Go! Go! Go! with the Howards

Trailering across the United States

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March 26, 2018 / 0 Comments

A Tragedy at the Very End

This morning we set out from Washington, D.C. for the final leg of our long trip, heading for my sister’s house in New Hope, PA, but first we had to drop our trailer off at a storage yard I had located in nearby Frenchtown, NJ, about 20 miles away.

Our drive was easy. Last night we prepped, flushing the tanks, taking out trash, packing up clothing, and doing as many other chores as we could to ready the trailer for storage. The weather was perfect for travel, the truck is running well, and we were excited to finally arrive, spend time with family, and live indoors again.

My only trepidation was routing – the roads near the river tend to be narrow, winding, and they often cut through villages and towns designed more for horses and carts than the nearly 50 feet and 6 tons of steel on four axles we were hauling around. Most of all, I wanted to avoid crossing the river on one of the many local bridges, many just barely wide enough for small cars to squeeze past each other. Since we were heading for Frenchtown, our route up River Road on the New Jersey side – a faster, less claustrophobic road than its counterpart across in Pennsylvania – looked doable without too much trouble. It’d only be about a ten mile stretch and my recollection of that piece of road was favorable.

After our first couple of miles up River Road, in spite of cruising at the speed limit I had a big truck riding hard on my tail so I pulled onto the shoulder to let him pass, and then proceeded on our way. As we came around a bend in Titusville, I was initially confused by what was in front of us, and slowed down quickly. There was a large truck like the one that’d just passed, stopped in middle of the narrow two lane road, with some dark smoke coming out of it. My first thought was that it had broken down, but quickly the situation became clearer as we saw several people running towards the truck with fire extinguishers.

I pulled our truck and trailer off the highway and before I was even fully stopped, Stephanie had jumped out, ran back into the trailer, grabbed the fire extinguisher and was sprinting towards the scene to help along with the owners of the house and the business next door. I briefly went to follow, but as the scene became more apparent knew I couldn’t leave our child without one of us.

In front of us on the highway was a large dump truck, with flames growing rapidly around it, on the wrong side of the road, and another vehicle crushed between it and a wall. Fire was climbing up from the truck to engulf a power pole, live lines were already hanging across the road where the pole they connected to had been snapped in half and laid across a lawn. The truck was traveling in the same direction we were, had hit the pole on his right and then cut across the road in front of another vehicle, nearly disintegrating it. We arrived seconds later.

As much as Stephanie and the others tried, there was nothing they could have done to change the outcome, and thankfully none of them were injured in the act. A conflagration enveloped both vehicles, with fuel spilled all over the road, and all we could do was pull back to distraught safety. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truck driver had escaped injury, but there was never any chance for the occupants of the other vehicle.

Out of respect for everyone involved I’m not going to go into greater detail, but as we understand it one of the victims was a veteran firefighter in the very department which had responded to the scene. The tragedy of the situation is still beyond comprehension and I know that the shock hasn’t nearly worn off.

March 13, 2018 / 0 Comments

The Rocky Road to Asheville

Yesterday we left Nashville and headed east to the nearly homophonic Asheville. We’d heard from many people that it was an artsy town with great food and a lovely vibe, in a beautiful stretch of Appalachia. We’d be heading into colder weather, but given the torrential rains in Nashville, it didn’t sound like a terrible trade, and we were definitely ready to leave.

The drive pushed our regular daily limits, about 300 miles. This may not sound like much, but the trailer and the toddler both slow us down quite a bit, so we like to pace ourselves and have rarely done more than 250 in a day. Between a somewhat late start and a route that took us up through the mountains, I figured we’d be arriving around 4pm.

With the expectation that we’d be hitting the first sustained freezing temperatures of our trip, the health of our trailer was already on my mind. Built primarily for desert weekends in California, it’s not particularly designed for snow. Thin walls and limited insulation all around aren’t the worst – we have plenty of warm clothes and bedding, and a strong, mostly-reliable heating system should easily be adequate for temperatures in the 20’s and 30’s – but the plumbing system was concerning me as parts of it aren’t insulated at all, and are completely exposed underneath the body of the trailer. It’d take a long, sustained cold to manage to freeze the main water tank – thermal mass being on our side – but some of the pipes and valves are small and easily frozen. I had various ideas floating around for months about if, and how, we needed do anything to handle this, but had yet to actually need to, so it was all theoretical until now.

As we drove, we strategized. We’d make sure the fresh tank was full, so we’d have plenty of water – and the more water in the tank, the longer it’d take to freeze – and then stay unhooked from the “city” water – the pressurized water supplied by the campground. This would leave the most vulnerable external plumbing – the pressurized lines and their valves – empty, or at least unpressurized so they’d be unlikely to burst if frozen. We’d need more propane – we had two large tanks, but one was completely empty and the other maybe half full – so we’d just fill the tanks when we arrived. With plenty of propane we could keep the trailer well heated as well as leave the water heater on around the clock, which would help protect it and other parts of the plumbing.

Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, we decided to take a bigger step and buy some insulating bubble wrap and fashion a skirt around the trailer – if we could reasonably seal the underside from the elements it should make a substantial difference in the temperatures we, and the trailer’s systems, could withstand. We found a couple big rolls of the stuff at a Lowes nearby, and ordered them for pickup that night. The final step would be to stick a small electric space heater under the trailer skirt – since we could run it off the free power provided by the campground, cost and efficiency weren’t a big issue, and with the insulated skirt and the heated trailer above, it should make a huge difference. With a good enough tailoring job this skirt might just get us by through much lower temperatures.

