Book: Long Way Home by Bill Barich

On the Trail of Steinbeck's America. The author spends six weeks driving across country from east to west always inspired by Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. He did not have a dog and he did not have a camper but he traveled nearly 6000 miles pretty much across the middle of the country...close to US 50, but veering southwest in Utah to southern California and then up to San Francisco. Of course, I LOVE travel tales and have done my share of cross-country driving, always having the sorts of encounters Mr. Barich had on HIS trip. He takes time to engage in conversations along the way. He detours whimsically and he refers to Steinbeck often.

"The next passage in my journey is a love affair," John Steinbeck swooned over Montana, but it was "Jefferson City, Missouri that stole my heart," says Bill Barich. The book moves right along, with anecdote following anecdote, historical perspectives, musings on how Americans live and what they find important in their lives.

He finds his route peopled mostly with conservatives. He is traveling just before Obama was elected so he asks folks about their politics and concludes that there was a "bizarre reality irrespective of the facts. On this particular subject [guns] as with abortion, the possibility of an intelligent discussion had gone by the boards."

After an overload of advertising aimed at attracting tourists with all possible inducements and hyperbole, in Ouray, Colorado, he finally "saw the best sign of the trip, a small brass plaque on a nondescript brick buidling: ON THIS SITE IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED."

If you like the open road, you will like this book with its observations on the America he experienced in 2008.

In Monterey, he "asked around Cannery Row to discover what, if anything, of John Steinbeck's the tourists had read. Of Mice and Men topped the list....The late novels, such as The Winter of Our Discontent and Sweet Thursday, drew a blank. Oddly, Travels with Charley earned just a single mention despite being a bestseller. Readers had forgotten about it, apparently, but they praised it when prompted." The author also notes that they "loved Charley and the idea of being on the road, but they were blind to the author's acid observations, barely concealed malaise, and outright expressions of disgust." And I admit, I too have only a romanticized remembrance of Travels with Charley.

He agrees with Steinbeck's pessimism and "the trashiness of the landscape, the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions, and the uniform blandness of our mass culture are here to stay barring a catacylsm." He decries our "gross obesity and polluted watersheds...our unsurpassed talent for living on credit cards.. and our indulgence of the divisive talk-show pundits or the way we've devalued--even become suspicious of--the pursuit of excellence."

But the author is also heartened by many of the individuals he meets, by the national protected lands, by our technology, and at the end of the book by the vote for change...the election of Obama. And he also notes that the "fifty states each with its own mores and set of priorities, don't cohere except on paper."

I find that individuals are always more complex, with richer lives, in real-time than they are when generalized or as statistics. This author, as all good travel writers, seemed honestly interested in those he met with their diverse lives and histories. This book is a very readable combination of specificities and the generalities of a trip across America.

Book: Walking Isreal by Martin Fletcher

A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation, the nation being Israel. Martin Fletcher is a newsman currently living in New York and Israel and working for NBC news. He decides to walk the Mediterranean coast of Israel from north to south and this is the story.

I felt immersed in the "soul of [this] nation" and certainly learned about the Arabs and Jews and Israelis and Palestinians as Martin trudges through the beach sand and settlements and cities along the way, occasionally cooling off in the sea. He talks with people as he walks and eats in restaurants and visits friends and he asks hard questions at times. I learned that there are 7.4 million Israelis and 20% are Arab, that Israel's currency is the shekel (an old Biblical word from my youth), and that there is the concern that "reducing the Arab birthrate is essential to maintaining Israel's Jewish majority."

He visits kibbutzim and I learned how 2/3 of them are now privatized because the ideology of the kibbutz movement didn't translate into successful, economically independent communities. "Kibbutzniks always complained that there were two types of members--the suckers who did all the work and the parasites who did as little as possible."

I learned how the victims of the Holocaust were scorned and derided for years. Yegudit Winkler is a retired journalist who tells about coming to Israel , "I was one of four children from the Holocaust, out of 24 kids. They called us soap...Even in the summer my mother's friends wore long sleeves to hid their tattoos." That changed with the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 and the survivors "found their voice, and Israel listened in horror."

