Traveling and how you do it

 The mission was to visit Uncle Alex in Tennessee. The mission behind the mission was to find out what it’s like to travel in a camper.

The Wise Woman wanted to know. She’s been window shopping since we moved from La Casita, which began as a home away from home. She’s the enthusiast. I’ve been the foot-dragger. When we went to Tennessee, we rented a camper built on the chassis of a big pickup truck.

In many ways, the maiden voyage was a disaster. It took longer for greenhorns to load than you’d imagine. We forgot things — like phone chargers — and had to find a store. We hit Chattanooga at rush hour and spent almost two hours getting through town.

A big storm that the forecasters had been talking about hit as we were going through the mountains. It was dark when he reached David Crockett State Park and raining so hard we were reading signs by lightning flashes. It took a long time to find our campsite. We hooked up water and electrical connections in a gale.

We didn’t get off to a great start. But when we got up the next morning, we spent a while listening to birdsong and talking about the coyotes we’d heard in the night. Wild canines sometimes celebrate the end of storms with song.

We spent a couple of nights on the Cumberland Plateau and felt a connection to the place we wouldn’t have felt it we’d stayed at a hotel off the highway.

The jury’s out. But given enough time, I usually begin to see what my wife is talking about.

On the road

 Stefan Zweig says that when Montaigne traveled, he didn’t follow the guidebook. In 1580, Montaigne took off on a long tour. Here’s Zweig’s account of Montaigne in Rome: 

He scarcely mentions the Raphaels, the Michelangelos, the monuments. Instead he attends the execution of a criminal, has himself invited into the home of a Jewish family to witness the circumcision of a child, visits libraries, enters the Bagni di Lucca, invites peasants to the ball; chats away with all the lazzarones. But he eschews all the celebrated sites. For him, all that is natural is to be celebrated.

 

Montaigne was on the road for almost a year and a half. Maybe I’ve been thinking about his travels because the Wise Woman and I just got back from a three-day trip to the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. We went a long way to see a natural wonder, Uncle Alex, 95. Like the Wise Woman, he is Black in a society that sees only Black and white.

He’s a Korean War veteran who came home to see the country get angrier and more disturbed. The neighbors across the county line elected George Wallace governor.

He lives in Pulaski, Tenn., which is known as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Uncle Alex’s living room had hand-drawn maps of a Black neighborhood with thriving businesses. It grew under the protection of U.S. Colored Troops, stationed in Giles County after the Civil War, and survived the of Jim Crow. He calls the place Belleview.

Uncle Alex is working on history projects these days. He argues with what his place in the world is known for. He wants a better account of what it should be known for. He wants a better guidebook. 

• Source: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone; London: Pushkin Press, 2015, p. 134.

A sense of another place

 E.T. Collinsworth III of Portal, Ariz., sent me a copy of his book Life on the Line: A Sense of Place. E.T. lives on the border, the line between two countries. The line between cultures is harder to find.

I’m fascinated by places and our ideas about place. So I’m interested in E.T.’s practice of collecting photographs and observations and publishing them in little books.

When I go outdoors to look at the place I call home, I look for tracks and other evidence of the creatures who live here or are just passing through. E.T. does too.

The game cameras on his and his neighbor’s places have captured images of people passing through. Some are migrants, trying to find a better life, what E.T. calls the mythical construction job in Phoenix. Some of the people are carrying loads of drugs. One photo shows a man carrying a rifle.

I looked at his words and images and realized that whatever else I’d imagined about his place, I’d hadn’t imagined the half of it.

Maybe that’s the human urge to communicate — to help someone else imagine what another place is like.

• Note: E.T. published a book about mules a couple of years ago. For a note on it, see “The powers of observation,” May 16, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-powers-of-observation.html

An offer of public service

 When I was a reporter, a poultry magnate from East Texas came to the Capitol in Austin and started handing out $10,000 donations to state senators. I was in a knot of reporters interviewing one of the senators when Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Pride stopped by.

That was near the end of the session in 1989, and the Capitol was packed with reporters, advocates and lobbyists. It didn’t occur to Pilgrim that people would question the actions of any fellow who had cash and wanted some consideration in return. That was just business.

A lot of people saw it that way, and you’d be wrong if you thought that the prudes of the press were the only people who were offended. The people who were enraged were the lobbyists who had offered lesser sums and saw the threat of inflation.

I got to thinking about the Good Old Days when I read The New York Times story about the contractor building Trump’s new ballroom. The Times reported that the company got a secret, no-bid contract from the National Park Service to repair two ornamental fountains. The Biden Administration estimated the cost  at $3.3 million in 2022. 

The Times said the company doing the work for Trump would get $11.9 million for the job. Project creep would bring the total to $17.4 million.

The secret contract without bids was justified on the grounds of urgency. Those old decorative fountains are almost a matter of national security.

The story reminded me why a 20-something version of me wanted to be a reporter. I’m too old to do that  work, but I would like to offer my services to any organization that is interested in clarifying the rights of taxpayers.

