The cable guy who came and switched their cable was Black. The neighbors saw the cable guy approaching Shawn’s house and called the cops on him. The cops stayed like 20 minutes talking to Shawn, the homeowner, confirming, “Is this guy working on your cable?” Yes. Yes. Yes. The cable guy was late to his next job. Shawn heard him on the phone explaining this (to his boss, or maybe to his next customers) and was pained to hear him have to say, “I don’t know, I guess I looked like I was lurking around or something.” The cable guy had been wearing a florescent lime green vest and driving an AT&T truck. 

Shawn went downstairs to his studio and Aurora and I were still in the kitchen as I cleaned up from breakfast and packed my lunch to take with me. My phone chirped and she said “What was that?”

“My phone. I got a text message.”

“I wanna see.”

“Ok.”

I showed her and explained. “I texted my wife that I was instructed to go to a record store and she wrote back this emoji.” It was the wide-eyed “oh shit” emoji. “She’s worried I’m going to spend all my money at the record store.” 

She eyed me up and down. “Wait. You’re a boy?”

“No.” 

“But you have a wife?”

“Yes.”

“Girls can’t marry girls.”

“They totally can.”

“What.” 

“You can marry whoever you want. Boys can marry boys too.” She had been earnestly surprised but accepted the news easily. Kids these days. Gay agenda: check! Then I showed her on a map where I was from and told her about the Pacific Ocean. 

A few minutes later she was reading aloud the welcome message Alexis left for me on the white erase board and had a hard time reading my name. “Wellllllllllllcccoooommme Ssssssssssss…...SANTA?” Then she eyed me up and down all over again, this time bug-eyed. Surprise, children of St. Louis! Santa is a lesbian from the Pacific Ocean!

THEN I was telling my wife about our conversation and when I got to the part of “I was telling her my wife was worried I was going to spend all my money at the record store” and how she said, “Wait, you’re a boy?” And my wifey CRACKS UP and says, “What, because only boys can buy records?!”  That was fun.

I went to Planet Score, which lived up to Shawn’s recommendation. After perusing for a luxurious amount of time I would never have at home, I found a Mulatu Astatke record and when I went over to pay for it I asked the guy behind the counter if he could recommend a place for me to go. A fellow record store goer joined the conversation and we talked about my project. Joe, the owner, told me I should go to the City Museum, a big art playground creation. The eccentric creator died few years ago under mysterious circumstances. His wife and son are claiming foul play; there are rumors the mafia was involved. Joe got married there in 2010. 

Derek, a regular at Planet Score, was born and raised in Ferguson, in the same neighborhood where Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014. Derek said that growing up as a white kid, the only racial issues he witnessed were those caused by the police. He had Black friends and white friends, and driving around the city, he routinely got pulled over when he was with his Black friends but never with his white friends. Once he and his buddies were stopped while just driving down the street - the cop didn’t even bother with a pretense for pulling them over. He made them all get out and handcuffed them. He searched the car. He pulled everything out of the car, all the trash of teenagers, and threw it all over the street. Then he said, “If you don’t pick this up I’m gonna pull you right back over for littering.” 

Derek said that overall he feels fondly towards Ferguson. He said the farmer’s market is really nice, and his mom still lives there and he enjoys visiting her. He told me I should go to the spot where Michael Brown was killed. He expressed that it’s an important place to see. And it’s important to see what Ferguson is actually like, rather than what we all saw on the news. 

Ferguson is 10 minutes away from Florissant, the neighborhood Paul Artspace is in. Michael Brown was murdered by police on the sidewalk of a tree lined street near apartment buildings.

A plaque has been installed at the site, along with fake flowers and teddy bears. I parked in the lot near one of the apartment buildings. As I walked to the spot I started sobbing. I stood there and took pictures and cried. Cars drove by, people walked past. A young man walked by and saw me in my state and nodded. I went back to my car and wept. 

Then I saw a young man coming up to my car, kind and concerned. He asked if I was ok. I opened my door and got out. (While I do not usually get out of my car to greet strange men who approach in empty parking lots near murder sites, I did this time. And I also was aware that he, as a Black man, was risking his safety approaching a crying white woman in her car just as much as I was risking mine.) I told him that I’d come to see where Michael Brown had been killed. He nodded. He offered a hug and I accepted. He seemed young and old at the same time. Are you real? 

“I’m.” [crying] “doing. this. art. project” [crying] “because” [crying] “I don’t want to. hate. our.” [ugly crying] “country.” Then I dragged snot across my red splotchy face with shredded Kleenex. 

Then the beautiful boy man said, “That’s beautiful. There’s no time for hate. No time for hating.” Who are you?

His name is John. I would guess that he was 22. He said he’s really interested in art. He told me he’s reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, “just to get my creative mind going.” When I stopped crying, I asked him how he had found that book. Was he taking a class? Did he just happen to see it in a bookstore? No, he said he just likes things that get him thinking creatively and so he googled “creative book.” That was the book that came up so he ordered it. Where am I? Is Wim Wenders or Miranda July going to jump out from behind a bush?

I told him there was probably an artist inside him and he said, “Yeah I think there is but I don’t have time with work and everything.” He was there right now for work. He inspects areas before they lay a gas line. He was wearing a fluorescent vest. 

We hugged goodbye and got into our respective cars. Then it occurred to me that I had a postcard for my project in my bag and dug one out. I tend to not give them out on these trips because it feels like, “Look, folks! I’m a traveling artist and I’ve come to your state, and I bring propaganda!” But in this instance I was glad to have remembered I had them and I went over and gave it to him and he was glad to have it and we said goodbye again. 

a grocery store in St. Louis

I wandered around the City Museum - where Joe at Planet Score got married - in an awestruck stupor. It mostly looks like a city building outside, but inside it’s another world.

