Category Archives: Travel

Where the chickens cross the road

12 Saturday Sep 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

Staying close to the Wildlife Loop at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota, we frequently went to see particular animals—the elk that roam the southeastern part of the park, the prairie dogs research area in the south, the wild turkeys and horses in the Bluebell area, the pronghorn, deer and bison wherever they happened to roam, the mountain goats and bighorn sheep in the steep mountains, and, of course, the burros in the southeast. We didn’t always want to travel the whole loop, so we found the shortcuts that took us in and out of the park. Our most frequent visit was to the southeast section, and Lame Johnny Road provided the seven mile shortcut.

Lame Johnny was a former sheriff who wound up hanging from a nearby tree. His road provided more than a shortcut and a sad story. Along its winding way a half mile from the park, it intersects a barnyard with a house and a couple of outbuildings on one side, and a barn and chicken house on the other. On our luckier evenings we got to see a sight that is among the rarest. Not only did we see a chicken cross the road, but we saw a flock of chickens cross the road, in single file, followed by the farmer. We did not think to ask him why the chickens were crossing the road, because we were so amazed to see him herding his chickens. On some occasions the farmer did not appear, but his chickens still crossed the road in single file.

On one occasion a guinea hen and cock provided an additional entertainment, chasing each other in loops around and under the car we were driving. We came to a quick stop, of course, but the guineas continued their chase for several minutes. It was a hold-up. We could have used Lame Johnny’s help in his sheriffing days.

Not So Finger-lickin’ Good

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Learning from mistakes, People, Travel

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

We were traveling in Europe as a family—Jan, Alicia, Nathan, and I. London, Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, and assorted smaller towns in Germany where we rented a small VW Polo so I could enjoy driving on the Autobahn. This was Europe on $25 a day when the dollar was worth more anyway, and beds and breakfasts, hostels, and pensions provided inexpensive overnight accommodations for families.

I was studying the relationship between church and state for two months, so not every stop proved interesting to my minor children, although they seemed to appreciate churches in general, most of which provided stately, beautiful, and immense echo chambers.

One area where I knew we would have to compromise occasionally involved food, considering the fact that my children tended to be picky eaters, one in particular, though she is not so picky anymore in her adulthood, I must hasten to add. England to me meant steak and kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, and stock pots. Only to me. To the rest of the family it meant the accommodation of one stop at McDonald’s.

Amsterdam meant raw ground meat. Only to me and my flirtation with Mad Cow disease. There we began the tour of different national variations of pizza, especially of the Four Season variety, with four different items in the four quarters of the pizza. That worked well in Paris and Geneva, but in Bacharach, Germany, the Four Seasons pizza that included tuna, peas, sardines, and squid did not go over so well with the rest of the family. Fortunately they were placated with Brats mit Brotchen at the next stop.

It was the Geneva visit to Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken that caused the most intense reaction from the local clientele. We had not observed that the advertising slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good” was noticeably absent in French, German, or any other language. Believing that we knew how to eat fried chicken, since it was after all a conspicuously American restaurant with an all-too-familiar menu, the four of us proceeded to eat the chicken with our fingers. Every one of the other customers began to stare at us , and there were unnervingly many customers. As our nearest neighbor at the next table informed us, “It is extremely impolite and unsanitary to eat with your fingers.” We must have thought that we had entered Geneva out of a time warp from the Fifteenth Century when they were not so fastidious, from their point of view. We rapidly adapted to knife and fork consumption of the rest of our meal.

The Wild Life at Wind Cave and Custer Parks

04 Tuesday Aug 2015

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Driving through nearby Wind Cave National Park into Custer State Park for a circuit of its forty mile Wildlife Loop has become a frequent part of our sojourns at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs at the southern reaches of the Black Hills. Both parks have extensive herds of American bison as well as populations of elk, pronghorn, white-tail and mule deer, prairie dogs, marmots, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep. Custer has its burros that became “wild” after their usefulness as beasts of burden officially ended, but the visitors offering food don’t have any trouble getting them to eat out of their hands. We bring carrots, although we often see less healthy snacks offered. The burros are not fussy.

This season we also saw a prairie rattlesnake at the edge of a road, but still no cougars, which are numbered among the inhabitants of the parks.

Two years ago Wind Cave obtained a large additional acreage of old homestead tracts, long since merged into ranch pasturelands, but still containing some of the pioneer buildings, and at least one bison jump, used by Native Americans to herd bison to their doom over the edge of a cliff in centuries past, when several captured animals provided food, tools, clothing, fuel, medicine, and shelter for many native peoples. A ranger took a few of us on a preview tour of that locale, and we look forward to the day when it will be open for others to appreciate.

