How to spot a racist

Here's a clue: if upon seeing a 55-year old photo of a local woman, a person who has been dead for decades, the first words out of an individual's mouth are "You know why half her kids were so dark? She had affairs with the porters on the train." Holy wah. Talk about bad re-runs of infantile gossip from the local junior high's mean girls table. 

Of course, the person regurgitating this ancient piece of junior high crap said it in total seriousness. Again, holy wah. It was remarkably stupid back in the '60s and it's remarkably stupid now. It was (and no doubt still is) a reflection of the steeped into the bone.anti-Native prejudice still much too common in an area that includes an Indian reservation and has always had a significant percentage of Anishinaabe students in the L'Anse and Baraga school districts, including the woman's children who were probably classmates of the racist. Odds are the dumb cunt* who spouted this nonsense first heard at the mean girls table back in 7th grade and has been sure it was true ever since. 

And, on top of the evidence of the idiot's ingrained bigotry, it also sets some sort of record for sheer stupidity. The S.O. and I both have railroad backgrounds. We joke that the family coat of arms includes a switch broom. I used to take the train a lot. As a dependent of a Chicago & Northwestern employee I got to ride for free, which I did on a regular basis. I know what conditions were like on passenger trains 60+ years ago. The idea of any porter, black, white, or purple, managing to do the nasty with a non-passenger even one time let alone multiple times gives a whole new dimension to the term ludicrous. The porters worked hard and did not have a lot of time for spending the two minutes the train stood in a station banging any of the locals. Then when you toss in the issue of sundown towns. . .My dad explained sundown towns when I asked why the African-American dining car waiter never got off the train in Ironwood even though it was a station where the train sat in the station long enough for the rest of the train crew to get off and hang out on the platform swapping gossip with the depot agent and chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes. (Male bonding in action.) Bottom line: It truly is the type of shitty stupid slur that can be generated only by middle school students or people with fewer brain cells than the typical hamster. 

FWIW, this particular photo has been seen by literally hundreds of museum visitors over the twelve years I've been volunteering. This being a small rural community many elderly visitors remember the woman. Universally, everyone who remembers her or knows her family says something positive. Until this one dumb cunt*.  You know, I can't help but feel a little sorry for her. How sad and empty must her life be if as a septuagenarian she feels compelled to share 60-year old racist gossip. And what was the point? 

*I've been watching the most recent season of "The Boys." Billy Butcher seems to be influencing my vocabulary.

It's Rapture Day

It's Eclipse Day at last. Given all the pre-event hype, I figure the actual eclipse may feel a tad anti-climactic. At this point here in Arkansas (we've been snowbirds in Hot Springs since December) the sun is still shining. There are high, thin clouds but the tv weather folks keep re-assuring us those clouds are high enough, thin enough, and scattered enough that totality will still be fully visible. We shall see.

The S.O., the Younger Daughter and I are equipped with the suggested eclipse glasses. Kroger started selling them before Christmas. Ditto tee-shirts and other memorabilia. We bought the glasses but, frugal people that we are, decided to wait until the tee-shirts go on sale for a lot less than they were selling for the last time I checked a price tag. That should start happening sometime later this afternoon. The partial starts here in about half an hour, totality a little before 2 p.m., and I figure half price tee shirts start about the same time. 

Lost in the Bozone has a post up about eclipse fever in Maine. Apparently traffic to reach the places where totality is guaranteed has become a bit messy. Maybe. According to the Arkansas DOT traffic counts were up this past weekend (one assumes out-of-state people travelling to hotels or campgrounds) but I am as usual skeptical. There's been a lot of talk abut how insanely congested Hot Springs might be thanks to the eclipse but when we were downtown on Saturday things looked like any good weekend now that tourist season (and gorgeous weather) has arrived. The National Park Service had an event happening on Arlington Lawn at the end of Bathhouse Row that looked like it had a decent crowd but no more than one would expect on any lovely, sunny day in a prime tourist location. 

