BLOG POST HIATUS EXPLAINED

 The Church of the Open Road gets Published!

 

Our last post to the Church of the Open Road was last April.  You may be wondering why.  

 

Was it COVID-19?  Nope.  We didn’t travel as much but that doesn’t mean we didn’t travel.

Was it that cancer diagnosis?  Nope.  Radiation ending in June seems to have cleared things up.

Was it a lack of motivation?  Nope.  I’ve been writing away, just not bloggy stuff.

 

And that gets to the big announcement:

 

Eden, Indeed: Tales, Truths and Fabrications of a Small Town Boy, a compilation of my growing up stories has been published!  

 

When I was just a little kid, I used to love it when Dad would sit at the foot of my bed ~ I still recall his weight pulling the covers snuggly around my feet ~ and tell of his adventures growing up in the Mojave Desert.  Fast forward a few years and I was married with a lovely child but soon divorced.  It immediately occurred to me that I would not have the opportunity to sit at the foot of her bed and tell my growing up stories.

 

While the pieces in the collection are arranged roughly in chronological order, the first piece I wrote was about a little old lady that lived down the street from us.  Initially, I composed it when while assigning my fourth graders the task of writing a short biography of someone they know “…but it can’t be a relative…” one little boy said, “You do one, too!” And the class chorused “Yeah, Mr. D!”  Thus, I was stuck.

 

What now exists are my hazy impressions of growing up on five semi-rural acres during the tumultuous late 50s and 60s and beyond, building tree forts, catching poison oak, crashing canoes, surviving a pre-teen crush or two and remembering some dark national times from which me and my gang of friends were pretty well insulated. The target audience is my grandkids.  Implicit is the desire that they have an impression of my youth similar to the impression Dad gave me of his own.

 

The stories have been critiqued and vetted by members of the Cloverdale-based writers’ group with which I’ve been engaged. It was designed by Personal History Productions LLC in Santa Rosa so it looks much more professional than anything I might have imagined on my own.  https://www.personalhistoryproductions.com  The CEO of Personal History, upon reading the text (many times) said that she grew up in a small town in North Carolina but that my stories reminded her of home.  With that generous comment in mind, I’ve asked the company that prints the volume, IngramSpark, https://www.ingramspark.com to add it to their wholesale catalog.  

 

 

At 230 pages, the cost is twenty bucks. Available by ordering through your independent, local book seller (also online from Amazon, but the Church of the Open Road always prefers you shop with the local guy.)

 

While I don’t want to commercialize my blog, I hope you will consider ordering a copy. 

 

 

Now, for 2023, the Church of the Open Road resolves to return to the Open Road, take a few photos, write a few words and tell folks about it here…

 

© 2022

Church of the Open Road Press

 

SUSAN, THE OIL CHANGE LADY

…Whacha readin’?…

Moving to a new town about five years ago, among the first tasks would be to find an outfit to perform regular maintenance on my Nissan pickup and whatever else happened to be in the garage.  I like to trade with local Mom and Pops so when the Nissan was due for an oil change, I stumbled into a shop that looked the part, walking distance from home.  Good, I’m thinking. I can drop the truck off and hoof it home or head to the local coffee outlet and wait for a call.

         I opened the door to the business only to find a woman, perhaps a few years my junior, sitting behind a computer but with a book, open, in front of her.  After two, maybe three beats, she placed an index finger somewhere in the text and said, “Hi there.  How may I help you?”  

         “Whacha readin’?” was my first comment.  

         I don’t remember her response other than it was not one of those supermarket paperbacks.  It was something about the Jamestown Colony or some cosmic nebula light years from this shop.  I mention those two examples because in the ten or twelve times I visited the shop for service to the truck or the Subaru – “You have a Subaru?  We love our Subaru.  Michael likes working on Subes and we both enjoy driving ours.” – she’d have a book at her workstation and her index finger was regularly employed keeping her spot in the narrative.  Once she told how she was fascinated by what she had just read about the pilgrims and their hardships, another time, space.  

         “What are you reading?” she asked.

         The woman’s name was Susan and Michael, her husband, turned wrenches in the back.  A true Mom and Pop.