The bison herds here are among the first to be restored after the animals were nearly extinct. People purposefully destroyed these majestic and well-adapted animals by the millions to make way for cattle or just for their own amusement. It makes us wonder about human intelligence and character. We could watch their behaviors for hours. Part of the herd is usually on the move even when most of the bison are resting as they graze over large territories, never depleting their resources.

One magnificent old bull walks across the road and stops both lanes of traffic, then he walks down the middle of the road as cars slowly pass, then he stops one lane of traffic for a full minute, then he moves into the other lane to stop it for another minute. A loud motorcycle tries to pass, sounding like another bull, and he challenges it with the hoof-scraping gesture and his characteristic bellow, then he snorts and turns his back and moves on. He knows what he is doing.

One bison cow nurses her calf until she decides it has had enough. She turns in circles while the calf tries to reach for more. The calf persists until the cow finally lies down and the calf has to go to another cow if he wants more. It tries, but that cow knows what it is doing, and she imitates the first cow’s behavior. Finally the calf has to be satisfied with what it already has.

We looked for the bison herd on our first visit in 1976, but didn’t see any. Now we usually check with the rangers for their last observed location, and head for it, but usually we find them whether we have good information of not. We have learned to be patient in the quest and we are rewarded.

Rethinking the Melting Pot

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Events, Learning from mistakes, Racial Prejudice, Travel

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“33 Flavors,” Baskin-Robbins used to advertise, and I probably liked them all. Years ago, ice cream came in vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Now it comes not only in multitudinous flavors, but in low and no (as well as high?) fat varieties, frozen yogurt, ice milk, and other variations. When people are put together for any long, intense period of time, you begin to note how many variations there are in us.

When many varieties of ice cream first became available, Jan and I splurged one time by each ordering a concoction. The location was Mackinaw City as we viewed the great bridge over the Straits of Mackinac. We were celebrating our safe landing after being caught in the middle of that five miles long bridge in a windstorm and watching a camper blow off a truck onto the roadway ahead of us. The fear of having our 1960 Falcon take flight off that bridge might be supposed to remove appetites, but we were on our honeymoon, so we were believers in letting our appetites expand.

In our celebration we each ordered about seven scoops of different flavors of ice cream. (They were small scoops.) They came with names like Bat Girl (licorice), Fudge Brownie, Candy Stripers (peppermint), and Black Walnut. I just remember the appearance of the bowl as they began to melt together–black, green, red, and yellow mixing. I ate mine and Jan handed hers to me to finish, after it had begun to turn into one blended shade of brownish-grayish.

Then and there I had a revelation. The melting pot was an inadequate image for people getting along together. One has to recognize and accept the differences—the different flavors—in order to enjoy being together. (Revelations after all are hard to come by.) Trying to force everyone into one “mold” is likely to produce something that looks a bit moldy. We try to remember that when we live and work intensely together. The flavors are all there to be enjoyed. Attempts to put everything together all at once may put a strain even on great lovers (of ice cream). Everything works out in due time, with patience and flexibility and fixed purpose.

A Conspiracy to Cover with water and oil?

29 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Cherokee history, People, Travel

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I was hunting for the places where John Bell, the son and father, grandfather and great-grandfather of other John Bells, and the husband of Charlotte Adair (and the 4th great grandfather of Janet Chapman) had lived and worked. He was born in South Carolina, the son of a Scot trader and a Cherokee woman of the Deer Clan, in Greenville County, but the exact location is unknown. The Greenville records of land transactions and other legal matters before 1840 were destroyed in the 1990’s. They mostly dealt with Native Americans and African slaves, and so they were considered unnecessary and too expensive to maintain.

The journey took me to Coosawattee Town in Georgia, an ancient city that made documented history when DeSoto temporarily occupied it. John Bell and his son John Adair Bell centered their trading activity there before 1839.The strategic location between two mountains (Bell and Martin) made it too attractive to engineers, who built a dam and flooded the site, so all that I could see was Carter Lake.

Next I went to the Coosa River Plantation that John Bell developed in his middle years, when he devoted his work to blacksmithing and farming. That location near the foot of Lookout Mountain provided an easy place to locate a dam, so all I could see of the Bell plantation was the surface of Weiss Lake, about fifty feet above the old river bank.

The Bell family left Georgia and Alabama in the Cherokee Removal in a detachment directed by John Adair Bell (an uncle to Jan’s 2nd great-grandfather), and old John Bell relocated in what became Delaware County in Oklahoma along the Grand River. The Grand River plantation, where David Bell (Jan’s 3rd G-G) and Sarah Caroline Bell Waite (aunt) were buried, where members of the family continued to live for fifty years, became a casualty of the plans to build the Grand Lake of the Cherokee, so all of the original site as well as the cemetery is under water.

