Category: September 2017

Tale of a Lazy Tongue

Or, how a Southern wine lover blindly found her proper place
at a glamorous Napa wine event

 

By Cynthia Adams

As California was flogged by epic February rains and winds, I headed straight into the storm, determined to join some of the wine industry’s finest at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley. My first stop was in Lodi, home of zinfandels. Wine expert Stephanie Bolton was suffering with flu, too ill to meet me as planned, to reveal her insider’s view of my favorite wine. 

Stephanie is a home girl, Carolina-raised. She and I had clinked many a glass together while she earned her Ph.D. in research at the University of Georgia. She cheered me on as I dreamed of writing about vineyards, bud break, harvests under full moons, barrel samples and the romantic world of the grape. This symposium was to be a launching pad into this dream.

But I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. What did I really learn?

I’ve learned that even though I have never written a bestseller like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, I am the Fannie Flagg of wine writing: meaning, Southern and overly polite. And although as a writer I’ve been told I have a distinct and winning voice, I’ve discovered in California that I lack a tongue. 

How Southern am I?   

Swishing and spitting used to draw the ire of my parents and got my sassy self sent directly to my room without supper. Spitting, according to my Carolina Mama, was the equivalent of biting the person seated beside you. Now, I wince whenever I must spit out perfectly good wine, and dread letting even an understanding fellow Southerner see me do it. 

And that was just my first obstacle. Turns out, I have an olfactory disability. My brother was born with a lazy eye, and had surgery when he was a lad of 5. But I’ve apparently inherited an infuriatingly lazy sense of taste. There is no surgery that can help me. 

You see, before this humiliating realization, I wasn’t going for Fannie Flagg. Nooo. I wanted to be the
M. F. K. Fisher of fine wine and food. I envisioned prose about molten rubies in the glass, or waxing poetic at the first sight of shapely “legs” streaming down the inner contours of a delicate Riedel glass.

Well, no. We were privy to some of the finest wines, ones that had never left the estate libraries until the symposium. Turns out, the only thing I could correctly capture were my streaming sinuses with a wad of tissues. I am also asthmatic and allergic (thanks to an early spring, my sinuses were deeply offended) missing most of the “notes” my comrades were rhapsodically describing whenever they pushed their noses deep inside a glass. 

The symposium fellows had segued from lecture to lecture, morning until evening, with most of the slated events featuring wines that we were to study. One lecturer had even written the frigging bible of wine. (Swear to God, Karen MacNeil was there with an updated, second edition of her Wine Bible.) By day three, I was slurping, chewing and spitting at Greystone, the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, revered mecca of food and wine knowledge, in a lecture hall where Julia Child had once held forth. My teeth grew black with red wine stain. Lesson No. 1: Even if you spit, after sampling 50-plus wines, you get slightly drunk. And start channeling more Flagg than Fisher.

But that wasn’t the worst of it: My smart-aleck mouth harbors stubborn-as-hell taste buds. After about six wines had been swished and swirled, my tongue was deadening, like a hunting dog that cannot, will not, get the scent.

With an array of Napa’s finest juice in front of me, I became even more challenged. My mouth was almost immediately addled, overtaxed, overcome; the oral equivalent of hysterical blindness.

First my tongue went numb along the sides, then the undersides. The deadening spread as I powered on with my classmates, continuing along the top, creeping across the entire roof of my mouth. I feared drooling, which would make my humiliation complete, and checked my reflection in an empty glass, hoping none of the luminaries in the class notice me swabbing my nose, eyes and even (so help me) my tongue.

My sinuses swelled and closed, with my nose giving off little porcine snorts as I approached the glass.  So I gave my tongue a pep talk: Yes, you can! Yes, you can!

Meanwhile, my colleagues were detecting all sorts of notes: pine, chocolate, cherries and huckleberries. Seated beside Richard Bradley, editor of Worth, I shouted out that I was getting “notes of leather” from a 1974 Charles Krug cab. He swiveled and gave me an incredulous look. I dabbed at my blocked nose and sank deeper into my seat. Next up, a 1975 Beaulieu Vineyard Private Reserve, which elicited coos of praise and claims of different smells, but none quite as creative as leather.

By day four, I contemplated the final challenge: an auspicious blind tasting held in St. Helena for Premier Napa, where we were dispatched to taste Hall Wines. Conveniently, they provided, right next to our tasting glasses, containers of complimentary toothbrushes for our wine-blackened teeth. So I grabbed one of each.

Initial hiccup: I could not figure how one approaches so many stellar wines. Was I to guess at every single one of them?   

I was at a racetrack without a program. A wine jockey without a saddle. And there before me were 81 vital, athletic, utterly staggering thoroughbreds.

The tables were set with three vintages of 13 red wines, and 14 white wines, waiting to be swirled and spat, with experts circling around the tables, squinting in earnest concentration, notepads out. 

The room was intense, the mood all business — and I stumbled out of the gate, desperately hoping my palate would spring into action. My lazy, lazy taste buds, I reproached. Wake the hell up!

It was now 10 a.m. As my Southern grandmother, Mama Patty, maker of scuppernong wines that would curl the teeth of a grown man would have reproached, “And there you are, Cynthia Anne, drinking in broad daylight!”

Now, I had learned that some people are morning tasters. (Forgive me, those of you whom I previously assumed were hopeless alcoholics.) My tongue, when it could be lashed into service, was only working third shift.

Coming off a Meadowood dinner the prior night, one featuring wines that were premier, cult-status fine, my tongue had signaled further trouble. It began to loll around, declaring that it had no further work to do. (Wine God Kevin Zraly of Windows on the World fame had warned us that taste buds are extreme slackers by age 32. Thereafter, they either work part time or die. Mine had left the building.) 

By now, Hall was crawling with millionaire oenophiles who had arrived in Teslas (car of choice after Ferraris), padding around in Zegna togs and Tod’s loafers. These cats looked casual but they were most certainly not. 

And, they were carrying white paper spit cups. Where I was born, spit cups are for chewing tobacco, not priceless wines. 