On about my third visit, I chose to pack a book rather than hike home.  It was a Longmire mystery.  As I settled in, she asked, “Is it like Nevada Barr or CJ Box?”  I explained by affinity for Craig Johnson’s series because I’d visited with the author a couple of times at conferences but admitted that I don’t really go in for series novels too frequently.  “They often seem to become formulaic,” we agreed.  The chat lasted until Michael appeared, wiping his hands on a shop towel.  Neither she nor I had turned any pages.  She looked at him and then tipped her head in my direction.  “Honey.  We’ve got a reader here.”

         On a subsequent visit, I had just finished Richard Flannagan’s brutal and brooding World War II Mann Booker masterpiece  The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  We talked about it and I mentioned my desire to read two categories of books: the stuff I avoided in high school and books that were considered for international awards like the Mann Booker.  “I need to up my game,” I said, “if I’m ever gonna die literate.”  

         She held up The Great Gatsby, saying, “I’ve read this twice before, once in high school when I had no idea what I was reading about…”  

         “You sound like me,” I said. 

         “Actually, I sound like you and Mike.”

         Over the course of the next three years, I looked forward to my visits with Susan always thinking that an oil change place is just about the last place I could go to talk about books and be challenged to read something more or better or, at least, different.

         

Shortly after Thanksgiving, 2017, the Subaru was due for service.  Susan wasn’t engaged in a book this time.  After she checked in the car and went outside to get the vitals, I asked, “So, what do you have planned for the holidays?  Something good, I hope.”  Susan smiled.  “The holidays are going to be a bit different this year,” she said.  “On Halloween night, Michael came in, said he wasn’t feeling well and left me to handle the trick or treaters.  He passed away before I came to bed that night.  Heart attack, they said. Massive.”  

         How could this not leave me speechless?  

         Knitting her fingers, she added, “I’m working on convincing myself that there was nothing I could have done.”  Then she brightened just a bit.  “What book do you have there?”

         

The business went on the market within months, but it took well over a year for the place to sell.  I had the good fortune of dropping in a few more times to sit and read; and it wasn’t until perhaps my third visit that I found Susan with a book in front of her again: Flannigan’s Narrow Road.  “Damn,” I said, “That’s really dark.”  

         Susan chuckled.  “No, I know dark. This,” she said waving the book my way, “is simply perspective.”

Susan, the Oil Change Lady, has moved to Texas to be closer to family.  A nice young couple took over the operation a few months back with a late-teen daughter ably running the front counter.  And although the new crew changes the oil or swaps out a battery or inspects the brakes just as well as the former owners, I no longer pack a book with me to read while I wait.  Rather, I head back home on foot often thinking of books and talking about books and how the woman who cuts my hair, my dental hygienist, the wait person at the local sushi place – each who likes to talk, by the way – never bites when I dangle something about a book as a conversation starter.  I wonder if they read and if they read, how much they read and if they don’t, where do they find their important ideas – the stuff that touches their inner self – provides them with some perspective?  

         Does it really matter?  After all, it’s really none of my business.

         These things cross my mind while I'm walking home from the oil change place along with how much I miss chatting with the Oil Change Lady.

© 2019

Church of the Open Road Press

“THE LONG HAUL” – A BOOK RECOMMENDATION

There but for the Grace of God… 

I pedaled LTL (less than load) freight during college and for my first few years in teaching.  A buddy hooked me up with a Northern California outfit and during a couple of ten-week stints in the summers, I made almost as much as I did in nine months of teaching.

Never driving line, I envied the independence and freedom of the guys who took to the open highway and, while putting the pedal to the metal, probably enjoyed the vast reaches of our great land.  So much so that during my first several months as a self-doubting classroom teacher, I thought a lot about trading my credential for a class 1 operator’s license and hitting the road with ‘em.  The romance of the open road stuck in me pretty good, so I considered the option again with my first self-doubting months as a school principal.  And again, as a district-level administrator.