Fletcher talks about the compulsory military service. He describes how various nationalities came to Israel during different decades: Russians in the early 1900s, Poles in the 1920s, Germans in the 1930s, Europeans from many countries in the 1940s and 1950s, and Ethiopians and those from the former Soviet republics in the 1980s and 1990s. Over a million Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel in the 1990s.

I laughed occasionally as when Fletcher went into a restaurant: "The waiter, whose arm was in a sling, informed me that the cook was off, and that I should look only at items that could be cooked with one hand." Or, "She is an American Jew whose despairing parents sent her to Israel at age 16 to save her from the Roman Catholic she was dating. Unhappily for them she then ran off with an Arab poet. "

He is self-deprecating, aware of his age (especially as he briefly tries to relive his youth in the bawdy nightclubs of Tel Aviv), always seeking answers and trying to understand both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He notes that the press seldom covers the amicable relations between these two peoples, only the animosity and bombs and raids and terror, and that he also has been guilty of that type of reporting.

An Israeli Arab tells him, "I always thought Israli Arabs could serve as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians." Yet Martin says that "in all my research for this book, this has been the most common warning--Israeli Arabs have had it up to here. The new generation will instigate the next intifada, which will be inside Israel." There is some feeling that Israelis are becoming too materialistic and soft, and the Palestinians just have to "survive and avoid a peace agreement Israel collapses from within."

He does make it to Gaza and gets stopped from approaching too closely by two soldiers with M16s who insist he delete the photos he took. He explains that that the warning signs should be in English and Arabic, not just Hebrew, and the soldiers agree.

He muses, "Imagine being a refugee only a few miles from your stolen home, watching strangers tilling your fields and harvesting the fruit from the trees your father planted....If an Arab creeps up at night and picks fruit from his old trees, is that stealing? Who here is the thief?"

The book tells of daily life in Israel, and Fletcher finds Arabs and Jews often live comfortably as neighbors, co-workers and citizens of Israel. Still, sadly, it often seemed that Arabs living in Israel are second-class citizens, subtly so, but still "not our kind."

It is a land of sunshine and memories; it is modern and ancient, colorful, lively, a country that in "2008, had more companies listed on NASDAQ than companies from Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined."

At journey's end, he is body-surfing in the sea in a celebratory mood, and a wave crashes him into a small rock and he calls his Hagar his "long-suffering" wife to come pick him as he likely had a broken nose.

Hagar--another strong association with the Bible from my childhood.

Bird: Clay-colored Sparrow

This July, I have been walking in fields near Glacier High School early in the morning before the sun gets too high. I park in the school parking lot and see and hear several killdeer, the young ones a bit clumsy as they scurry across the parking lots, the adults doing their noisy best to have me move on.

The adjacent fields are full of Salsify and Musk Thistle which is a tall and formidably prickly plant with a beautiful purple flower. This is open country with primarily weedy fields. The more I looked and listened, the more sparrows I saw and heard and soon kept hearing an insect-like buzz, repeated 2 to 3 times, in addition to the more melodious Savannahs and Vespers. With some bird guide research, I narrowed things down to a couple of possibilities and then listened to the CD. I am nearly clueless with bird calls, but several years ago Steve and Andree had given me this CD, which is always in the car, and I am beginning to refer to it more and more. The buzz was unmistakably the Clay-colored Sparrow. Now I just had to SEE it. I do not list birds I do not see. Nothing virtuous here; just my personal decision.

So the next day, I listened and soon heard the buzz, buzz, buzz. I got off the sidewalk and moved slowly through high weeds, which wasn't so bad except the ground underneath was uneven and I had to be careful not to fall. I did wonder about ticks, although I don't think this is the right habitat for them. I walked up a bank, over some minimal fencing wire and just stood still, repeating my mantra of "Let the birds come to you." After five minutes or so of standing quietly, I began hearing the buzzing again and soon spotted the bird. I knew the field marks and it WAS a Clay-colored, a life bird for me! There were a couple of them and they would dive under cover for a few minutes and then pop out and sing again. No one was near, even though I was out in the open and close to the whole northern strip mall / box store area. The sun was out, the sky was very blue and a whole world of sparrows was singing and nesting and fledging and surviving in this habitat which certainly will be expropriated within a decade for something we humans want. But for now, it is idyllic.