There were spit buckets at the tables, but with so many wines to be tested, they threatened overflowing. There is an unspoken etiquette to spit bucket use. “Do not spray,” a friend hissed. “You’ll get yelled at. I know, because I did.” With buckets filled, we used white cups after we chewed and swished.

The place swarmed with growers, winemakers and vineyard owners, who knew what they were about and set to doing it. Then there was me, open-mouthed, feeling very much like Lucille Ball at the candy factory. These were unimaginably promising wines. I grabbed a spit cup.

I wanted to taste them all! 

When I saw my pal Irene Moore looking rapturously into a glass, I did my best imitation: I, too, narrowed my eyes, addressed the wine, swirled it with my hand cupping the top of the glass, and tasted. I chewed and swished and allowed the wine to roll to the back of my tongue. The first sensation was an ecstasy of flavor. So good I didn’t want to spit. But spit I did, then drank some water, and soldiered on to another. The next taste exploded in my mouth, the finish strong and the wine young and wrestling to the top of my palate. I closed my eyes, smiling.

Then I advanced to the third. It was another rapturous red; if it met its promise, it was going to be a Stradivarius of wines. 

As I squinted and puckered, waiting for my tongue to curl like a Persian carpet, it began. Before I could spit, my damned tongue began withering. My sinuses swelled and my wastrel taste buds were atrophying. I could now taste little and smell less. Gasping, I spat, ran to the bathroom to gargle and swab the telltale stains from my teeth.

I stared at my tongue in the mirror. It was probably going to leave me altogether, buds and all, and move to another ZIP code. Run off with Little Debbie, or maybe, Mrs. Smith. It didn’t care — it had no standards. 

Returning to the fray, I tried to resume. But, the tongue was done. Hell, it wasn’t even mine anymore. Perhaps I swallowed a chunk of it; I scarcely recall.

The takeaway from Premier Napa? 

My problems may be rooted in my Southerness, and I can overcome the spitting thing. But think of the biological imperative. 

Can a tongue be tamed?  Maybe our biology is our destiny.  Rethink cellaring those special bottles if you are over, say, age 33. Some of us have tongues that will not be overruled. They’re like doomed wines:  underachievers, stalled, peaking too young. 

Some people, some unlucky ones, are not morning tasters. Our mouths prefer wines at dusk, in the cover of darkness, with our histamines and convention in check.

And yet, I fight. If I can keep my incorrigible tongue from sliding out the corners of my mouth, decamping for less challenging opportunities, I’m opening a 2005 Rubicon tonight.  OH

Cindy Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

For Generations, Irving Park’s beloved Brown-Gardener Drugs has anchored
a community and served up more than a great grilled cheese sandwich

 

Story & Photographs by Sam Froelich

I hear my name three times before I can find a stool at the question mark — shaped counter. It makes me feel like Norm from Cheers, minus the potbelly and hollow leg. Sara knows my order already but is polite enough to ask anyway. “Three eggs with cheese, bacon and a grilled biscuit?” That reminds me, I need to refill my cholesterol medicine. Luckily, my pharmacist is only 60 feet away.

Knowing the patrons by name, and often by what they’ll order, is more the rule than the exception at Brown-Gardiner, Irving Park’s almost 50-year-old neighborhood restaurant/drugstore that Bill Brown and Paul Gardiner started after moving down Elm Street from a smaller pharmacy across from Cone Hospital.

It’s the kind of place where 10 or 12 of Gavin Ray’s extended family happily crowd around a table for eight every single Saturday at noon. Where Wanda once served your toddler son grilled cheese and now her daughter Sam makes him an orange-ade when he’s home from college. Where there’s a poster board in the corner displaying a smattering of customer’s old Christmas cards under the headline “Where Are They Now?”

At the counter, you can often find Kay Chesnutt sitting beside her son Xan Tisdale and his two young children, Finn and Reece. Three generations on four stools is a wonderfully common sight here. It’s also a place where you can go in alone for lunch when you’re feeling down and leave with your spirits buoyed after impromptu conversations with Ellen Worth about the city swim meets, and with Howard Arbuckle about little-known Davidson baseball history.

Brown-Gardiner is woven into the fabric of Irving Park and each supports the other. Indeed, a crisp white paper bag sitting on your doorstep containing your prescriptions can make you smile much more than any 24-hour drive-thru ever could. When an Eckerd’s  drugstore opened directly across the street a decade or so ago, many outside observers predicted Brown-Gardiner’s demise. However, the neighborhood responded and sales went up. Within six years it was the Eckerd’s that closed its doors.

The beauty and importance of a Brown-Gardiner, or say a Smith Street Diner, a Bernie’s BBQ, or any of the many cherished gathering places in neighborhoods across Greensboro comes from a mixture of time and place that isn’t evident with a quick glance. These are the places that for decades have endured the encroachment of cookie-cutter chain stores with their hollow, corporate-mandated “Welcome To . . .”s and their walls covered in “nostalgic” signs that are pre-distressed in a Chinese factory. The kind of places that value serving a sturdy, well-made meal over chasing every artisanal, free-range, gluten-free trend, and where conversation often precedes ordering and can sometimes be just as important as the food. By virtue of their permanence in one location for long periods of time, they foster the connections between friends and families, and through and across generations, which strengthen neighborhoods and ultimately lead to a better city.

Such places as Brown-Gardiner aren’t ones that rely on the amount of stars in a Yelp review or golden skillets in some newspaper column for their longevity. A word-of-mouth recommendation holds more sway here. Like that given 20 years ago to a young father new to Greensboro and in need of a Saturday breakfast spot to take his son and grant his exhausted wife just one morning of uninterrupted sleep.

Two decades and two more children later and I’ve always been welcomed back with a smile. Whether it’s by Nancy or Holt or Hilaire, who rings your order up at the same counter where she was once weighed on a vegetable scale as an infant. Nowhere else were countless lunches only eaten completely due to promises of trips to the candy aisle. Whether those lunches were prepared then by Imogene “Nanny” Sells and now by her granddaughter Kendra. And, of course, where else would I, Andy and Mary, and so many others have gotten a small glacier’s worth of the “good” ice over the years?