I would like to withhold a tiny portion of my taxes, just so the courts could clarify our rights. I’m willing to pay taxes to repair the ornamental fountains. What I want to know is whether I have a right to decline to pay taxes on things that are defined as illegal — graft and corruption, for example.

Because I grew up in Texas, I understand the form of government we’re now under as a nation. I think I’d be a good representative litigant.

I’m interested in the accounting. I know that the difference between $17.4 million and $3.3 million is not all questionable. I’m just interested in what’s legal — that is, what I’m legally and morally responsible for. Is that not also a religious question, protected under the First Amendment?

The case would not be significant in terms of money. But it might set a precedent. If the organization won this case, other taxpayers might challenge other deals. Alert taxpayers might file so many suits that it might take the profit motive out of this form of government.

I don’t think we’ll get anywhere talking about the difference between democracy and kleptocracy. But if you cut certain sources of revenue by 20 percent, you might get a different kind of people in government.

You might get the hogs out of the trough.

 • Source: David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater and Andrea Fuller, “Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job”; The New York Times, April 25, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/us/politics/lafayette-park-fountains-trump-contract.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eFA.08-k.Cc-LE9q8ffbX&smid=nytcore-ios-share

A hole in my knowledge

 When a tree falls in the forest, I suppose I should wonder whether it made a sound. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I wonder about the woodpecker hole.

The oak had fallen recently, and I hoped to find clues that might suggest what kind of bird or critter had been using the cavity.

If you made a list of the most common birds at our backyard feeders, you’d start with titmice, chickadees, nuthatches and wrens. All those birds nest in old woodpecker holes. I’m just now appreciating the role that woodpeckers play in providing housing opportunities in the Geogia Piedmont.

I looked for the hole until I found it. But I found nothing that would help identify the last tenant.

Much of what I see in the woods remains a mystery.

When truth dies first

 Palamedes, wisest of the Greeks, came to a bad end. He was executed for treason during the Trojan War. He’s famous for mourning truth, which he said died before he did.

During the first nine years of the Trojan War, the Greeks raided Troy’s allies, hoping to cut off supplies. Achilles and Ajax came back to camp with loot and captives. Odysseus returned from Thrace empty handed. Palamedes, suspecting a lack of initiative and possibly a lack of courage, let Odysseus hear about it.

Odysseus, at least in the early legends, was the kind of man who always got even.

Odysseus convinced Agamemnon, the supreme commander, that the gods had warned that the Greeks must move their camp for just one night. The army moved out, and that night Odysseus buried some gold at Palamedes’s campsite. Odysseus forced a Phrygian prisoner to forge a letter, allegedly from King Priam of Troy, saying that the money was the agreed price for betraying the Greeks. When the prisoner finished the letter, Odysseus killed him on the spot.

The next day, the army moved back to its original campsite. Somebody found the body and then found the letter.

When Palamedes protested his innocence, Odysseus helpfully suggested that the Greeks search his campsite.

The ancient Greeks constantly worked on their legends and myths. This one was older than Homer, who saw Odysseus in better light.

One of the traditional readings of the tale is that wise people don’t last long in places where truth isn’t valued. It’s a lesson Socrates might have appreciated.

But I like the aftermath, which suggests a problem with abandoning truth.

Palamedes’s father, Nauplius, heard of his son’s murder and sailed to Troy to demand justice. He appealed to Agamemnon, the army commander, who turned the old man away.

Nauplius could do nothing against the powerful block that had gained control of Greece. But on the way back home, he stopped at the palaces of almost all the murderers. He told the wife of each murderer that her husband was bringing a captured princess home as his new queen.

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, was one of several women who took the story badly.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 299-300.

Norman Maclean's stories

 The New York Times tells us that A River Runs Through It is 50 years old. The Times points out that the percentage of American males that read fiction is declining. Norman Maclean’s novella was barely published 50 years ago. Could it be published today?

The book, as opposed to the novella, is A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. One of those stories, “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim,’” is about a lumberjack that the narrator hated. The narrator sounds like Maclean.

Jim was the best sawyer in the crew. The narrator worked as his partner, needing the money for graduate school. Jim was bigger and stronger. Manning a crosscut saw with him was an ordeal.

The story includes long passages on the importance of good boots and on the psychological games men play when they have to work with someone they hate. It also includes this:

 

It was getting hot and I was half-sick when I came back to camp at the end of the day. I would dig into my duffel back and get clean underwear and clean white socks and a bar of soap and go to the creek. Afterwards, I would sit on the bank until I was dry. Then I would feel better. It was a rule I had learned my first year working in the Forest Service — when exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change socks.

 

I’m one of those American males who read fewer works of fiction than I used to. The newer books that I tried and gave up on had conflicts that didn’t hold my attention.

I read Maclean’s story with wonder. If he were alive and writing today, I’d read more fiction.

• Sources: Monte Burke, “Could ‘A River Runs Through It’ Have Been a Hit Today?” The New York Times, April 20, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/books/could-a-river-runs-through-it-have-been-a-hit-today.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d1A.KnEH.XeCTgpqEXfHV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories; New York: Pocket Books, 1992, p. 122.