Finn Murphy writes of his decades-long career hauling home furnishings across the nation.  Turns out that the furniture folks who drive for United and Allied and Bekins and North American find themselves in different league than those who drive for Werner or Schneider or Swift or Prime or Crete.  The freight guys essentially pick up a loaded 53-footer from a dock and go to the next dock, back ‘er in and clock out or wait for the next call from dispatch.  The furniture folks have to meet with the shipper (customer) analyze that which is to be moved, arrange casual (local labor) assistance, pack cartons, load the trailer like some sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, get from point A to point B on time and without damage, unload, unpack and place everything.  It’s a days-long process with days-long-only relationships. The driver is an independent business person who deals directly with the customer – a customer who all too frequently looks down upon the individual with whom they place in trust the most valued of their possessions.  Odd, when you think about it.  

The furniture hauler can be shackled by weigh-station officials, many of whom are intent on exercising an outsized amount of authority; and disappointed by dispatchers who promise a lucrative load that doesn’t materialize after having dead-headed (driven empty) hundreds of miles to pick it up.  A week of driving for Allied is a lot more taxing than a week driving dock to dock.  But it pays a lot better.  Sometimes four to ten times as much.  Thus, the furniture guys are shunned by the freight guys wherever a good shunning can take place.

Murphy, a well-read, well-educated individual, turned his back on the conformity demanded by parents who sent him away to college. It seems he couldn’t shake the “romance” that came with his college-years summer job.  His story of unsuccessfully backing his trailer down a twisting drive, feathering the brakes down a seven-mile stretch of curving, icy roadway rather than chaining up, and of not being entirely sure the second story deck could support the weight of the grand piano and his two helpers makes for an entertaining read.  I was captivated by the wisdom of his insights about the people he’s met and his thoughts about what America both was and has become. 

I’m glad Finn Murphy drove truck and wrote about it.

And, looking back, I’m glad I didn’t.

See your local independent book seller.

o0o

“The Long Haul.” Subtitled: “A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road.”  Finn Murphy. WW Norton. 2017. $17.

Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley 1856-1863 – a book recommendation

Required reading for a full understanding 

of our conquest of the American West 

and, perhaps, our current state of affairs

Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley 1856-1863 by Frank H Baumgardner III.  Algora Publishing. 2006. $23.  (Out of print but still available with some searching.)

A couple of months back, I reported on Carranco and Beard’s Genocide and Vendetta, the expose of atrocities committed just north of here by white settlers upon their discovery of a fertile and hidden Round Valley.  Here’s a link:  https://thechurchoftheopenroad.blogspot.com/2018/05/genocide-and-vendetta.html

Recall that the volume, published in 1981 by the University of Oklahoma Press, inflamed the passions of the descendants of the victors to the extent that a bogus plagiarism law suit prompted the U of O to suspend publication.  Many of the copies, it has been reported, were snatched up and destroyed by those eager to erase this bloody portion of California history. Remaining few may be had by ponying up prices ranging from $350 to $1140, depending on condition, either on line or, if you’re lucky, at a used book store.

My concluding admonition was “Let’s do what we can to ensure voices are not stilled by those they might offend or expose.”

An Amazon search (although I did not purchase my copy from Jeff Bezos) found Baumgardner’s Killing for Land, a text that might cover the same ground.  The independent Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah was able to find a new copy for me.

Baumgardner references Carranco and Beard frequently but also cites period newspapers, federal and state reports and records, dissertations, census reports and personal interviews in order to detail how local land owners and wanna-be cattle barons thwarted the government’s attempt to provide sanctuary to displaced Native Americans.  While serious corruption occurred on the watch of some Indian administrators – corruption that lead to those folks looking away as Euro-American war parties set off to slaughter the natives based upon false claims of horse and cattle depredations – many others reported that the Native Americans were peaceable, willing to learn farm trades and desirous of learning the language.

Set in history against the backdrop of the Civil War, folks in Washington, while in receipt of reports and requests for monetary support for the Round Valley Reservation, barely afforded those requests passing attention.  Thus, seed supplies for the Nome Cult Farm, established on the reservation to create self-sufficiency, were denied or ignored.  Government Agents had little resource to repair fences pulled down by settlers or establish tribunals to call those guilty Euro-Americans to task. With the fences down, Government livestock wandered off to be appropriated by the settlers.  Crops were grazed off by settler’s cattle or trampled to dust.  