While the ice may be resplendent, it is the people, past and present; in the kitchen or at the counter; serving food or dispensing prescriptions; that are truly special and they make Brown-Gardiner one of Greensboro’s neighborhood icons.  OH

Sam Froelich is from High Point, lives in Greensboro, and occasionally drinks in Winston. He should have bought his own ice machine years ago.

The Next Frontier

Listening for voices of
characters I have not yet created

 

By Wiley Cash

Jill McCorkle, my friend and fellow writer, has said on more than one occasion that she knows it is time to let go of one novel when the next one reveals itself. I imagine this is like swinging through the jungle on vines: It’s not wise to let go of one vine until you’re certain that another is in reach. I feel the same way; even if my eyes are closed as I reach for the vine, I’m certain it’s there, waiting for me if I’m brave enough to grasp it and keep swinging along.

But I cannot help but pause and hover in mid-air. I need to give my hands a rest before they grasp another project, before my body can agree to be carried through the jungle of novel-writing with only the most tenuous connections to the trees above me to keep me from tumbling to the forest floor.

For me, writing a novel is hard, and it takes a long time, and over the course of writing three novels I have adjusted my approach to letting one go before taking up another.

I began writing my first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, which is about the fallout in the community after a young boy is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina, in the spring of 2004, and I thought I had finished it in the fall of 2008 when a New York agent agreed to represent it, but I was wrong. Although she and I worked on revisions of the novel over the next year and a half, she was never able to sell it to a publisher, and we ended up parting ways in early 2010. I had a failed novel on my hands, and I had lost an agent. The chance to publish had slipped through my fingers.

Although I felt defeated, I had already begun thinking about writing a second novel, although I had no idea how to begin. I had lived with the story of my first novel for five years, and I knew the characters intimately  — their history, landscape and emotional terrain  — and I could not imagine forgoing these people for a new cast of individuals that would be born in my mind and live on my screen for some indeterminate time.

Slowly, characters for a new novel and the circumstances that would animate them began to come to me: two young sisters in foster care; a wayward father who is also a washed-up baseball player; stolen money; a bounty hunter with a years’ old vendetta. Although the characters and plot were revealing themselves, I was hesitant to put pen to paper until I knew for certain that my first novel had failed. I’m glad I waited.

In the spring of 2010 I began working with a new agent. Over the course of the next few months, he and I worked on revisions of A Land More Kind Than Home. In late October, he called me and told me that the book was ready to go out to editors in the hope one of them would want to publish it. He asked if I had another novel in mind. He wanted us to go for a two-book deal. I told him the story of a washed-up minor league baseball player who kidnaps his two daughters from a foster home and goes on the run with a bag of stolen money. I had not written a word of the novel yet, but I had lived with it for the better part of a year.

My agent sold the manuscript of A Land More Kind Than Home, as well as a synopsis of what would become This Dark Road to Mercy, to the first editor who read it. I suddenly found myself with a two-book deal.

Over the next few months, my new editor and I went back to A Land More Kind Than Home, and I wrote a new draft of the novel, and I also spent a lot of time on pre-publication tasks: writing essays that would appear online and in magazines; giving interviews; attending trade shows; and traveling to New York to meet the publishing team. Although the synopsis of This Dark Road to Mercy sold in late 2010, I did not write a word of the novel until the summer of 2011.

I was very fortunate to be accepted to artists’ retreats at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and, later that summer, at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The first time I sat down to write at Yaddo in June 2011, I wrote the entire first chapter of This Dark Road to Mercy. It literally poured itself onto the page because I had been living with it in my mind for so long. By the end of the summer I almost had a complete draft.

My first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, was published in April 2012, and I submitted the final manuscript of This Dark Road to Mercy to my editor a year later. One day, he and I were on the phone talking about the novel and the ways in which it would be promoted and sold.

He said, “I know you just turned in the manuscript, but I’m wondering if you’ve got any ideas about a new novel.”

I did. For a few years I’d been considering writing about the Loray Mill and the violent textile strike that engulfed my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, in the summer of 1929. I told my editor that, in secret, I had begun working on a novel based on the life and tragic murder of Ella May Wiggins, a young single mother who joined the union only to be killed after becoming the face of the strike. He said the story sounded interesting. We got off the phone, and I did not think anything more about our conversation until later that afternoon, when my agent called. My editor had just offered us another two-book deal.

For the past five years I have been clinging to the vine that is now titled The Last Ballad, living in a 1929 world of cotton mill shacks, country clubs, segregated railroad cars, and labor organizers with communist sympathies. Everything I know about the craft of writing and the history, culture and politics of America, especially the American South, has gone into this novel. I literally feel as if I have been wrung dry, and I cannot imagine writing another book, even though I know I will sooner than later.

But even in this state of exhaustion, there is a story percolating in my brain where the voices of characters I have not yet created are speaking in whispers. I feel the hot breath of a novel on my neck even as I sit here. There is a vine somewhere out there in the jungle, if only I’ll reach out, open my hand, and grasp it.

It’s not going anywhere. I’m not either.  OH

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His forthcoming novel The Last Ballad is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

Farewell to Folk

Ten must-see acts for the final installment of The National Folk Festival

By Grant Britt

Itís just folks out there. But there’s nothing ordinary about this gathering of them. Called “the Noah’s ark of living traditions” by ArtsGreensboro’s President & CEO Tom Philion, The National Folk Festival, Greensboro’s best-ever street party, returns for its final, three-day run this year September 8–10 (nationalfolkfestival.com). And as the word spreads, people are discovering new meaning of “folk,” an all-inclusive term for a plethora of styles and genres, from a lot of artists and acts you may not have known existed until they came to visit. What makes it even better is that it’s free, and better than that, unlike most big festivals, the performers here are on stage multiple times. It’s a daunting task to pick favorites, even with a program and a plan. Just wandering the streets and listening till something snags your ear and pulls you in works pretty well, but if you’re more of the organized persuasion, or strapped for time, here are some tidbits to get started.