One of the things that struck me in the lead up to the eclipse is just how many places seemed to believe that the world was going to beat a path to their specific location. While we were in Texas in January, we saw ads all over the place touting the wonders of reserving an RV space at the Llano airport (where the hell is Llano, you ask? I have no clue. Somewhere northwest of Johnson City and Marble Falls, I guess, because the advertising signs were along US-281 going north). You've really got to be a little strange about being sure of being in the path of totality if Llano, Texas (reachable, incidentally, only via state highways, no actual US-anything if Google Maps can be believed), strikes you as being the perfect place to park your motorhome. I never did believe the official paranoia about huge crowds, massive traffic jams, et cetera. And for sure having Governor Shuckabee declare an official Arkansas state emergency for today did nothing to persuade me there was any cause for concern. 

The Younger Daughter tells me that was a lot of discussion at work about how much of a headache the eclipse was going to create for the Forest Service. Personnel who had been at other national forests the last time there was a major eclipse said it was no big deal. Everyone imagined gazillions of visitors damaging resources and shedding trash wherever they went but it didn't happen. I'm thinking this event will be similar. Lots of people all assuming their specific location is going to be mobbed with people when the reality is the path of the eclipse covers 13 states and is pretty damn wide. People have a lot of choices of where to go, and for many it's not actually that far from home. All things considered. I am not surprised to see news items this morning saying that the hordes of visitors did not materialize in the Texas Hill Country (an area well worth visiting at this time of year even without an eclipse; March and April are the best months to be in Texas). No doubt there will be similar news briefs and after action reports as it sinks in that the anticipated (hoped for?) thousands of visitors at any one site were at best hundreds. 

 

Happy birthday, Val

 It's my youngest sibling's birthday today. I think this was her kindergarten photo. She has a different hair style these days. 

Pulitzer Project: Independence Day

This Pulitzer winner turned out to be another remarkably readable book. Two in a row. Amazing. The Garland County Public Library does have the next book on the list sitting on its shelves. I'm wondering if I should tempt fate by having Tammi check it out, too. Although I am going to give myself a short break before tackling it and indulge in some mind candy first, like reading one of the books in the Murderbot Diaries, before going back to more serious prose.

Independence Day is the middle book in a series of three novels that Richard Ford wrote about Frank Bascombe, a former sports writer and current real estate agent in this particular work. It won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1996. 

The book covers three days in the life of its hero. It's the 4th of July weekend in 1988 when Frank tries to juggle his responsibilities as a divorced dad, a realtor with clients he's trying to reel in, issues with his ex-wife, and a changing relationship with a current female friend. To be honest, if I wasn't working my way up a list and had read a plot summary that said the book chronicled a holiday weekend in the life of middle aged real estate sales guy  I would not be real interested in pulling it off the library shelf. 

Of course, I hadn't read a synopsis before starting the book. I try to go into each Pulitzer winner not knowing much, if anything, about it. I do occasionally end up doing some Googling to learn a little more, like if I'm thinking a book is pretty much a complete waste of paper and ink I'll go looking to see what reviewers had to say about it. Not surprisingly, my reaction to a book tends to be a bit different than the ones who get paid to review books for the New York Times. Professional reviewers have a bad habit of mistaking an incoherent piece of crap for a masterrpiece. 

Not that Independence Day is incoherent. It's actually quite well written and fairly easy to read. I got sucked right into it despite it being essentially one middle-aged guy musing on life as he takes care of various chores in the lead up to the Independence Day weekend: shows a house to potential buyers, tries to collect rent money from a difficult tenant, checks on a small business he owns. It helped that Ford gave his protagonist both a wry sense of humor and a dislike of right-wing politicians. 

Independence Day reminded me a little bit of the piece of unreadable dreck that won the 1982 Pulitzer, John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, in that it looks at what's going on in the head of a pretty average middle class white male, There is, however, one huge difference: Frank Bascombe is likable, he seems like a decent guy, and you find yourself hoping things work out for him. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in contrast, came across as a rather sleazy weasel. 

So how would I rate this book and do I recommend it? The overall quality merits a high 7, maybe a low 8, and, yes, I recommend it. It's decent reading. Not super exciting but not boring either. 

Next up on the list: Martin Dressler, which is yet another book by an author I'd never heard of before starting the Pulitzer Project. The local library does have it on the shelves so now I get to decide if I want Tammi to check it out tomorrow or if I indulge in a little more escapist genre fiction first. 