Since then I have heard and seen these rather unobtrusive sparrows a couple of times, in different spots in the fields. They don't show themselves like the Savannah or Vesper sparrows; however, and I needed to do a little work to find them. I think of this as another puzzle piece now in place in my perception of the natural world, the Clay-colored Sparrow piece.

What I have found much more challenging recently is the identification of grasses, with their ligules, lemmas, glumes, auricles, panicles, spikelets, bracts and awns. Still, I am now finally noticing and appreciating grasses and how graceful they are.

I need to remember to talk to Betony about botany as we gather for her wedding next month. A serious botanist needs a dissecting microscope I discovered, but I am hoping there is a simple way for at least figuring out the common grasses in my field.

Book: Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

I just re-read this book. I have never done that intentionally before. I love how Jim Harrison writes. This is a beautiful novel, and while reading it, I wondered how others would react and if they would find it as compelling. To some, it might seem deceptively simple in a way. I think his writing is unique. His scenes and characters and dialogue make me peaceful.

The story takes place almost entirely in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While I only drive through this part of the state occasionally, all the place names are familiar, and I would guess that many of the vignettes are taken from Harrison's personal experiences when he lived in the UP. So for us who have lived or are living in Michigan, there is the sense of home ground, of a known geography.

Donald is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and the book is partly that story but also the stories of his wife, his daughter and son and his brother-in-law. The days go by, with lovely descriptions of the natural world, of Lake Superior, of life in the small towns and in Marquette, of the history of the UP, and of bears and cabins and rivers and of the Anishinabe. It all just flows in a way that delighted me, maybe even more through this second reading. While most of his characters are likable enough, familiar in their foibles, mentally and emotionally organized or not, they are mostly ordinary people, but also extraordinary as they become vivid and real in Harrison's words, if that makes any sense. It does for me. It is the gift a good author has passes on to readers, a universality quotient that draws us in as we recognize ourselves and feel somehow comforted.

I wanted the book to go on and on, not to find out what happens to the characters, but because the pages were full of weather, water, the woods, spoken insights by one or another of the characters, or their mental observations on the state of things general or specific and, of course, what happens to Donald.

Here are a few sentences, chosen at random. The first is when K unexpectedly meets Sandra and her 18-month-old baby in a grocery store. (K's friend had killed himself after his young girlfriend becomes pregnant and he is charged with statutory rape.)

"The baby reached for me and I held her between the grocery aisles. The baby had my friend's green eyes and I was falling apart inside. The girl said that her family had moved to Newberry after the funeral mass. She said her family didn't believe in abortion and they couldn't give up the baby for adoption because it might have gone to an unchristian family. She said she was sorry every single day...I looked at her and down at the baby in my arms, who was fondling my pretentious Tibetan prayer necklace. 'I knew you was so close as friends.' Her bad grammar made it all more unbearable. I impulsively said that if she ever wanted to get away from her family I'd support her and the baby. She never called."

"If you were making five bucks a day at an American-owned maquiladora plant in Sonoran Nogales and stood on a hill outside your cardboard hut you could see a PizzaHut in American Nogales where you could make more than five bucks an hour. It was a no-bainer why people crossed the border."

One more...again chosen at random. I didn't have to look to find sentences that I liked because I liked them all:

"Ravens don't stand on the ground unless they're sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven't figured out cars but ravens have....A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground...My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree."

Birds: Lostwood, Medicine Lake and Bowdoin (NWRs)

May 27, 2011 ~ North Dakota

I headed west to Stanley and then north to Lostwood NWR. This country is so beautiful, to me anyway. And it was especially so on this bright spring morning. Lostwood is out in the open on the high plains, away from everything; there is a modest visitor center with a bunch of brochures and a whiteboard where folks could list what birds they had seen. No one came out to greet me or the other guy who drove in just ahead of me. Around the office there were some trees, a few buildings and vehicles but mostly it was rolling prairie with no trees and many potholes and small lakes. The wind was blowing hard, it was a bit chilly, and I was still somewhat tentative what with the GI upset the night before and not sleeping much.