Alash, practitioners of Tuvan throat singing, is a heckuva warmup for festivalgoers. This vocal technique from Tuva, a remote region in Siberia, simultaneously produces a rumbling bass and an eerie falsetto, whistling overtone. Bluesman Paul Pena, composer of Steve Miller’s “Big Old Jet Airliner,” helped popularize the technique in this country with the 1999 documentary Genghis Blues, (youtube.com/watch?v=OO2QgNdqvXg), chronicling his fascination and mastery of the technique by listening to shortwave radio from Moscow, then finding a rare recording. The blind musician also taught himself Tuvan. You’ll be wanting to try this at home, to the great consternation of your family, neighbors and most assuredly your dog, who’ll undoubtedly take up refuge underneath the bed.

For a more soothing message, become part of the congregation gathered around The Fairfield Four. The Memphis a capella gospel group has a hundred-year history of glorious, jubilee-style harmony. “Whether it be gospel or jazz, I think it all started out with the old traditional hymns,” says tenor Bobbye Sherrell. “People in the plantation or the fields started a lot of the call and response type of music and songs we have today. The roots of it always came back to the beginning, which I thought was spiritual.”

If you’re a fan of space travel, check out the Sun Ra Arkestra. Free jazz is the label that marketers have tried to attach to it, but that doesn’t even get close to how far out this stuff is. Founder/leader Sun Ra believed he was from Saturn and was just visiting here. “That’s what he said, and that’s the way he acted, like he was from somewhere else,” bandleader/saxophonist Marshal Allen said in a 2008 interview. “He always had these bright ideas, and we respected his word, ’cause he would foresee things and tell you.” The music is atonal at times, but ethereal. Immerse yourself in it for few minutes and you can feel the Earth’s gravitational pull lessening while you drift upward toward the Sun. Space is the place, Ra said, and this music will get you there.

Sri Lankan Dance Academy of New York is otherworldly as well. An explosion of sound, color and motion, the dancers, ranging in ages from 17 to 27, deliver a Cirque du Soleil–style presentation that showcases Kandyan dance, from Sri Lanka. The large Sri Lankan population of Staten Island led to the formation of a dance school there in 1992. The steps and movements were only performed in Buddhist temples until 1944, when the first Kandyan school of dance was founded. The stunning costumes and vibrant, sternum-rattling drum propulsion draws you in and amps you up, tickling places you won’t usually mention in mixed company.

If you pass them in the street, you’ll want to pay them the ultimate compliment: “You guys sound so good I wish I were dead.” The Treme Brass Band doesn’t play too many funerals anymore, but you can hear them every Tuesday night at New Orleans’ live-music club, d.b.a., cranking up some stuff from the graveyard days but mostly brash, brassy fare fit for marching and strutting round the barroom floor. You can also find the band in the streets during Carnival season, and leading the second line for Satchmo SummerFest. Founder Benny Jones still wields the bass drum mallet and occasionally sits in on snare, while the band blasts out thumpers like “I Got  A Big Fat Woman” and “Food Stamp Blues.”

“Conjunto is original music from San Antonio that combines the accordion and the bajatesta, which is a 12-string guitar,” says Flaco Jimenéz. “It was introduced and created by my father, Santiago Jimenez Sr., in 1936.” European musicians brought that sound to Brownsville, about 15 miles from San Antonio. The TexManiacs threw in a change-up, modernizing the sound. “We added country, or country rock, or even rock ’n’ roll, things that include the accordion, which is a versatile instrument for this type of music, the lead instrument,” Texmaniacs’ founder Max Baca explains. His nephew Josh Baca’s accordion prowess pulls people’s feet right out from under them, propelling them in directions they never dreamed of, but Max’s 12-stringed thrumming on the bajo sexto hits you right in the heart.

Cajun Bruce Daigrepont keeps it simply traditional. No rock ’n’ roll, no blues, just strictly Cajun. But that’s enough to keep feet and sweat flyin’ when he punches out rollicking rhythms from his Cajun stronghold birthplace, Avovelles Parish, on his squeezebox. With just a drum kit, fiddle and bassist, and maybe a rubboard or triangle, Daigrepont keep the heat turned up as hot as a Louisiana summer.

Brice Chapman doesn’t play an instrument or sing or dance. What he does do is literally rope you in with a lasso. But Chapman doesn’t just stand around flat-footed and twirl pretty curlicues. He’s got help from Sooner, a red Border Colllie, who also leads Chapman’s horse Crossfire onto the showgrounds with his halter in his teeth. Crossfire is an acrobat helper as well, standing at attention while Chapman stands on his back doing some fancy rope twirling. Chapman has upgraded his act over the years, which now includes daughter Grace’s rope tricks as well as some serious behemoths, two massive Percheron draft horses who parade around, hauling a vintage 1920s wagon. 

Lurrie Bell spent his formative years in church, but when he crossed over, he rode hard on the devil’s coattails. Although battles with substance abuse sidetracked Bell for almost a decade, when he got back to serious business in the late ’90s, he was stronger than ever, playing with the staggering intensity of Son Seals. His 2004 release, Second Nature, an acoustic duet with his dad harpist Carey, was nominated for a WC Handy Award Acoustic Record of the Year. It’s an astounding record, Lurrie’s crisp, clean fingerpicking underscoring Carey’s crisp interpretations of blues classics like “Key To the Highway” and “Rock Me.” Bell’s immaculate acoustic fingerpicking is also the perfect counterpoint to his crusty world-weary vocal. Expect a mix of secular and blues that’ll have you on your knees repenting one minute and on your  feet dancing like the devil the next.

Listen, enjoy, and partake, but be careful and stay hydrated. It’s hot out there, and these folks don’t have any intention of cooling things down.  OH

Grant Britt will enlist the services of the Treme Brass Band, should he overexert himself dancing like the devil at this year’s National Folk Festival.

Sleepyhead

Everyone needs a good nap

 

By Susan Kelly

Do you need a nap?î is the preferred question these days, replacing the more candid, more insulting, “You’re a crab and a grump.” Scram.

I’m also occasionally asked, “Are you hungry?” which falls in the same crab/grump category, but I’m partial to the former because it implies that naps have become a socially acceptable and beneficial time-out rather than slacker behavior.