With the assent of the Agent, Native Americans from as far away as Chico-Oroville (the Concow) and Placer-Nevada Counties (the Maidu) starving, left the “protection” provided by the government to return to their ancestral homelands.  Leaving in October, before the streams were too full to cross and before the snow flew, more than 450 Concow struggled to return to Butte County only to find white settlers there unwilling to allow them back.  Returning over the Mayacamas (Coast Range) just 277 survived.  184 had departed or died on the trail.  It was California’s “Trail of Tears.”

Captain Charles D Douglas, Commander of Company F, 2^ndInf, Round Valley California, in a message to headquarters wrote: “Now the Question is which of the two parties is to blame for this wild and disorderly state of Indian affairs, the Government Agents or the Settlers?”

The lens of history shows us that it was a combination of factors: Poor support for managing the reservation coming out of DC, superior weaponry in the hands of settlers, greed, corruption and bald-faced lying under oath, all coupled with the remote and rugged nature of the terrain made supervision and first-hand observations of the Mendocino Indian War less than a footnote in the troubled history of the times.

The area Yukis, Wailaki and Pomo were doomed from the moment the first whites set eyes on the place.

In the text’s final line, Baumgardner cheekily concludes: “There may be a little poetic justice in the recent success of Native American tribes through the legalization of casino gambling.”

My conclusions are darker: 

1          “…California Indians were among the most gentle and ‘primitive’ of North America’s aboriginal peoples. Most were generally at peace and harmony with their environment, and that harmony – exemplified in their view of nature and themselves as parts of a whole and their acceptance of what life offered them – branded the California Indians as hopelessly ignorant, lazy, backward and ignoble in the eyes of many of the whites.” [quoting Elizabeth Renfro in The Shasta Indians and Their Neighbors, 1992].  Renfro’s quote sounds starkly similar to the thoughts of some of my fellow citizens regarding blacks, Mexicans, Muslims…  After all: Who are we if we cannot say we are better than someone else?

2          George Santayana reminds us: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Reading about the corruption, theft, falsehoods and protection of the guilty from the Round Valley Wars, an apt then-and-now comparison might be drawn.

3.         Therefore, I’d again suggest: Let’s do what we can to ensure voices are not stilled by those they might offend or expose.

This is a difficult volume to read, very textbook-like but, I would hazard, quite essential if we are to gain understanding of and an appreciation for a fragment of history those once in power would just as soon have us forget.  

It is well worth asking your local independent book seller to search out a copy for you.

© 2018

Church of the Open Road Press

REBUILDING THE BMW

Something I’m quite unlikely to do

My first real foray into motorcycle touring came in about 1982 when, fresh off a divorce, I purchased, new, a BMW R-65 from the venerable Ozzie’s BMW Center in Chico, California.  My black Beemer cradled an iconic 650 cc horizontally opposed motor and, when equipped with side bags, and with a duffel bungeed on top, provided an adequate mount for week-long explorations of Northern California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.  The thing was as dependable as tomorrow’s sunrise and I often marveled, after a 400-mile day, how an engine that was light enough for me to remove from the frame and cart around to the workbench with my own feeble arms – which I never did – could transport my lanky self so far, so cheaply and with so little problem.

There were downsides, however. At 6’4”, the frame on this German masterpiece was a bit small for my build.  Although it returned almost 50 miles to the gallon (on regular!) I often found myself wondering whether I’d find a filling station or find myself pushing the thing along a paved secondary route bordered in endless sage.  And the seat, honestly, was a bit like riding an ironing board.

Still, the adventure of cresting a rise or greeting a horizon was precisely what my 31-year-old psyche needed after those dark days of separation.  Four or five years later, however, with my career taking me from my home town and my leisure hours truncated by responsibility, I found that the BMW did more sitting around than getting around.  Realizing that in one twelve-month period, I’d only added 850 miles to the odometer, and after nearly rear-ending a Dodge van on highway 108 due, largely, to my rusty riding skills, with forty-three thousand miles on the thing, I returned it to Ozzie and he gave me a good price on an outright sale.  For the next thirteen years, I would ride nothing.

Decades later, the little Beemer still holds a place in my heart.