You can imagine what I expected when I planned to visit the cemetery in Rusk County, Texas, where John Bell and John Adair Bell moved in 1850 to escape continuing death threats. Nevertheless, the cemetery and the land that they farmed is not under water. An oil company in the 1950’s purchased the land, destroyed the Indian cemetery, and drilled for oil there. Nothing remains but photos of one tombstone in an otherwise empty oil drum, the tombstone of John Bell.

I began to think there was a conspiracy. There was, of course—a conspiracy to ignore and forget the Native American history of much of our country and the people who lived and worked here long before the current generations.

All roads going to the same place?

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.comDriving north from Alton there are three roads. One is a picturesque road along the Illinois River. If you want to meander and enjoy spring blossoms or fall foliage Route 100 is perfect. The other two roads take you to Jacksonville eventually– Route 73 and Route 273. On various maps Route 73 is marked as 273 and vice versa, because at some point the state renamed them, but neglected to change their own maps and all of the road markers. Likewise local communities did not change all of the local signs to correspond with the renaming. The roads begin and end at Alton and Jacksonville, so what’s the difference?The low road takes 15 fewer miles to get to Jacksonville because it is relatively straight. The high road curves in a large arc to the west, passing through Jerseyville and Carrollton on the way to Jacksonville, so it adds miles to the trip, but a third of it is a four lane limited access road, so it is quicker. (It will also avoid Roodhouse, but that may not be important to you.)

The low road will not help you if your destination is Quincy. Then the curve in the high road actually puts you farther west and, combined with route 106, cuts off several miles. None of these roads is especially well-marked on either maps or signs along the way, so the confusion of road names is just an additional disadvantage for people who are first finding their way.

Especially when you are leaving Alton the choice of whether to take 73 or 273, and determining which one is which, challenges the journeyer. It’s enough to make you choose the river road, knowing at least that you will enjoy the scenery. But in order to determine the fastest way, I have taken both roads, going the opposite way than I planned the first time because my map was wrong. The next time I bought a new map at a convenience store, and it was wrong too. Then I picked up a fourth new state map, and they had finally corrected their error. The new 73 is now the high road– old 273. The new 73 is now the low road– old 73.

It makes me wonder about the saying, “We’re all going to the same place anyway, so it doesn’t matter how we get there.”  In some respects it matters, although the devil is in the details. And if you think you’re going one place and wind up in another, then it certainly might matter to you. It might even be important which roadmap you choose, since they are not all correct, at least not in all details. And it is especially disconcerting to think that you are on one road, and then to find out that you are on another, but something tells me that it is not an unusual experience. Sometimes someone has switched the roads, making a person think one is the other.

We Thought You Were Just Kidding

14 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Forest, Learning from mistakes, Nature, People, Travel

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For forty-some years I took church youth groups on trips, accompanied by several adults, of course, on short trips, long trips, and in-between trips, for service, for learning, for recreation, for fellowship. The trip that took us to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park included some of all of these purposes. We devoted four days to work on houses that needed help—painting, repairing, building a wheelchair ramp. Then we had one full day and two nights in the Smokies.

We stayed in the national park campground. I gave the usual warnings, that included not keeping food of any kind in your tent. We would even keep the food we prepared together locked in the cars, out of reach of the bears, we hoped, though we had heard stories of bears breaking into cars. I repeated those instructions several times ahead of the trip, put them in writing, repeated them before we entered the park, and in the campground before we set up tents.

Shortly after we had our tents and equipment set up, sure enough, a bear came ambling through the campground. Everyone scurried out of the way, into the cars or behind them, giving the bear plenty of room. That bear seemed intent on a mission, heading straight toward one tent, which he circled for several minutes, stopped at the front tent flap, and poked his nose through the flap into the tent. He seemed to be pondering whether he should enter it or not, whether he dared to get into trouble with the park ranger or not, whether it would be worth it or not. Finally, he withdrew from the tent and continued on his way toward the deeper woods on the other side of the campground.

I gathered the group together at that point and asked the girls, whose tent it was, what food  they had hidden inside their tent. They shyly admitted that they had candy bars stored in their knapsacks.

“Didn’t I tell you that there were bears here, they had a keen sense of smell, and they enjoyed candy best of all?”

“We thought you were just kidding,” one of them answered.

Everywhere people make fun of someone

13 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by in Gullibility, People, Small town life, Travel

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

In the summer of 1987 my family and I were traveling in Germany, and we made an obligatory visit to Worms and Heidelberg. I exercised my pitiful German and most of the people I talked to wanted to exercise their English abilities, which were usually better than my German. Likewise people wanted to know where we came from in America, and I would explain that we came from farming country in Central Illinois, that had been settled mostly by Germans and Italians.