It was packed because it was spring break. People of all ages crawled over misfit indoor playgrounds while gargoyles spat water into pools between spiraling staircases with neckties hanging above. A wall of doll heads, a cabinet of jars, a bank vault, a piano. Who are we if we have no precious things? What do we do if we don’t make anything? 

The night before I left, Alexis and I sat at the kitchen table and talked like normal, then she pulled out presents for me! She went to the corner store her family’s been going to for generations and got me some essential Missouri snacks. I ate them as I drove across the state to Kansas the next day. 

January 20, 2020

the blankets made more ghosts than any guns or fires

I read this book with my eleven-year-old son.

“The next morning Old Man and Old Woman stayed in their lean-to. Most of our Choctaw friends stayed inside, too, curled up in their blankets. No one laughed.

By afternoon Choctaw people from every lean-to moaned and cried. Old people, young people, everyone cried. As day turned to darkness, a young girl shouted, ‘I am burning.’ Her mother ran to the swamp and brought her a cup of water.

‘We should get a good night’s sleep,’ my father said. ‘We will be leaving in the morning.’

‘Where will we go?’ my mother asked.

‘Away,’ my father answered. ‘Far away.’

‘I hate to leave our friends,’ Mother said.

‘So do I,’ said my father. ‘But there is nothing we can do to help them.’

I had a bad dream that night. I dreamed of what would happen in a few days. Old Man and Old Woman were covered in sores. They itched and burned and the sores never went away. Everyone with a blanket had the sores…

Some Choctaws became ghosts from the shotguns. Some became ghosts from the burning houses. But the blankets made more ghosts than any guns or fires. The smallpox blankets were the ghost-making blankets.”

- Tim Tingle, How I Became a Ghost, 2013

(Red Country Reading List)

Kentucky, October 2018

pink = where I went

I drove to Louisville from Nashville, right after my time there. My friend Elishua was living in Louisville, doing AmeriCorps at Americana World Community Center.

I stayed with him for several days in the common house above Americana, where he and fellow AmeriCorps workers live for a year at a time. The building is a former Catholic high school and convent. The bedrooms, kitchen, and living room are where the nuns lived. The space has a dorm-like, communal feel.

There is a lot of great programming going on at Americana, and it was exciting to see my friend fluently contributing to this active, important place. Largely serving the immigrant community, Americana welcomes people in a variety of ways, including a community garden, outreach in local schools, a maker space, counseling for torture survivors, and after school support.

The morning after my arrival, Elishua gave me a tour of the building and garden.

In the basement is Fiberworks, a space for women to sew and make things that they can then sell. Most of the people that use the space are from Iraq, and are using skills they brought with them from their homeland.

Elishua explained how in addition to serving a practical purpose, the space is the hub of the community, where the women share their unique immigration experiences and practice their English together, making their new life here more manageable. Americana sells the things they make at craft fairs and community events, which Elishua has often tabled. The artist gets 90% from each sale; 10% goes toward buying new fabric and sewing machines. He said that a lot of their materials come from donations; the women work with what they have. The fabric may not have been their first choice but they make cool things with it. They had incense burning in the space and it smelled nice.

Elishua told me about World Fest, an event he tabled for Fiberworks. He said when Fest-goers learned what Fiberworks was, they were eager to support it. Since the event had a largely Iraqi focus, there were Iraqi desserts along with local Kentucky fare too. The women at Fiberworks made derby hats for the Kentucky Derby. Lots of people bought them; he said everybody gets into the Kentucky Derby. There are fireworks during Derby week–the biggest fireworks display in the country. The Derby is expensive, but there are different free satellite events and parties that everyone goes to. He knows a woman from Venezuela who said her favorite thing about being in the U.S. is the Derby. She also loves going on distillery tours.

At my opening in Jodi’s studio in Nashville, many of the people I talked with had lived in, or had meaningful connections to Kentucky. One artist told me about how her family worked on Rand Paul’s campaigns when she was in high school. She described Paul as approachable, “not like Mitch McConnell,” and hard-working; how he “got in to fix what was wrong.” She said I should go to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and go to Rand Paul’s office on the downtown square. She said she thought he, or people working with him, would be happy to talk to me.

So one day I went to Bowling Green. I parked a few blocks away and walked through the old downtown. I found his office and found the door unsurprisingly locked, and so I rang the bell to talk to someone. A woman asked what I was doing there. I gave her a long answer about making paintings about places I go in our country, and that a woman I met had worked on his campaigns and recommended I come here. There was a quiet moment and then the woman said he wasn’t here. Unsurprised, I walked around the side of the building and found this beautiful light pink wall that looked striking as a backdrop to the blue dumpster and slate ground. It was not a wasted trip, because I talked to the lady, I was unsurprised, and I saw the pink wall with the blue dumpster, which was a surprise.

On my way back to Louisville that evening, I drove through the farmland on a self-guided wayward tour of barns that have quilt patterns painted on them.

I had gotten a brochure of the “Barn Quilt Trail” of Hart County. I focused on Bonnieville. I got lost on the country roads winding over gently rolling hills, and many times had to stop and drive back in reverse down long gravel driveways. I crept down private lanes under clouds that looked like they would unleash a downpour at any moment.

I talked to people who seemed mildly concerned to see me in my rental car on their little road, at first. When I told them I was there to see the quilt paintings, they seemed to just barely remember that they had colored shapes on their property that put their homes on a map I held in my hand. Then they welcomed me with some mixture of pride and confusion, and we talked about the coming storm with ease.