As I have come of age as a reader, one of my favorite genres is the memoir.  The book that introduced me to this realm of literature was Fred Haefele’s “Rebuilding the Indian” [University of Nebraska Press, 1998, 2005.]  In this volume, Haefele tells the story of turning a box of junk parts into a gleaming Indian Chief.  The Indian Motorcycle Company was founded early in the 1900s in Springfield, Massachusetts, adjacent to the site of the armory commissioned by General George Washington 130 years earlier.  The company’s storied history is punctuated with examples of innovation, success and failure.  From delivery vehicles to military motors, from single cylinder to in-line fours well before that configuration became the universal Japanese machine (UJM) – thanks, Honda – Indians had been the backbone of American motorcycles, along with what Mr. Harley and Mr. Davidson created out west in Milwaukee.

The Chief was a massive V-twin with a heavily valenced front fender and a broad, thick, well sprung bicycle-type seat suitable for long days on the road.  After “the war,” the Chief and its little brother, the Scout were the envy of anyone who wanted to explore our continent on two wheels. But the company fell on hard times, Harley was more prolific, and for a spell, Indians left the market. 

But the Indian Motorcycle spell did not.  Thus, Haefele, captivated by what used to be, and with little mechanical experience, bought that box of parts intent on putting a Chief back on the road and heading out to Sturgis to show the thing off.  The problem was, the box of parts was incomplete and some of the parts were not of the same motorcycle.  Quoting a review in the New Yorker: “Haefele describes how his search for vintage parts eventually involved an entire community of fanatical mechanics, impoverished motorcycle collectors, and renegade bikers – a collaboration, he realizes, that gave him skills as much social and spiritual as practical.”

It is a marvelous read, one that I return to from time to time as I find it inspires me both to do some things and to avoid other things.

A couple of weeks back, I was driving on California’s State Route 12, back-dooring my way into Sonoma, the historic home of General Mariano Vallejo.  In front of a derelict gas station turned coffee shack rested something that caught my eye – something familiar.  But I didn’t stop.

Today, while cruising though the area on Enrico, the Yamaha, I did.

Resting on its side stand was a ‘80s-era R-65, brown, not black, but otherwise the spittin’ image of my first tourer.  Thirty-five years hadn’t been exactly kind to this example.  The paint was deeply faded, the tires cracked like the hide of a road-kill armadillo.  The seat was solid, but sun-worn and by brushing my fingers across the cast aluminum jugs of the horizontally opposed engine, I could pick up a grimy, oxidized dust.  Yet the thing was straight, the frame true and sitting on the saddle felt a bit like coming home after missing too many holiday gatherings.  Immediately I remembered that I still owned the set of metric end wrenches – never used – that I’d purchased to tinker with the old bike when needed.

The coffee concession was closing and the motor-head boss about to button things up for the day.

“How much you take for that R-65?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “Probably two grand.”

“Does it run?”

“Did when I parked it.”

“Barn find?”

“Nope.  Got from a local doctor, original owner, who rode around town on it for years and years.  Finally, about three years ago, he came to me and said he probably ought to give the thing up.”

We walked over to the machine.

“I pulled the battery out and drained the fluid.  I was going to fix it up, but just too many other projects.  Like my R-80 I’ve got in the shop.”  He walked me into the one-time service bay.  A lovingly restored similar-era BMW GS sat looking as if it had just been freed from the showroom.  “I ride it every day that I can.”

“So, two grand?”

“Yeah.  About that.”

“Thanks,” I said, and we shook hands.  Before leaving, I snapped a few photos with my iPhone, thinking it would be fuel for thought.

And thought is what I gave it.  I came home and thumbed through “Rebuilding the Indian,” revisiting some of my favorite passages.  I suspect my mechanical skills are far more limited than Fred Haefele’s were when he found himself staring at a box of parts.  Then I thought, “I’ll bet Ozzie’s shop could clean it up, repaint the tank, refresh the tires, battery, adjust the valves, sync the carbs, replace the seals…”  I felt my eyes turn into those spinning dollar signs Warner Brothers once used to drive home a point in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Soon I arrived at this: With an additional investment of about thirty-five hundred dollars, I could end up with a really cool looking vintage German masterpiece still worth “about two grand.”