First I tried to see any warblers lurking in the brush near the office but only saw a beautiful Northern harrier flying about, so I decided to drive the auto tour. I wondered why the guy who drove in before me was walking down the road carrying his camera with a long lens, but soon realized the gate to the auto tour was closed. A young kid came by and apologetically said something about birds nesting and the rangers not wanting people to get stuck on the water-logged roads. Darn…I was not about to walk for miles in the wind.

So I left and headed vaguely north and west to the extreme NW corner of ND, kind of heading for Westby, Montana. I did eventually make it there but started going on gravel roads since so many fields were flooded and there were hundreds of birds taking advantage of this. I saw eared grebes (at one point there were three pair swimming just off the roadside!), willets, all kinds of other ducks and swallows, and I stalked (with the car) a Franklin’s gull, which was sitting in the muddy road. I crept closer and closer and got wonderful views. There were also marbled godwits which are magnificent large wading birds with long bicolored bills. I was on marginal country roads and came out north of the town of Bowbells, ND, and saw that the road I was on was blocked from that end. I made it around the barricade and got on a paved road.

Westby is JUST across the state line and is a Montana town…a small, old town, looking rather shabby and certainly without tourist amenities. While trying to find the City Park, I noticed a street named “State Line” so maybe half the town is really in ND. The park seems to belong to another era. There were tall trees, un-mown grasses, houses on the periphery here and there…a glade under the trees, some sports fields and picnic tables, but all seemed like they had been there for 100 years…to me, it was right out of a Willa Cather or Wallace Stegner novel. There were a lot of birds chirping and I saw a pair of thrushes, but birding here would require patience and time. Also, of course being me, I felt strange and out of place in this intimate little corner of the world, where undoubtedly everyone knows everyone else and who was this strange woman out there?

So I drove on to Plentywood, hoping there would be a motel there because it would have been a long drive to find one elsewhere. There was: The Sherwood Inn, where I stayed in a lower level dreary room. I ate an early supper at Cousin’s, a restaurant across the street and went to bed early, kicking myself for not asking for a second-floor room in the front which looked out into tall pine trees. At it was, my view was a street level parking lot. I read and went to sleep early.

May 28 ~ Montana

And got up early. I had a cup of motel coffee and there were at least nine guys hanging around in the small lobby. I think some were oil men, some fishermen and some ranchers. One had a shirt saying “Been there…Wrecked that.” It was dark and gloomy outside and raining.

Medicine Lake NWR is 20 miles south and I headed there. As I drove off the main road onto the refuge road, I started to see birds and immediately saw a life bird: a chestnut-collared longspur. YES! There were also many Western kingbirds. There is a large lake (Medicine Lake) to the south and a lot of protected prairie making up this refuge. I wondered how it would be to live here through the seasons.

I started on the auto route and watched a pair of harriers fly around and soon discovered that (guess what?) the auto route was closed. Jeez. I think it was because of flooding and horrid road conditions. So I took a dirt road north and a sign said I was leaving the refuge. At first I thought it was a field, but looked at the map and realized it was a county road. Eventually, I ended up at the other end of the refuge and drove around there for hours, since part of the auto route was open at that end. I did not see another soul in the refuge.

At one point there was water over the road, but I got out and saw that it was a short cement section over a low spot and only a couple inches deep so on I went. I had to pass cows that were unfenced and got onto a 2-track leading to the “Pelican Overlook.” I saw more willets and godwits; I watched an upland sandpiper for a long time; I saw the pelicans although it was too cold and windy to stand out for long; I kept hearing grass birds…probably the Sprague’s pipit and Baird’s sparrow I was hoping to see and didn’t.
There were lots of yellow-headed blackbirds near the watery places and killdeer constantly doing their distress thing right in front of the car so as to lead me away from their nest and/or babies. And then all of a sudden my car wouldn’t start. I was slightly freaked as I really was MILES from a person or a building, it was cold and I was sure the cell phone (if it was even charged) would not work…Oh, f_____. Could I sleep out here? in my car with the cows around? Would they close the gates at dusk? Would I try to walk the 5 to 10 miles to get to a road through the cows?