Still, there are naps, and there are naps. You either take an intentional nap, or an accidental one. Intentional naps are luxury lulls: planned, often announced, and occurring generally during weekends and vacations or after what Gen Y calls a Big Night. For an intentional nap, you deliberately darken a room, lie down on a bed or hammock or sofa or beach chair, and put on a sleep mask, or the book or hat or towel over your eyes, assume a curled-up or stretched-out or otherwise comfy posture and proceed to fall asleep. A baby pillow is a fine accoutrement of the intentional nap; so is a white noise machine or app.

These are the kinds of naps I’d take when I had small children, left them with a babysitter, drove the one mile to my mother’s house, retreated to the empty-nest bedrooms upstairs, and dove into dreamland. Maybe it’s genetic: My father came home every day at lunchtime to “take a lay-down.” Mid-afternoon, my Walnut Cove grandmother pulled down her bedroom window shades (with those marvelous ringed pulls on a string), adjusted the window units, put on a robe, of which she had about six, and retired for a nap. The kind of nap Harper Lee wrote about in the first chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird: “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” (“Bathe”: such a lovely, archaic Southern verb.)

Today, the term for an intentional nap is Power Nap, but I distrust the concept. “Power” and “nap” don’t belong in the same sentence, much less the same phrase. Napping is about giving yourself over to helplessness.

And then there’s the accidental nap. Which also takes place in a hammock or beach chair or on a sofa or porch rocker — and frequently, a desk. The accidental nap has no accoutrements other than embarrassing, physical ones upon waking: the drool pool, the mouth gape, the sweaty and sunburned, the smoking-gun stigma — diamonds from the rope hammock or indentations from a candlewick bedspread like a branding on your blushing, caught-out right cheeks. Then the sudden, momentary, awkward confusion of “Where am I?” and the furtive glance to see if anyone caught you, well, napping.

With practice, you can even nap on a treadmill. While walking on it, I mean. Bringing our 10-year-old daughter home from camp, my husband pulled the car to the side of the road and told her he needed to take a nap. She’d waited four weeks to get home and was not only crazed to see her friends, but horrified at his behavior. “Dad!” she said. “Dads do not do that! What am I supposed to do? You just don’t pull over on the side of the road and take a nap!”

Well, yes, you do. Because the characteristic of a nap, whether intentional or accidental, is that it is — at least at that moment — absolutely vital.

Be it an intentional knockout or a rainy-day doze, everyone needs a nap now and then. Even my middle son, who, when he was 2, believed himself beyond naps. So I fastened a metal hook and eye to his bedroom door so that he would understand that it was his naptime. As well as mine. At some point, naps transition from delayed fun to a goal. What happier objective can there be than this statement, uttered by a friend over his morning cereal every day of vacation? “I can’t wait for my nap today.”   OH

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

A Jarring Truth

Grandma knows best

 

By Clyde Edgerton

A dad is at home, talking on his smartphone with his 13-year-old son, Grayson, who is across the state at Grandma’s for a week. This is Grayson’s second day.

“How’s it going?” asks Dad.

“Fine. Grandma is, ah, putting zucchinis in jars. She’s been at it all day.”

“You mean cucumbers. She’s making pickles. She does that every year. She’s ‘canning.’”

“No, Dad. It’s jars. Not cans.”

“You use jars for canning,” says Dad.

“Then why don’t they call it ‘jarring’?”

“Don’t know. Hadn’t thought about that. Have y’all been in the garden?”

“She has.”

“How about you?”

“I’ve been inside. It’s hot out there.”

“OK. But — “

“I told her I could look up some YouTube videos on gardening. She talked about her garden all morning. Her tomatoes and stuff.”

“It’s very important to her.”

“I found some videos on how to grow tomatoes and stuff, but she — ”

“Son, she’s been growing tomatoes for over 50 years.”

“Yeah, but like she’s never seen any YouTube videos on growing them. She didn’t even know what YouTube was, Dad.”

“I don’t think — ”

“I found a bunch of videos but she didn’t —”

“You should have gone out and helped her pick those cucumbers, Son. You should be helping her. Have you done anything this morning except stare into that phone?”

“Dad, I can learn everything she knows about growing tomatoes in about 15 minutes — with like, say, three five-minute videos. I found one that shows — ”

“Put up your phone and go help your grandma.”

“Da-ad.”

“Do it. And call me back in one hour, or you lose your phone for a half-day when you get back home.”

“A half-day!? “

“That’s right.”

“OK.”

One hour, four minutes later:

“OK, Dad, I helped her. You won’t believe it. I’m so glad Mother buys pickles already made.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, you have to have all this equipment — these tongs and jars and funnels. And before you get going, the cucumbers have to sit in this water that has all this vinegar and stuff in it for like 12 hours before you even do anything, and then she has to boil all this water and do all this crazy stuff with steaming rags and a hot stove, and then she has to wait another 24 hours for the cucumbers to sit there in jars full of hot water that cools off and while it’s cooling the jars pop which means they sealed. So the jars like sit for one day and one night. All that for some pickles that she could buy at the grocery store.”

“Let me speak to her.”

“OK.”

Grandma speaks. “Hello, Son.”

“Mom? How’s it going? Making some pickles, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get much help from Grayson.”

“Hang on one second. I’m going to step out onto the back porch here . . . OK, he can’t hear me now. I’m going to be helping out Grayson after he goes to sleep tonight.”

How’s that?”

“When he wakes up in the morning that tiny TV of his will be in the middle of a jar of cucumbers: all boiled, pickled, sealed and out of sight.” OH

Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently,
Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.

Tick-ing Time Bomb

September’s new reads includes an environmental
dystopia by Greensboro’s Holly Goddard Jones

 

By Brian Lampkin

September is a great month for new books, and especially so this year in Greensboro. Novelist Holly Goddard Jones is a Greensboro resident (on the faculty at UNCG) and her third work of fiction, The Salt Line (Putnam’s, $26), is set to release on September 5. The novel reveals a nightmarish future in which the divide between the classes has become physical, and the authoritarian rule of the new powers is driven by an environmental fear.