I sincerely hope the motor-head coffee shop owner finds success in pedaling that BMW.  I’m sure it will end up in good hands.

Just not mine.

© 2018

Church of the Open Road Press

“What Unites Us” - a book recommendation

by Dan Rather.  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2017. $23.00.

Perhaps it is a function of being halfway through one’s sixties that one looks back and nostalgically thinks things were “better.”  Growing up (to the extent I did grow up) in the latter half of the twentieth century, a voice that accompanied me and informed me was that of CBS newsman Dan Rather.  Like Cronkite before him, Mr. Rather was, to me, a trusted figure that told the story of our days with integrity and courage.  His demise at CBS came from his “60 Minutes II” reportage of former President Bush’s time with the Texas Air National Guard.  Rather’s work, as it turned out was true, but CBS had allowed the entertainment side of the business and the advertising revenue it generated to influence the news division.  Corporate CBS decided that their anchor’s story leapt from the sphere of news to the sphere of the political, and BOOM! He was gone.  With him, some say, went the credibility of the news division.

Love him or hate him, Dan Rather has held a unique position in our American culture for over 60 years.  From the early days of chasing hurricanes, to being the man on the ground in Dallas in November of 1963, to field reports from Vietnam and an earthquake ravaged Mexico City, this guy has seen a lot, learned a lot, reported a lot and grown.

In his recently published book “What Unites Us,” Mr. Rather views his career and our nation through the discrete lenses of Freedom, Community, Exploration, Responsibility and Character.  Essays under each banner speak to the issues and problems of our yesteryears and the means by which we, as citizens and neighbors, pulled together to address them.  The impoverished Houston neighborhood into which he was born – the same neighborhood my mother grew up in, ten years prior to Danny – cared for the families of the Great Depression’s unemployed or under-employed.  No fingers pointed, no aspersions cast; it was just what you did.  Children of that age grew to bring us Social Security, desegregated schools, Medicare, the GI Bill and countless other far reaching programs designed to ensure that fewer Americans are left behind; that some level of opportunity exists for all.

In his collection of 15 essays, Rather shares his singular view of what we built last century and what might be at stake should it crumble.  To preserve who we are, he addresses the necessity of the vote and of voting rights, the importance of debate and dissent, the role of the press and the courage demanded by circumstance to ensure that our arts, science and educational communities – foundations of both our democracy and our leadership in the world – don’t founder under the weight of half-truths, binary thought and simple, convenient lies. 

Daunting times we live in.  Yet, Dan Rather’s voice is both reassuring and optimistic.  We’ve been through tough times before.  We’ve been divided before.  We’ve hungered and bled and cursed one another before, but we’ve always seemed to venture past discrimination or disenfranchisement or dissatisfaction, and pieced together a better future for ourselves.

Currently, I don’t like the divisive direction in which our nation is headed.

But after reading Rather’s book, I am confident that we can fix it, and I’m glad his voice is still active.

See your local independent bookseller.

© 2017

Church of the Open Road Press

Sometimes Brilliant – a book recommendation

Dr. Larry Brilliant’s memoir.  Harper Collins.  2016.  $28.

I served 35 years in public education and felt like, for the most part, I contributed something to some greater good.  Yet, when I get hooked into some story on PBS Newshour, I see the works of others who probably contribute more and a twinge of regret tickles the backside of my brain.  Perhaps, I think to myself, if I’d better understood the movements of the 60s – the decade in which I came of age; perhaps if I’d studied science; or embraced some sort of concept of the nature of existence; or been more politically aware. 

A month or two back that twinge hit when the Newshour interviewed Mill Valley resident Dr. Larry Brilliant on the occasion of the publication of his memoir.  I was, at first, interested because “Mr. Brilliant” was an alter-ego character I wrote about in a series of true to life short stories regarding a school principal who didn’t ever quite know what he was doing – but things worked out anyway. 

Larry Brilliant’s life adventure seemed to begin in a similar fashion.  Reared in Cleveland, he moves west, earns a medical license, joins up with a cavalcade of interesting characters (including Wavy Gravy who lives just up the road from me), travels the hippie trail from London over the Khyber Pass to commune in India.  Confronted there with the reality of poverty and disease, he plies both his training and his spiritual awareness becoming “Doctor America” to the spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba who tells Brilliant he is to rid the world of smallpox, the ancient disease that has claimed billions of people.