Out and About in Arkansas, Part II

AKA the State and Federal Parks edition. 

In addition to the obvious national park, the one that's the easiest to get to*, the incredibly photogenic one from the view point of a former architectural historian (see photo above), we've visited a couple other parks in the past couple of weeks. 

First up was the William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site (WICL), the place Clinton and his mom called home for the first four years of his life. The park was a first for me: I took zero photos. Maybe it was just too gray a day. The photo of the house I'm using in this post is courtesy of the National Park Service.

The park was interesting, but probably not in the way that supporters of the park would appreciate. Before I saw it, I'd been thinking "Why?" As in "why is it a National Park Service site?" And I'm still thinking that. I don't buy the argument that just because someone was President that automatically makes places that person lived historically significant. And even if the places associated with a past President merit preservation and interpretation, not every one of them requires National Park Service management. The Clinton early childhood home could have easily remained in private nonprofit organization hands or become a state park, but, nope, the NPS got stuck with another money pit. (The house has foundation issues. Work that would cost a private homeowner or a local nonprofit maybe  $20,000 will end up in an NPS budget as $2,000,000.)

I will say WICL has done a decent job of having the house more or less accurate to its period of significance (late 1940s). The furniture fits the time period, there's nothing notably out of place. I did have a few minor quibbles -- the medicine cabinet, for example, could have used some editing. Everything in it might have been accurate to the pre-Korean War era, but having similar products from different retailers struck me as anachronistic. You know, how many rolls of adhesive tape does a person need and, if you want more than one, why get multiple brands? 

On the other hand, the Hopalong Cassidy bedspread on Bill Clinton's bed was a nice touch. Clinton reportedly was a huge Hopalong Cassidy fan as a child. He did like Westerns -- Louis L'Amour was (is?) a favorite author. Whether or not he ever actually had such a bedspread as a child is unknown, but it does tie in with things he has said he liked. The only item in the house that did actually belong to Clinton is a child's picture book; everything else in the house is just stuff that's the right age and kind of matches the few family photographs that show the interior. According to the interpretive ranger leading the tour, Clinton himself thought some of the furniture had actually belonged to his grandparents when he visited the home after it became a museum.

From the town of Hope we ambled a few miles down highway US-278 to Historic Washington State Park. Washington is one of the oldest towns in Arkansas and has two claims to fame: it is where the Bowie knife first saw the light of day (a local blacksmith is credited with its invention) and it served as the Arkansas Confederate state capitol for two years during the Civil War. It is also known for the remarkable number of really old (by U.S. standards) houses and other buildings that have survived. We had lunch at the sort of historic Williams Tavern before checking out the park. I say "sort of historic" because although the building is pushing 200 years in age, it's not on its original site. Arkansas State Parks moved it approximately 7 miles in 1985 and rehabbed it as a restaurant. 

We did enjoy checking out the exhibits in the courthouse (pictured above; it stopped being the county courthouse when the town of Hope won a local election that moved the county seat) and then ambling around town admiring 19th century architecture. There is a replica blacksmith shop commemorating the invention of the Bowie knife, although to be honest I'm not sure just what would make a Bowie knife much different than any other knife available at the time. I did some googling and it appears the blacksmith (James Black) celebrated in Washington did make a knife for Jim Bowie that incorporated some improvements on previous versions of a common type of hunting and/or fighting knife, which isn't exactly inventing the knife, but close enough for the super short sound bites common on signage at state parks. Whatever Black did or did not do, he developed a reputation for good quality work and built a successful business producing knives better than the usual ones available in the 1830s. 

There is a memorial to James Black, although it's a bit odd looking. The blacksmith's shop does have an actual blacksmith doing demonstrations, although we happened to hit a day when the smith wasn't there. The park sells wrought iron items made by the resident smith, e.g., plant hangers. Reasonably priced but I was in full spend-no-money mode thanks to our truck still sitting at the garage in Missouri. 

The park has an event planned for March, a jonquil festival, that sounded like it might be fun. Washington is less than an hour's drive from Hot Springs so we may check that out. Assuming, of course, we have our truck back by then and I'm no longer afraid to spend any money.