The “salt line” demarcates the place where people are no longer safe from this very familiar and now deadly nemesis: the tick. Jones invents something called “Shreve’s disease,” which the miner tick transmits after the female “drills into your skin” with its “corkscrew shaped horn” and releases pinprick sized eggs that eventually erupt from your skin by the hundreds. But that’s not the bad part: Within 48 hours of infestation “blurry vision, nausea and loss of feeling in the limbs” will lead to total paralysis and death. Furthermore, this all plays out in the country between Greensboro and the Tennessee border—a land responsible for dozens of my own tick encounters. It’s all too familiar.

And it’s all convincing as political parable, as well as a frightening encounter with the natural world. Jones’s work has always been astute about class and gender/power dynamics (her previous novel The Next Time You See Me and story collection Girl Trouble are both set in rural Kentucky and bring nuance and character to the same terrain that the much-overpraised Hillbilly Elegy sensationalizes and in many ways this novel is similar to Don DeLillo’s latest book, Zero K. Both are set among dystopian environments that arise from openly classist policies but Holly Goddard Jones’s novel has more heart. You’ll care for these characters — even for the more despicable ones — and that care makes for a powerful reading experience, even as you realize you’re reading a possible future that looks mighty bleak.

Other September Releases:

Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisible Disability of Lyme Disease, by Yolanda Hadid (St. Martin’s Press, $26.99). In early 2011, Yolanda was struck by mysterious symptoms including brain fog, severe exhaustion, migraines and more. After much misdiagnosis, Lyme Disease was revealed to be the culprit. The dystopian future might be closer than we think!

Love and Other Consolation Prizes, by Jamie Ford (Ballantine, $28) “Only Jamie Ford could take a snippet of a true story about a child offered as a raffle prize at the 1909 Seattle World’s Fair and spin it into a dazzling tale of love and family and ultimately hope,” says writer Ann Hood. By the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

How to Fight, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press, $9.95). The latest in an elegant series of books by the Zen master. Learn how to relax the bonds of anger, attachment, and delusion through mindfulness and kindness toward ourselves and others.

The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home, by Denise Kiernan (Touchstone, $28). The story of Asheville’s Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression and generations of the famous Vanderbilt family, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The Last Castle is the unique American story of how the largest house in America has flourished, faltered and ultimately endured to this day.

Complete Stories, by Kurt Vonnegut (Seven Stories Press, $45). Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the 20th century’s most popular writers. Curated and introduced by longtime Vonnegut friend Dan Wakefield and Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz, the Complete Stories puts Vonnegut’s great wit, humor and humanity on full display.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

Dean of the Dobro

Alex McKinney is a
professional sideman — and more

 

Next time you see Jerry Douglas in concert, thank him for creating Alex McKinney.

Wait, that has misleading connotations; rather, thank him for teaming up with guitarist Russ Barenberg and bassist Edgar Meyer and releasing the landmark album Skip, Hop & Wobble in 1993. That is the album that rocked McKinney’s world and altered the course of his career forever.

By the time McKinney was handed that album by a friend, a couple of years after its release, he already had an enviable 10-year track record. As bassist for Atlantic recording artists Athenaeum, generally considered the finest alt-rock band Greensboro has ever produced, McKinney was also a professional-level guitarist and banjoist. But he immediately went out and bought a Dobro, aka resophonic guitar, and began woodshedding. He got to break it out on a tune Athenaeum recorded for a benefit CD, a cover of Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever, Amen,” but by and large McKinney remained a bassist/guitarist. After Athenaeum broke up in 2004, he did a stint with local legend Patrick Rock, while easing into his new acoustic role with banjo wizard Andy Eversole.

He soon became a sideman for N.C. twang legend, Caleb Caudle, before getting the call from revered singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett to join her and multi-instrumentalist Scott Manring.

“I had actually taken banjo lessons from Scott as a kid,” says  McKinney,” so to actually play alongside him onstage was a huge thrill.”

These days McKinney gets calls from any number of top-shelf artists needing a top-shelf Dobroist, both as a session man and sideman. As if playing four instruments — and playing them well —weren’t enough, he has also picked up the lap steel and pedal steel, playing them on songstress Carri Smithey’s new CD. He and singer-songwriter Alan Peterson have formed a duo, and he also plays occasional shows with guitar god Sam Frazier and percussionist Eddie Walker, in addition to sitting in with Dossett and Molly McGinn.

The gig that has McKinney most excited these days is with Martha Bassett’s new six-piece group. They just finished a CD, set for release in September, and launched the act at a sold-out show at The Crown.

Maybe playing with a half-dozen acts simultaneously isn’t enough to keep the boyishly handsome 42-year-old busy; he also works full-time as a web developer and designer at Bluezoom.

“When I picked up the Dobro I had all this experience already and knew the language of music,” McKinney notes, adding, “I love putting Dobro in situations and genres where you normally wouldn’t find it.”

Given that he’s the most in-demand sideman east of Nashville, that shouldn’t be hard to do.

— Ogi Overman

Out of this World

Last year, filmgoers were captivated with Hidden Figures, the story of math prodigies — all of them black women — whose calculations helped NASA launch astronauts into space in the 1960s. On September 18, at 11 a.m. Katherine Moore, the youngest daughter of Hidden Figures’s protagonist Katherine Johnson, will address the Greensboro History Museum Guild (130 Summit Avenue) and recount stories about her mother’s experiences at NASA. On September 28, as a part of Greensboro Public Library’s One City, One Book initiative, Margot Lee Shetterly will speak at Dana Auditorium (5800 West Friendly Avenue) at 7 p.m. The author of the book that inspired the film, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Shetterly wsill discuss her work with the Human Computer Project, which recovers the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930’s through the 1980’s. Info: greensborohistory.org;
beth.sheffield@greensboro-nc.gov.

