Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Farm-to-Market
Texas Farm-to-Market roads 767 and 722 leading from Channing to Dumas pass through some of the prettiest places on earth. Impossible to photograph because they are just too big to fit into a camera lens, these roads wind and dip over the vast expanses of the historic XIT ranches that helped fund the building of the state capitol in Austin. Wide-open, you can survey 20-25 miles off to the horizon and not see a single soul. This vast expanse of territory, desolate yet beautiful, acquires a strange sense of power as the sun nears its setting point after a long summer day. A passing train impeded our progress in Channing.
Mamo and the Fruit Cocktail Incident
Kirsten’s grandmother, Mamo, has survived her whole life on a diet of burgers and coffee. She doesn’t touch vegetables or fruit. One incident that might help explain this aversion is the story of the fruit cocktail incident. During some floods in the Northern Texas area some years ago, a railroad bridge washed out and a box car full of cans of fruit cocktail emptied into the river. For years, cowboys ranging the land would come to pick up some fruit cocktail. But they all got sick of it. And so did Mamo.
There Ain’t Nothing in Texas but Steers and Windmills
Like the spotted owl and its obliteration of logging in old growth forests in the Northwest, the windmills that power oil refineries and that could possibly represent a source of clean energy in the future are in danger because of the sage grouse, more commonly known as the prairie chicken. Instead of the environment v. the loggers, it’s a question of the environment v. the environment.
Grandpa Bobby's Non-Op Village
Ashley’s grandpa Bobby has a whole heap of cars. Some might call this collection art. Others might call them junk.
Nebraska: The Good Life
Like all of his music, Bruce Springsteen’s album, Nebraska, captures the optimism, the disillusion, the restlessness and the anguish of life in America. The decidedly sparse album—just his voice, guitar and a harmonica—tells about a dark and desperate life in between both sides of the law. The album begins with “Nebraska” a first-person narrative based on the true story of the 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who are portrayed so well by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in the 1973 film Badlands. The Nebraska we encountered was quite different. Although self-professed gunfighters, we are not spree killers; nevertheless, we drove through the badlands of the Cornhusker state, the Sand Hills, feeling maybe a bit like we were running from the law. We stopped at the Nebraska National Forest, a plot of trees hand-planted in the early 1900s. We walked through the sandy hills dotted with pines, listening to a metropolis of vibrant insect life. Our walk was interrupted by dark clouds and a gully-washing storm that produced quarter-sized hail and rain that scoured all of the insect carcasses off Tommy Three Reds. And we drove away like bandits.
Oklahoma
We all grew up listening to Eric Clapton’s versions of “Cocaine” and “After Midnight” thinking they were pretty swell and Clapton’s songs. What we didn’t know was that they were not his but written by JJ Cale, whose original versions are, in my opinion, a lot better. Cale’s laid-back guitar never rushes and never over-states. Deep in the pocket, Cale’s brilliance shines in songs like “Crazy Mama” and “Magnolia.” We listened to JJ Cale coming over the 21 in Central Idaho over the Ponderosa Scenic Byway, easing into the Sawtooth Mountains and also coming over the North Cascades Highway on our way home.
Like the Flaming Lips and Woody Guthrie, JJ Cale is from Oklahoma, which strangely or maybe not so strangely, is the home of a lot of good musicians. One has to ask, Why? After living in the Midwest for a while, I became partial to writer Susan E. Hinton’s assertion that there is a lot more intellectual and political freedom in the fly-by states, the “real country.” Hinton still lives in Tulsa, by choice, even after living in my beautiful homeland of Northern California for three years. She justifies her decision to stay in Oklahoma by saying that in Oklahoma, there is a “freedom of thought,” which comes as a result of “the cultural ignorance.” Thankfully, a lot of Midwesterners (and others who live in either more rural or “disconnected” areas) don’t feel the need to follow the fashions coming from New York and California. Hinton cites her son who left home and reported that he missed Oklahoma because of this purported unawareness of the rest of the world. “When I was living in Hartford,” her son says, “everyone seemed to think whatever was emanating from New York City. In San Francisco, what San Francisco thinks is what everyone thinks. But in Tulsa, I could use my own brain to form my own opinions.” [p. 366]. This might be a sweeping generalization, but there is a lot more creativity—in music, arts and thought—in the Midwest than many people living on the coasts might think. I admired the Midwesterners’ original thoughts, particularly when I was living in Lawrence, Kansas. Just sitting on the patio of Free State Brewery on Mass Street, the main drag that rambles through Lawrence, my heart was warmed knowing that people in the heartland were engaged with the world but disconnected enough from “mainstream America” to reinvent a new America. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t places in the heartland that aren’t plagued by bigotry, but it doesn’t exculpate the self-anointed “broad-minded” people of the cities. Being in the middle of nowhere in a fly-by state like Kansas, I felt like we were also at the center of the universe because it was possible to have a more immediate impact on what was going on.
Like the Flaming Lips and Woody Guthrie, JJ Cale is from Oklahoma, which strangely or maybe not so strangely, is the home of a lot of good musicians. One has to ask, Why? After living in the Midwest for a while, I became partial to writer Susan E. Hinton’s assertion that there is a lot more intellectual and political freedom in the fly-by states, the “real country.” Hinton still lives in Tulsa, by choice, even after living in my beautiful homeland of Northern California for three years. She justifies her decision to stay in Oklahoma by saying that in Oklahoma, there is a “freedom of thought,” which comes as a result of “the cultural ignorance.” Thankfully, a lot of Midwesterners (and others who live in either more rural or “disconnected” areas) don’t feel the need to follow the fashions coming from New York and California. Hinton cites her son who left home and reported that he missed Oklahoma because of this purported unawareness of the rest of the world. “When I was living in Hartford,” her son says, “everyone seemed to think whatever was emanating from New York City. In San Francisco, what San Francisco thinks is what everyone thinks. But in Tulsa, I could use my own brain to form my own opinions.” [p. 366]. This might be a sweeping generalization, but there is a lot more creativity—in music, arts and thought—in the Midwest than many people living on the coasts might think. I admired the Midwesterners’ original thoughts, particularly when I was living in Lawrence, Kansas. Just sitting on the patio of Free State Brewery on Mass Street, the main drag that rambles through Lawrence, my heart was warmed knowing that people in the heartland were engaged with the world but disconnected enough from “mainstream America” to reinvent a new America. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t places in the heartland that aren’t plagued by bigotry, but it doesn’t exculpate the self-anointed “broad-minded” people of the cities. Being in the middle of nowhere in a fly-by state like Kansas, I felt like we were also at the center of the universe because it was possible to have a more immediate impact on what was going on.
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