The following weekend we decided to head for the southeastern corner of the state, get down into the Arkansas/Mississippi delta country, and visit Arkansas Post National Memorial and Arkansas Post State Museum, but I think I'll do a Part III instead of making this post even longer. 

 

*Photo is a shot down Bathhouse Row at Hot Springs National Park. The nifty dome graces the Quapaw Bathhouse, one of the 8 historic bathhouses along the Row. Seven are open to the public: one is the park visitor center, one is still a functioning bathhouse with traditional thermal baths, one's a brew pub/restaurant, . . .back when I worked for the Park Service 16 years ago most of the bathhouses were mothballed, but NPS management has done a good job of finding tenants.

Out and about in Arkansas

One effect of the transfer case falling out of the truck has been to make me extremely reluctant to go anywhere or to spend any money. No trips to the local quilt shops, no wandering around flea markets, limited casual browsing at Books-A-Million, no going to see "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" in an actual theater. Just general frugality because we still have no idea just how much the truck repairs are going to cost. A lot, obviously, and even though it probably wouldn't make much of a difference if we indulged in an occasional frivolous expenditure, part of me doesn't want to part with a single dime until after we've got the truck back. 

Still, as the Younger Daughter likes to point out, it's not good to just sit in her living room binge watching "Maine Cabin Masters" and brooding about the possible outrageous prices of miscellaneous Ford parts. It will not do anything to improve my mood if I have time to spend wondering just how many payments the mechanic has left on his bass boat. We need to go out occasionally, venture out into fresh air and sunshine, and the venturing out should involve more than just going to the closest Dollar General for toilet paper and milk. So we've been doing things like checking out  campgrounds and RV parks as possible sites for Magee and visiting state and national parks. 

We've done windshield tours of several privately owned RV parks in the Hot Springs area. One struck us as acceptable, another was slightly better, and then there were the "Holy wah. People actually pay to stay here?!" gems. When the sites are uneven gravel and the RVs are parked so close together you have zero privacy you really wonder what the attraction can be, especially when none of the privately owned parks are cheap. 

On the other hand, there are a couple campgrounds in the Ouachita National Forest that aren't bad -- well maintained, lots of space between the sites, and best of all, Free -- that are tempting. They're basic -- no amenities other than the availability of a privy -- but Free when I'm busy stressing about money sounds pretty good. One campground looked okay to me, although I had qualms about the road in there. It's barely one lane wide with no where to go if you meet a vehicle. Someone would have to back up, and that could be a headache when towing Magee. The Forest Service does put a 14-day limit on how long you can stay on one spot, but even limited Free is better than paying every day. 

We also checked out a Corps of Engineers campground near Lake Ouachita. It's small -- only 9 sites -- but has full hook-ups. Our geezer pass would get us half-price rates, which would make it cheaper than any of the private parks, and it's got a nice lay out. Lots of space, no feeling like you have to worry about hearing every belch a neighbor emits. Photo above is from the COE campground. There were only three RVs there when we did our inspection tour. I checked on recreation.gov. Lots of open dates, including some really long blocks. The Corps sets a 14-day limit, too, but there's a loophole. It might be possible to do almost two full months without having to move Magee, or at least not move out of the campground, just shuffle over to a different site, because it's the off season. 

At the moment I'm definitely leaning toward the COE campground. Now all we need is the truck. As soon as we hear from the garage I can go online to make reservations so when we're able to pick up Magee we'll know where we're dragging him. 

Pulitzer Project: The Stone Diaries

It's been awhile since I bothered reading any Pulitzer Prize fiction winners. Back in 2021 I hit a couple that were such duds that I lost interest in bothering with Interlibrary Loan to work my way up the list. But after we got to Hot Springs, a city large enough to have a public library that hasn't overdosed on Danielle Steele, I checked the online catalog and then asked the Younger Daughter to check the 1995 winner, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, out for me.

The book turned out to be surprisingly good. Not great, but definitely readable. Shields could write. The book is  structured as a faux biography (or possibly memoir) of/by Daisy Goodwill Flett, a woman born in a small town in Manitoba in 1905 who manages to make it into her 80s before a bad fall triggers a decline in her health. 