 

 

Magnificent Magnolia

Readers of this magazine might remember a story from the February/March issue in 2012 (issuu.com/ohenrymag/docs/ohenry_february_2012/60), about a grande dame’s transformation: the restoration of the Magnolia House Motel. Once a successful lodging for black entertainers, business and civic leaders, the Gorrell Street beauty fell on hard times, only to be nurtured back to life by a one Sam Pass, who saw past the ravages of time and admired the lady’s character and soul. Well, five-and-a-half years, and a lot of community love later, The Historic Magnolia House blooms again. Last month her doors officially opened as an event space, and she was honored with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. So if you’re looking for just the right ambiance for a special occasion — a wedding, shower or graduation — or somewhere to rally your employees or hold a fundraiser, consider the Magnolia in moonlight . . . now that she’s once again taken her place in the sun. Info: (336) 617-3382 or thehistoricmagnoliahouse.com.

 

 

RH Factor

That would be Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Broadway duo that produced some of the best-loved musicals of all time. One of them, South Pacific, comes to Triad Stage (September 17–October 8) to start the theater company’s 2017–18 season. Set on a Polynesian island during World War II, the show centers on a romance between Midwestern nurse and a French plantation owner, with a subplot involving the relationship between a young Navy lieutenant and an island girl. Both stories are lessons in tolerance told with unabashedly romantic songs, such as “Some Enchanted Evening,” and “Younger than Springtime,” amid the comic hijinks of the American sailors in the chorus. So H’ai thee to Bali H’ai and be swept away. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.

 

 

Worth The Drive To Winston-Salem

Calling all mad gardeners! If you want to hear some of the pre-eminent authorities on American gardens and see some of the finest examples of the art of growing things, then sign up for the 21st Conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes (September 21–23) at Old Salem. Titled “Gardening in the Golden Age: Southern Gardens & Landscapes of the Early 20th Century,” the three-day event includes a roster of speakers who will lecture on topics such as garden photography, soil restoration, garden design and a trolley tour some of the finest local examples of gardens created by the likes of Buckenham & Miller and Thomas W. Sears, among others. Self-guided tours of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, plus the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), are included in the program. Tickets: (800) 441-5305 or oldsalem.org/landscapeconference.

 

Morris Towns

A mountain woman who dispensed folk remedies and political opinions.

A psychic who worked the case of a 19-year-old’s disappearance.

A Mennonite man who sought a court-ordered injunction after the church shunned him, leading to his wife’s refusal to sleep with him.

These are just a few characters in American Berserk: A Cub Reporter, a Small-Town Daily, the Schizo ’70s (Sunbury Press). It’s recently been published by Bill Morris, author of three novels and a former columnist and reporter for Greensboro’s News & Record, and author of three novels.

Morris, who now lives and works in New York City, will read from Berserk at Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books (304 South Elm Street) on Saturday, September 30 at 7 p.m. with music from The Difficulties. The autobiography covers Morris’s days as fledgling writer for the daily newspaper Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, but the story starts and ends in Greensboro, where he worked at the Record Bar in Friendly Center in 1976 — and where he returned to work for newspapers at the News & Record a few years later. — M.J.

 

 

OGI SEZ

Most of the September Songs the past two years have been sung at the National Folk Festival, and this year is no exception. Believe me, I am not complaining, but my task is to remind you that there are 27 more days this month and that music will fill the air for most of them. Here are the top picks for kicks.

• September 1, Blind Tiger: The month gets off to a running start with Michael Franti and Spearhead. Mixing social activism with brilliantly crafted world music, he has become the voice for the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, while still making you want to dance. No mean feat. Just feet.

• September 9, White Oak Amphitheatre: Speaking of dancing, break out your best two-toned dogs for Morris Day and The Time. This might be the outdoor party of the summer. No word on whether Jay and Silent Bob will be in attendance.

• September 10, Cone Denim Entertainment Center: After playing the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 2010, one scribe called Lettuce “the funkiest band on the planet.” And that came after a gig with the best of the best in NOLA, the funk capital of the world.

• September 22, Carolina Theatre: One of the last members who can rightly claim a direct lineage to the Temptations, Bo Henderson is keeping their magical legacy alive. He sang with the Temps from 1995 to 2001 and his Temptations Revue is the closest you’ll ever get to the real thing.

• September 26, Blind Tiger: I hate to double-dip the BT, but this is too huge to omit. The Chris Robinson Brotherhood might be the finest rock ensemble not playing arenas today. Oh, he’s played in plenty — as cofounder of the Black Crowes. I rest my case.

Old No. 7

Two aging road warriors strike out in search of the American past

 

By Jim Dodson

As summer’s end approached, I hit the road for research on a new book, though I wasn’t sure how far I might get — or where I might end up.

The start of any book project brings with it a humbling sense of vertigo, a feeling that the road ahead will be challenging and possibly full of wrong turns and maddening dead ends. But this particular project held special meaning because it’s a book I’ve been thinking about, in one form or another, for almost 40 years.

It’s a book about a road.

But not just any road — the Great Wagon Road.

You may or may not have heard of it. But if you happen to be a Southerner with deep roots in the region, you may well be here because of it.

The Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, as it was called early on, became the most traveled road in Colonial America. It ran from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, and was the road that opened the American South to exploration and settlement and pushed back the western frontier.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the road was the way to a new life for tens of thousands of Scots-Irish, German and English settlers — Amish, Moravians, Quakers and Presbyterians — who landed on our shores seeking a fresh start in a new world. Daniel Boone hunted along the road, and Thomas Jefferson’s daddy named and surveyed it. A young captain named George Washington served as an Indian scout along the GWR and no less than three major wars, the French and Indian, American Revolution and Civil War — four if you care to count the Whiskey Rebellion — were fought along it’s meandering way. Fittingly, the ingenious Conestoga wagon that carried later generations of settlers across the Great Plains to settle the Far West was created by German artisans by the Conestoga River near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Both wings of my family came down the GWR in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries respectively. My pretty blond mama’s sprawling German clan (the Kessells), hopped off around Hagerstown, Maryland and settled along the south branch of the Potomac River on the West Virginia side in the early 1800s. Half a century earlier, my daddy’s Scottish and English forebears (the Tates and the Dodsons ) filtered down the road over the Dan River through Walnut Cove before settling in the Hawfields near Mebane, where they formed churches and grist mills and made furniture. A few of them even went on down to Wilmington and the Cape Fear region.