And – you know what? – he does.

Now, forty years later, a confidant of presidents and counsel to titans of our electronic age, he writes of the people, great and small, that accompanied him on his remarkable journey.  He writes of God and of good, of frustration with status quo and of a type of universal love I don’t yet fully comprehend.  Good thing he does, though.

A real-life (and very readable) respite from the daily news, I came away enlightened to this:  As long as there is poverty, as long as there is suffering, as long as there is pain, there is good work to be done.

And this realization: When we teach, we may not be curing some ages-old disease, but we are indeed engaged in good work.

See your local independent bookseller.

California: A History – a book suggestion

By Kevin Starr, Modern Library, © 2005-2015, $17.

As a school principal I recall dropping by an eighth grade teacher’s history class the first day of school one year.  I remember him offering this sage comment to his charges: “The thing about history is that it’s a story well told.”  Surely that thought didn’t originate with him, but it stuck with me.

The story of California, from its geomorphic origins to its ranking as the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world is both dramatic and sublime.  It is expansive and illustrative of histories everywhere.  Decades back, I recall telling my fourth grade students that any kind of event that has happened in human history has happened in California.  Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in Italy?  Mount Lassen erupted here.  Overthrow of the British by the colonists in the 1770s?  The Bear Flag Revolt in 1846 tossed out a distant Mexican regime. The subjugation and massacre of Native Americans in the Great Plains?  We have the Modoc War (in which the only Cavalry officer having risen to the rank of General was killed.) Earthquakes in Alaska or Japan?  Reference shifts in our San Andreas Fault and many of its cousins.  Engineering feats like Egypt’s Aswan High Dam?  Ours are at Shasta and Oroville – and at the Golden Gate.

Then there are the events that have occurred or industries that originated only in place like California:  The titanic rail crossing of the Sierra, the birth of the motion picture industry in Hollywood, the dawn of aero space, Disney, Apple, Tesla.

I used to tell kids they could almost walk out their back door and step into some aspect California’s history or at, least find something within and hour or so from home if Mom or Dad would drive ‘em.  We live in a wonderful state.

Few people have told the story of California better than former state librarian Kevin Starr.  I purchased a copy of California:  A History the other day having read that Mr. Starr passed away a week ago.  My previous copy had somehow wandered off.

Rereading Starr’s work, I am reintroduced to the names and places – and the names that have become places – that I’ve enjoyed touring over the course of my explorations.  Mr. Starr makes me want to revisit the route of the Old Spanish Trail as well as the Applegate.  I want to again see Monterey’s presidio and the site of our state capitol in Benicia.  I need to see the Mount Wilson observatory and find my grand dad’s resting spot at Forest Lawn. I want to shake hands with Fremont and Carson and Bidwell and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Kevin Starr’s well-told story of California makes me want to do all these things.  Reading like an action/adventure novel in places, his history has proven to be both a pleasant departure from current events and a bit of an explanation of them.

If you’re in need of a similar respite, consider seeing your local independent bookseller and spending a few days in Mr. Starr’s California.

© 2017

Church of the Open Road Press

“A Full Life – Reflections at Ninety,” by Jimmy Carter

Off the sale table, I picked up a copy of President Carter’s latest memoir.  Unlike many of his previous works, reading through “A Full Life” is much like sitting down with my wife’s late father – one who is willing to tell all the little stories that come to mind, stories that might or might not have been told before.  So many of the tales are engaging and you can’t get enough.

Chapters are arranged chronologically but within each are paragraph-to-page long reflections and reminiscences ranging from growing up poor in rural Georgia to Carter’s ever-unfolding, ever-widening view of the world.  He speaks of the successes and disappointments of his presidency and shares his post-presidential interests both across the world and at home.  I found that as Mr. Carter laid out his accounts, rancor was absent and judgment about those with whom he interacted was left up to me.  Which is not to say he doesn’t hold strong opinions about folks who have succeeded him in the Oval Office and the world’s corridors of power. But, we find, one can disagree with the actions and views of an opponent and still treat that rival with dignity and respect.