By the time The Stone Diaries was published, Shields was an established author with a good reputation in Canada. She was in the comfortable position of feeling free to play around with formatting, perspective, style. . . she even inserts a section of vintage photos to mimic the type of old family photos a reader would expect to see in a real biography or memoir. That particular literary trick didn't go over very well with me. I'm not sure if Shields meant for there to be a disconnect between the way a reader finds herself visualizing the characters and the supposed photos of them (a character described as "morbidly obese" appears to be not especially fat, for example) or if the incongruities were simply an accident, but the end result was that to me that section just felt weird. 

Some sections are told in the first person, some in the third, but all are more or less the story of Daisy's life. Some of the narrative is from Daisy's perspective, some is how things may have looked to the people around her. For example, at one point a college friend of Daisy's visits for a few days, and the author gives us two radically different interpretations of how that visit went. One version describes a happy home, well behaved children, and a Daisy who seems to have her life pretty much together. The other version has Daisy as a fraud, her kids rude, and depicts a household the visitor would be happy to never visit again. 

So who is Daisy Goodwill Flett? In most ways, a rather ordinary woman. She's smart, but not brilliant; attractive but not necessarily stunning; hardworking but not ambitious. She's like most of us: she goes through life behaving appropriately but not making many waves. Her life has had some tragic blips -- her mother dies in childbirth, when she's eleven years old her foster mother is killed in a bicycle accident, her first husband manages to kill himself by falling out of a second floor window on their honeymoon -- but other than hearing the splat when Husband Number One hits the pavement she's not a witness to the events. She was present when her mother died, but witnessing a death when she'd only been breathing for a few minutes herself probably didn't make much of an impression. She is, in fact, remarkably untouched by events happening around her. 

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Daisy represents all of us. We all go through life experiencing various blips but most of the time we all just muddle on. 

So was the book worth reading? More than most of the ones on the list, although still not one of the truly good ones. On the usual scale of 1 being the worst, 10 being the best, it's a solid 7. Decent writing, not a whole lot of work to get through, but in the end not that special. The Younger Daughter asked me what makes a book merit a Pulitzer. Sometimes it's because it's an amazing work of literature and sometimes it's the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Even though the announcement may say the award is for The Most Recent Work the reality is the prize is actually acknowledging the half a dozen or more better works the author cranked out decades earlier. Not being familiar with Shields' previous work I don't know if The Stone Diaries qualifies as a lifetime achievement award candidate, but it feels like it could. 

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Sure, why not. It's decently written, moderately interesting, and inoffensive. This book, in fact, proved to be such a relief to read compared to some of the others I suffered through as part of this Pulitzer Project that I've already moved on to the next one on the list, Richard Ford's Independence Day*, the 1996 winner. At this point, I'm within 25 books of the most recent winner and have already read three of the 25 out of order, it looks like I could actually live long enough to read them all. . . especially if there's a year or two between now and whenever I get to the end that no prize for fiction is awarded. 

*Also surprisingly readable. I'm already about a third done with it. 

 

Stuff you don't expect to say more than once in a lifetime

 "A drive shaft makes a really interesting noise when it falls out of a moving vehicle."

Okay, so this time it wasn't actually the drive shaft hitting the pavement that made the really interesting (and definitely scary) noise. It was the transfer case eating itself followed by the sound of metal hitting the asphalt. 

My friend Kaylyn is probably going to tell me that losing a second drive shaft is a strong hint that we shouldn't drive Fords. The Guppy was built on an E350 chassis; our current (sitting wistfully waiting for parts) tow vehicle is a 4-wheel drive diesel F350. I don't think the brand is an issue. The S.O. and I have been driving Fords for decades and have only lost two drive shafts in the past forty or fifty years. . . and given just how marginal some of those Fords have been but still managed to keep moving, I'm not inclined to assume the Ford name is a problem.

On the other hand, when a person is sitting on the shoulder of a highway in rural Missouri waiting for a tow truck, the jokes about FORD standing for Found On Road Dead hit a little close to home. 

The transfer case decided to cannibalize itself when we were about two thirds of the way to Hot Springs. As planned in the revised itinerary, we'd spent a night in Portage, Wisconsin, a second incredibly cold night at a KOA in Newton, Iowa (cornfields do not provide much of a wind break once the corn's been harvested), and were looking forward to checking out Pomme de Terre State Park in Missouri. The truck died about 3 hours short of that goal.