I first heard about the Great Wagon Road four decades ago when a pretty girl named Rebecca Robinson and I stayed out all night on a date and wound up attending the sunrise service at God’s Acre in Old Salem. The Moravians originated the service in 1732 in Saxony. While standing among the ancient gravestones of that famous Moravian — men separated from women, a democracy of death, as has been described — we struck up a conversation with an older gent who turned out to be a professor of history at nearby Salem College. When I happened to mention my family name, he smiled and commented that my forbears, like his, probably “came down the Great Wagon Road about the same time” in the late 1700s.

He explained that the GWR subsumed the remains of the so-called Great Indian Warrior Trading Path used by the Iroquois tribes such as the Cherokee, and other nations, including the Catawba and Tuscarora Indians until the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744 opened the western frontier to European settlement, pushing the native peoples farther into the mountains.

Cities such as Lancaster and York in Pennsylvania; Winchester, Roanoke and Lexington in Virginia; (Winston-)Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte in North Carolina, and Camden in South Carolina, began either as trading post river fords or market towns that owe their origins directly to the Great Wagon Road.

Thirty-five years after that sunrise service, during the year I served as the Writer in Residence at Hollins University (which happened to lie along the GWR in a vale just north called “Big Lick,” now Roanoke), my fascination with the road was powerfully rekindled. I began moseying along Virginia’s winding and beautiful U.S. Route 11 and found all sorts of surviving references to the Great Wagon Road in various forms — place names of inns, family farms, townships, churches, battlefields and no shortage historical roadside standards.

On my trips home to Maine up Interstate 81, I realized that I was, in fact, traveling the same path my forebears had followed once upon a time in America, on the Great Wagon Road.

By the end of my time at Hollins, I’d resolved to someday drive the Great Wagon Road’s 700 miles in order to investigate how a young nation was born and how my native South grew up along what may be the most historic road in the land.

m

Someday finally arrived when I loaded up my own Great Wagon and set off for Philadelphia just after dawn one morning in late July.

My Great Wagon happens to be a vintage 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate wagon, an iconic American road car that automotive historians consider the last true production American station wagon built before Detroit switched to making SUVs.

Almost on a lark — or was it the sweet hand of Providence? — I bought it a decade ago from a nice lady in Pinehurst whose widowed papa had recently given up driving and had to “let go of his baby.”

Well-maintained Roadmasters, I soon learned, can fetch a tidy sum and are greatly in demand among collectors of vintage automobiles.

This one turned out to be a gem.

Its odometer had only 59,000 miles on it. The lovely fellow who’d owned it actually kept velvet on the dash. The seats were comfy and roomy, like leather La-Z-Boy recliners. It’s famous Dynaride suspension system made the vehicle glide over the road like a dream, and a 350-horsepower V-8 engine was the same one Chevy put in its Corvettes. The air conditioning system could have cooled a deli meat locker and the killer cassette audio system had the acoustics of a concert hall.

True, there were a few tiny dents and peeling paint in its fake wood grain side panels — but hey, there were in mine, too. We were perfect for each other.

I bought the car an hour after driving it.

Our four kids were amused and maybe a little embarrassed when they laid eyes on my newly acquired land yacht that Christmas.

“It’s so, well . . . big,” said one son with a
wary chuckle.

You should give it a nickname,” suggested another, the family comedian. “How about
The Beast?”

I didn’t care for The Beast. The car was nothing if not an iconic work of American automotive art, an aged beauty whose name said it all — Master of the Road.

One ride in it, however, and they all changed their tunes. Three of the four asked to take the car to college. Not on your life, I said, though I did consent to let them drive it whenever they were in residence.

My work colleagues were also amused.

The publisher of this magazine suggested I call her the “Dirty Pearl,” as if my beloved land yacht were an old pirate ship.

That nickname was cute but never seemed quite right to me.

While researching the Roadmaster’s distinguished automotive history — it’s the car that basically helped Buick survive the Great Depression and became the symbol of 1950s suburban America — I discovered a website that listed the Roadmaster Estate wagon among “Top Ten Best Vehicles for the End of the World,” capable of handling “nuclear winter, economic collapse or a zombie takeover.”

My 1996 Roadmaster was No. 7 on the list. The photograph was even identical to my Great Wagon — “The Modern American Power Wagon Exemplar,” noted the editor of Popular Mechanics, in effect the Conestoga Wagon of Vacationing America.

I finally had the perfect nickname.

My Great Wagon, after all, had survived the lives of two large and rambunctious American families, three teen drivers and decades of moving everything from entire households to countless garden shrubs, not to mention made dozens of beach trips and backcountry camping expeditions with a large canoe lashed on her roof. My Great Wagon was nothing if not a proven survivor.

So this summer, after 21 years of life and 159,000 miles, following a tune-up from Clark the mechanic who has faithfully looked after the old gal for years, we set off together up the Great Wagon Road to begin the first leg of our long journey from Market Square in Colonial Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia.

Old No. 7 handled Philly’s congested tourist traffic like a summer breeze off the Delaware and cruised west on the Lincoln Highway as if she were right off of the showroom floor.

After Philadelphia, where I walked in the footsteps of our founders and boned up on my heroes Jefferson and Franklin, the Old No. 7 led me to an expert on Colonial furniture making and allowed me to dine with a historian of Amish life. Among other things, I dropped by America’s oldest farmer’s market (1745), explored four famous battlefields, hiked in a state park, visited the nation’s first commercial pretzel maker, learned about the birth of the Conestoga wagon and watched the sun rise on Cemetery Hill where Lincoln gave his deeply moving Gettsyburg Address on a November afternoon in 1863. My notebook runneth over.

After five days out, we came home to rest a bit before resuming the next leg of the long road from Winchester to Old Salem later this autumn. The Road’s original travelers sometimes took four or five months to reach their new homes in the Southern Wilderness. Old No. 7 and I hoped to finish our travels in about the same amount of time.

According to her odometer, we covered 179 miles of the Great Wagon Road, which by my reckoning means there are many more miles of great discoveries to come. OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.