Pressed further about where in Germany the settlers had come from, twice I answered that they were mostly from Ostfriesland, in northwest Germany, which elicited a response of laughter both times. The second time this happened I asked why they were amused, and they responded that they knew that in America people made jokes about the foolishness of people in American southern states, or about Polish people.  There in southern Germany they made fun of people from Ostfriesland as the fools. After that I changed the answer to say that our own people had come from the Frankfurt region or from die Schweiz, and the response was polite interest.

The discussion about Italian settlers followed a similar course. There were mostly farmers and restauranteurs in our area, known for their pastas and pizzas, like Mona’s and Capponi’s at Toluca Illinois. But Illinois meant “Chicago” to three people that I talked to, and one of them pantomimed a machine gun, when I answered ‘yes,’ that I knew some of the Capponi family, and they prepared fabulous food. It hadn’t crossed my mind until his pantomime that he was thinking all the while about Al Capone.

At Worms we visited the reconstructed Cathedral, retraced Luther’s steps, and enjoyed some Liebfraumilch, but I’ll never forget the look on the face of one of the local citizens when I answered that I was most interested in worshipping in the restored synagogue where Rashi had studied. “Why on earth would you want to do that?” the man responded.

You learn a lot when traveling, and sometimes you can’t help but become the butt of jokes yourself.

Driving from the Rear View Mirror

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

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3 OwlsA few days ago, I again drove my car, leading another driver and her car through a long road trip. I used to do that a lot, guiding groups of vehicles packed with young people, on trips hither and yon. I thought I had a talent for it. Only once in fifty years did I lose a carload of passengers at the tail of a caravan, and that was due to a vehicle breakdown out of sight, and the loss of radio communication with the driver, but I knew he was resourceful and dependable, he knew our point of rendezvous, and he caught up with us at the end of the day.

Driving ahead of another car or cars requires frequent and observant glances in the rear view mirror. It does not matter if one tries to maintain a speed at or five miles per hour above the posted speed limit, someone will always want to go faster, getting between the lead car and the followers. Sometimes it is a truck, large enough to hide the view of cars from front or rear. The leader must find a way quickly to restore the connection, before the next turn or stop, or an additional intruder adds to the distance between the tandem drivers. Changing lanes and preparing for turns needs to be signaled well in advance if possible, but obscured vision may require the use of another lane just to keep each other in view. The process becomes nerve-wracking in heavy, fast traffic.

Often the lead driver spends as much time looking in the rear-view mirror as looking forward. That may sometimes be true in normal driving, when trying to keep a safe stopping distance between oneself and the cars ahead and behind, but with a caravan behind, as part of one’s responsibility, it becomes even truer.

What seems to be required for the lead driver is to know well the destinations and the directions for the trip, to set a reasonable and steady pace forward, and to keep the changing needs of everyone who follows in constant view.  It also helps to have a back-up plan that everyone is aware of, for all the times when the unexpected happens, and contact is,  we hope temporarily, interrupted. That sounds like an ambitious goal for leadership in many contexts, not just tandem  driving.

Fog on the Great River Bridge

14 Saturday Mar 2015

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I was approaching the Great River Bridge, driving East on 34. The winter fog rose and spread directly above the Mississippi, obliterating all familiar markers with its hungry white haze, as if the whole world had transformed into this blank computer screen, waiting for us to create something of it. The Great River Bridge itself rose into the haze with its five lanes lifting into nothingness.  

The car ahead of me disappeared. It looked like the bridge ended midair, and we would just drop off into the river, no matter how massive and secure the bridge must still be. There was that natural reactive moment of alarm, and just as quickly, the disclaimer of foolishness.  

I had not planned to drive across the bridge. I was going to take the Front Street exit. But there was an appeal from the fog, just to prove that the bridge was still there. There was a temptation just to find out. Should fear, even a momentary flash of it, dictate direction? How quickly we can become disoriented, even when we think we know where we are! 

Is this wide road like the one which, biblically, “leads to destruction?” Or is it the familiar structure that has proven itself by experience to be reliable, secure? How do we know that it is going to be the same this time? As the skeptic David Hume indicated, there is no provable necessary connection between what has been and what will be. There are unknowns which may change the experience, and surely eventually will change it.  

Everyone else was traveling with me at speed limit, trusting the unseen. Did they too have a moment of doubt? Did they just continue on automatic pilot? 

This time it was daunting enough just to take the exit. Its curve was obscured as well. Next time? Who knows? Maybe I’ll accept the invitation from the upper atmosphere. Maybe the bridge will rise above the fog. Maybe a multi-vehicle pile-up will greet me instead. Maybe….