What made our situation slightly tricky, of course, was the fact we were towing a 5th wheel trailer. Fortunately, Magee is small for a travel trailer. As it turned out, the towing company that rescued us had space behind its garage for storing Magee while the truck is being repaired another shop in Trenton.

How long and how expensive will that repair be? It's the holiday season. That alone is going to slow the process down. Before we'd even talked with a mechanic I was guesstimating a minimum of 3 weeks, and that was assuming no glitches in the supply chain. Even if the transmission wasn't damaged (unknown at this point; it's possible the housing got cracked but the repair shop didn't know that yet when the S.O. talked with them yesterday) and the transfer case is repairable (probably not) for sure they have to order one new drive shaft. One of the drive shafts stayed attached and dragged; the other one escaped and rolled off into the wilderness. 

One good thing that came out of this mini-disaster was being reminded (again) that most people are basically nice. We coasted to a stop not far from the end of someone's driveway. It was rural Missouri, houses along the highway were relatively far apart, but we wound up close to one. Cell phone technology meant we didn't have to go ask for help, but after we'd sat there for awhile the homeowner came out to ask if we needed any assistance. We told him not to worry; we'd called AAA and a tow truck would be there soon. 

When that "soon" turned into multiple hours, he came out again to ask if we'd like to come into the house and get warmed up. We went in, were served hot chocolate, and thawed out. It was incredibly cold outside so the chocolate was much appreciated. As time went by, it became clear there was a problem with the towing company. When I called AAA a second time to find out what the delay was, they gave me the name and number of the local business. The homeowner then called them to ask what the problem was and found out the idiot owner of that business (Precision Auto in Brookfield, Missouri, if anyone wants to make a note about who NOT to call in that part of the state) hadn't believed it was an actual AAA dispatcher talking to him, wrote the call off as a hoax, and never sent a truck out. He then hung up on the guy who was helping us. [My suspicion is that the AAA dispatcher had an urban accent -- the two I talked with while asking for roadside assistance definitely sounded black -- and Precision Auto's rural racism kicked in.] 

So the homeowner contacted the owner of a towing company in Trenton and got the promise of a truck being out there fast. His wife then called a hotel in Trenton to find out if they had any vacancies, explained our situation, and asked them to hold a room for us. While we waited for the tow truck (that we now knew for sure was on its way) they fed us dinner. It hit me that the hotel might not allow pets, so we called to find out for sure. And they were a No Pets facility. So then these incredibly nice people offered to cat sit Bubba -- they had a mud room so could confine him to a small space. They were a multiple pet household (dog, cats, college age sons) and assured me Bubba would be no trouble at all. He wound up being there for two nights and apparently behaved himself. 

After the tow truck arrived, one of the college age sons played chauffeur for us: drove us to the tow shop so we could deal with the paperwork there and then got us checked into the hotel. His father insisted we take their phone number and emphasized that if we needed more help, like a ride to whatever garage would do the actual repair work, to call them. As it turned out, we didn't need to bother them again, but it was reassuring to know there was someone with local knowledge and contacts we could contact if we needed to.

We're now in Hot Springs. The Younger Daughter took two weeks of vacation so she'd be off work when we first got here. She didn't think that vacation would include an 8-hour drive north to pick us up, but stuff happens. The truck broke down on Sunday, Tammi got to Trenton late Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning we went over to where Magee is stored and removed everything that was perishable or would be damaged by freezing along with enough clothes to last me and the S.O. for a couple weeks, got checked out of the hotel, picked up Bubba, and here we are. 

I do have to say everyone we met or dealt with in Trenton was super nice: the homeowners who helped us, the tow truck guy, the people at the hotel, the mechanic who's going to work on our truck, the Missouri state trooper who spent an hour standing in the cold directing traffic and making sure no one ran into the back end of Magee. . . Which isn't actually that surprising. Given the opportunity, most people want to do the decent thing. It can be hard to remember at times because the jerks can make so much noise, but the cold, selfish assholes really are a minority of the population.