I closed the book reminded of how this humble man brought his Christian beliefs with him and used those tenets as guideposts not only for much of what he did as president, but more importantly, what he has done as a human being.

o0o

Note:  Several years ago while living in the Sacramento area, the publisher of the Sacramento Bee asked a rhetorical question: “When did we as a society become so self-centered?”  My reply was this:  “I don’t know when we became so self-centered, but I believe it occurred sometime in the twenty years between when a president suggested, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,’ and another presidential candidate asked: ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’”

Much occurred in those twenty years as those of us who lived through them will attest: three assassinations, a questionable war, a summer of love, a presidential resignation; and the result was a nation unsure of itself populated by a growing number of individuals for whom the term “greater good” equated with “self.”

Jimmy Carter was arguably the last president who lead us during times less polarized politically, times more aligned with the ideals of outlined in the Preamble and upon which our nation was founded.  He worked with Congress and seemed more interested in service than prestige.  I recall that economic cycles and the downfall of an American-propped middle-eastern strong man conspired to end Carter’s presidency after one term.

It could be argued that the result of the wave that swept Carter out of office has led us to become a nation of disenfranchised have-nots, angry about a what-might-have-been that was never realistically attainable (big house, second home, fancy car, speed boat, no debt) and concerned more about our personal dominions than the future of a once viable “shining light on the hill” that a successor seemed to talk so much about.

The Church of the Open Road recommends this book to those of us who recall Mr. Carter’s administration and for the generation(s) following.  It is a primer on values, justice, compromise, and, an elusive greater good.

o0o

“A Full Life – Reflections at Ninety.”  Jimmy Carter.  Simon and Schuster. 2015. $28.

Suggested Reading: “The Oregon Trail – a New American Journey”

by Rinker Buck (Simon and Schuster, 2015. $28.)

Embedded deep within every Church of the Open Roader is an urge to see new places, confront challenges (either real or in one’s simple mind) and enhance our perspectives on self and the world.  And maybe resolve a thing or two.

Rinker Buck, a my-aged writer for Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, disenchanted with the change that is thrust upon most of us during our careers and harkening back to childhood days camping from a New England horse-drawn wagon with dad and family, undertook a Church of the Open Road adventure of a lifetime.  Starting near Kansas City bound for Baker City, Oregon in a replica Schuttler wagon, Buck and his brother traverse half a continent tracing a perilous route used 140 years ago, the route that opened up the west: the Old Oregon Trail.

With a reporter’s eye, he tells of verdant fields, thunderstorms, flooded camps, treacherous descents down rocky cliffs, parched desert runs, busted axles and of people – wonderful people whose spirit embodies that of our westerners: curious, helpful, joyful and strong.

As a historian, he weaves stories of 19^th century heroism and pig-headedness, politics and plague attached to the place names through which he passes.  On this romantic journey, Buck dispenses with the romance of the west outlining how cholera decimated hundreds, how helpful natives were abused and how religious persecution played a large role in seeing the land west of the 100^th meridian settled.

As a brother and a son, he chronicles trying relationships with a father and a sibling – a sibling who turns out to be an excellent muleskinner – sharing how both resolve.

As pages turn, vast expanses of Kansas plains or Rocky Mountain crossings are vehicles for Buck’s examination of his greater circumstance and the circumstance in which, we, as a nation, find ourselves.  Western wanderlust is elemental to who some of us are as individuals.  Western expansion is most certainly elemental to our narrative as a nation.  What we learn on our journeys can, and must, inform our tomorrows.

Looking at the possible history of our future - through the author's eyes after 2000 miles of heat, cold and hunger, self-doubt, worry and, finally, jubilation - one can take solace in Buck's conclusion:  

The impossible is doable as long as you have a great brother and good trail friends.  Uncertainty is all.  Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force.  Without them, you cannot cross the trail. 

Rinker Buck has given us a rewarding look at our country and ourselves.  He has engaged in an ultimate adventure.  And whether he knows it or not (or cares) he clearly has earned membership in the Church of the Open Road.

See your local independent bookseller.