Of course, the car started after a couple of minutes. I flooded it or something. I had been starting and stopping and not being very careful about putting the car in Park and constantly trying to start it in Drive, etc.

I finally left but thought I could go south and west on the country gravel roads instead of retracing my route, and I did, but a few places were iffy. Still, I was closer to farm houses and ranches, even if they were distant and on the horizons. At least I could SEE them.

I got to Hwy 2 and headed west, through Culbertson and the tiny town of Brockton and immediately got stopped by the Tribal Police for speeding through Brockton. I got a lecture about having to stop at ALL the small towns on the Hi Line (which is what Hwy 2 is called across northern Montana but which is called Grandma Bea Boulevard for the 1/4 or 1/8 mile that is Brockton. It says on my ticket “Grandma Bea Boulevard"). There are reservations all along here. I didn’t have cash, so the officer said to just make a U-turn on the road and go back to the Quick Stop in Brockton and he would meet me there and I could get cash with my debit card, BBB. Which I did and left the Quick Stop and a nice middle-aged Native woman asked if I “could spare 90 cents” which I could. We chatted a minute and I went on to Bowdoin NWF, another 100 miles or so down the road.

I got to Bowdoin well into the afternoon and took a couple of hours driving through this wonderful NWR. Again, being a Saturday, the visitor center was closed but the auto route was OPEN. It was perfect! I watched so many lovely birds like lots of Wilson’s phalaropes (one of the very few bird species where the female is more brightly colored than the male. I saw black-necked stilts on nests and calling and flying about and many American avocets, truly striking birds. I came upon a small group of white-faced ibises (remember Maria…they were in the pond close to the visitor center the time we went? This time, they were in a way different place.)

The weather was just stunning, with the immense Montana sky constantly changing with sun and occasional clouds. I saw only two other vehicles on the roughly circular 17-mile auto route.

The birds were not very skittish. There were more marbled godwits and lark buntings and bobolinks, along with many ducks. I saw a loggerhead shrike and magpies. I saw a flycatcher I couldn’t ID. This is, so far, my favorite NWR and it belongs to me (and to all of you!)

May 29 ~ Montana

A bright beautiful Sunday morning with even less traffic than during the week. I had about 5 hours before Kalispell and it was easy. At one point I pulled off on a road leading to some farms to photograph another old building. The road was muddy but I didn’t think anything of it until I was ready to get back in the car and realized my tennis shoes were loaded with gumbo mud…like a heavy paste about an inch thick. So, I tried to scrape some off on the edge of the door but finally just drove barefoot. On and on until I had one more birding thrill: I spotted a hawk on a road sign while flying by in my car. I turned around and got great looks at another life bird: a Swainson’s hawk.

The Rockies were visible for miles. I thought of adorable 4-year-old Ginny asking as she saw the Rockies for the first time from this approach: "Where's the door?" I went through the Blackfeet reservation town of Browning and then through Glacier NP and on to my house near Kalispell.

I know road trips help sustain me, both in the reality and the remembrance...Perfect spring weather and all the birds made this an especially grand traverse.

Book: City of Tranquil LIght by Bo Caldwell

This book "is based on the lives of my maternal grandparents, Peter and Anna Schmidt Kiehn, who were Mennonite and later Nazarene missionaries in China and Taiwan from 1906 to 1961." So notes the author at the end of this heartwarming story.

It is a wonderful tale, all the more so for being based on real people. Normally, I quickly decide I don't want to read novels based on "religion," but I didn't realize what the content was when I brought it home from the library. I scanned the back cover and found Gail Godwin saying that this narrative "is full of light, even at its darkest moments." Or Jay Parini who says, "Bo Caldwell has...conjured a miraculous story, one full of passion, historical interest, and spiritual questing."

The main characters are Will and Katherine Kiehn and they arrive in China in 1906. They are not married or even acquaintances but have traveled together with a group who are to become missionaries in China. But soon they fall in love and marry. The book alternates between their voices and is a compelling, warm memoir with details of what happens in China through their years in Kuang P'ing Ch'eng, the city of tranquil light. They endure many, many hardships but are totally committed to their mission. Bandits, drought, soldiers and wars, illness and death of loved ones...overwhelmed at times with all that needs attention, they persevere always with their faith ultimately intact, even if it wavers at times.

They grow to love China; it is their home and they are true servants. For the Chinese who watch these foreigners and who are initially reluctant and suspicious, the actions of Will and Katherine, as they unconditionally ease the miseries of body and spirit of those in need, working through the years selflessly and without flagging and always with the love of God in their hearts, break down cultural barriers, and they and their message are accepted. Yet, they are always also strangers, foreign-born, and when the Communists come to power, they know there may soon come a time when they must leave, to protect, not themselves, but their friends, parishioners and neighbors.

They do eventually return to the US, reluctantly, partly because of the political situation and partly because of Katherine's declining health. As they wait to board the ship in 1933 that will take them to Seattle, Will looks at Katherine:

"I looked at her. She was my own sweet wife....with Mo Yun's silver clasp holding her [bun] in place....In her hand she held our extravagant purchase for the journey: A Sunkist navel orange from California, which we planned to share when we boarded the ship. Then I took in the rest of her: the shapeless gray hat I did not recognize, the nondescript tweed coat I remembered buying on furlough twenty years ago, the flat black hand-me-down shoes I knew were too big. I looked down at myself: brown shoes with holes in the soles, patched woolen trousers sent from home a dozen years ago, a worn gray overcoat that had been given to by an American doctor who had been passing through years earlier. We had tried to dress up for our journey , butI saw how shabby we looked, and how bereft, and what a contrast our appearances were to the rich lives we had led in Kuang P'ing Ch'eng....People often spoke of the sacrifice Katherine and I had made in going to China. This had always sounded odd to me, for I had never thought of it a sacrifice...."

The idea of a missionary will now always be enriched in my mind, not glamorized or idealized, but better understood.

Book: Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie Brown were siblings who grew up in Arkansas in the mid 20th century. They became famous as country singers.

"The Browns' voices were shiny and elegant, and utterly controlled; the spirit of their voices had the Appalachian hillbilly music as its rootstock, but without the nasal whine and twang. People had never heard anything like it and could not get enough of it. Every song the Browns released in 1955 and 1956 hit the top ten. Never in the history of music has any group had as many Top Ten hits over a two-year period, nor as many number ones."

Rick Bass has written this novel about Browns and their family, their mother Birdie, their father Floyd. It is a fictionalized account of their lives, often returning to Maxine, now a lonely and elderly woman who remembers it all and who still hopes she will grace a stage again.

"That the fame has been gone fifty years now does not register in her. In her mind it has only been gone one day." Finally, she settles for putting up a notice at her local Piggly Wiggly asking if someone would like to make a movie of her life. And someone responds.

Elvis is a minor character and Chet Atkins becomes their manager. The Beatles become famous; musical tastes change and the Browns, for all their talent and success, are forgotten and dismissed. Jim Ed and Bonnie let it all go without much regret, but Maxine is tenacious in her hopes of a reprise of their fame. She has a hard life with an unhappy marriage and too much alcohol, and she never really lets go. Some can and some cannot.

Rick Bass almost always has written of the West or of the natural world, so this book was a surprise. He has lovely memorable scenes all through the story, as when Bonnie's husband-to-be, Brownie, comes to meet the family one snowy evening, or when Elvis and Bonnie take a canoe trip down the river, or when Maxine makes a carefully negotiated trip to the grocery store and it is almost more than she can manage in her frail state.

It is a also the story of a family struggling through adversity and celebrating when things ease in the small towns and hills and woods of Arkansas...the household tasks and homemade cooking, the hard and dangerous work of running a lumber mill, the bonds of family through the years, moonshine and Floyd's drinking, the long road trips when they are out performing and always the comfort of returning home.

So, for a glimpse into the country music scene just before the huge impact of rock-and-roll and technology, this is a sweet, often poignant remembrance.

www.themaxinebrown. com