Stephanie tackled much of the driving duties, pushing us almost to the 5,000 mile mark for the trip so far, but I took the driver seat for the last leg into Asheville. I was tired and not feeling great, and we were running even later than I expected, with an arrival time of 4:30 or so. Not terrible, but it meant the last hour or so of daylight on a blustery, cold day would be spent setting up camp, and we still had a lot more to do after that.

As we pulled into Asheville, we got further and further into its beautiful downtown. Smaller roads than I like to take, but the GPS showed we’d be camped practically in the heart of this cute city, so it looked worth it. Only, once I got about a block from the destination and still couldn’t believe there was a big campground here it hit me like a frying pan: I hadn’t set the GPS for the campground, just for the city itself. We were in the city center in our rig, in rush hour, and once I plugged in the proper address saw that we had passed the campground 20 minutes before. I had, in fact, seen the sign for our destination and mentally noted that there was another nice camping option if we needed it. Duh.

So we backtracked, which took a lot more than 20 minutes thanks to Monday night traffic. When we finally pulled in, the office was closed. No big deal, in most of the south you can get propane tanks filled just about anywhere, so I’d handle that when I ran our errands that night.

It turned out we made reservations for a spot without full hookups, which meant no sewer connection, which we’d definitely be needing before the end of our stay. The campground was maybe half full though, so I picked a spot on their map that had full hookups and left a note under the office door.

The spot I picked was on the end, and a little steeply graded both front and back, but seemed to be level enough in the middle that I could cope. The sun was going down and it was cold, so I pulled on a heavy coat and began to unhook, something I’d done dozens of times lately. It was important to do things right, but I had it down to a routine.

I leveled the trailer side to side, chocked the tires to keep the trailer from rolling, and put blocks down for the tongue jack. Because of the shape of the ground, the trailer was pointing slightly up, and the truck was nose down at a fairly steep angle. This meant I’d have to jack up the trailer more than usual to get it unhooked. Mostly, I was tired, and cranking that manual jack in the cold wasn’t a lot of fun, but I got it up there. The hitch coupler didn’t want to come off the ball easily – not unusual, so I stepped up on the truck bumper to give it a little motivation.

Instead of just slipping out of the coupler as I expected, the ball hitch released violently – I had been stuck much more than I thought, and I had unintentionally raised the back end of the truck up quite a bit with the trailer jack. When it released, this let a ton of pressure off the trailer as well, and it rocked backward, off its leveling blocks, crushing a chock, and then the tongue jack right underneath me slipped off its blocks and dropped, several tons of weight, straight down into the soft dirt.

The trailer tongue had forced its jack so deep into the dirt that the coupler was only inches from the ground itself. I had nearly been crushed and – as I was suddenly realizing – Stephanie, the baby, and all the animals were in the trailer when this happened. She came flying out with Wes, thankfully OK but shaken up, and surveyed the scene with me.

The trailer was tilted far forward as its tongue was sitting on the ground. The whole trailer had also rotated several feet. There didn’t seem to be any obvious damage to anything. It could have been so much worse.

Now the challenge was how to raise the trailer up, with its main jack embedded in the ground, and get it hooked back up to the truck so we could reposition it and start over again. I got out the emergency jack from the truck and got it under the tongue. In small increments I raised up the tongue, and then periodically put the trailer’s stabilizer jacks down to act as a safety net. We eventually got the trailer raised enough to pull its jack out of the ground. We got some heavy blocks under it, and were finally able to use the tongue jack again. Much easier.

At some point in the process I moved the trailer wire harness out of the way, and saw that it had somehow gotten snagged in the crash. The main umbilical between the truck and trailer, controlling lights and brakes, was badly torn up. In a weird way, this made me feel a little better – cutting and splicing seven broken wires is something I could do with nothing more than a pocket knife and tape if I had to, and since we weren’t towing anywhere for several days I’d have plenty of time to do it right.

After much laboring, we eventually got the trailer hooked back up to the truck, which meant it was at least under control again. We pushed it back into the right position, and then carefully set it up again, this time uneventfully. Everyone was cold and tired from a long and ultimately stressful day, so Stephanie got the trailer cozy and made dinner for Wes.

It was about 7pm and we still needed the insulation, heater, and, especially, the propane, so after feeling confident the trailer was stable and safe, I headed into town. On the way to Lowes I stopped at every gas station I saw, and not one filled propane tanks, but I figured the hardware store would at least. The insulation was easy to find, but in spite of the cold weather Lowes had decided to switch its inventory over to its spring collection, which meant that they had gotten rid of all their electric heaters and replaced them all with portable A/Cs a few days before. I kindly asked if their merchandising manager checked the weather. I headed to Home Depot, and was told the exact same thing. And of course, neither place filled tanks. Since I knew we were low on propane at the trailer, and was losing hope of getting my tank filled, I just gave in and bought a new, pre-filled tank.

I headed back that night without the electric heater for our insulation plans, but at least we had propane enough to get us to tomorrow. When I arrived back at the trailer it was late, the temperature wasn’t terrible, so we just decided to wait on making our trailer skirt until tomorrow, when we’d have time and some sun.

As it turned out, the next day brought more unexpected stress, but I’ll leave that for another post as this one is already almost 1800 words.

March 13, 2018 / 0 Comments

African American Heroes are American Heroes

I can’t pretend to understand the South after just a few weeks, but I’ve been an American my whole life and this concerns all of us, in every corner of this huge country.

There is a strong tendency to “other” the African American experience – I just did it, right there – and nowhere is this more glaring than in the telling of the history of black liberation and the treatment of its heroes, both in the story of the Civil War and a century later in the struggle to win full Civil Rights.

The epic tale of the liberation of tens of millions of Americans is the greatest triumph of justice over oppression we’ve known here, greater even than the American Revolution itself. Hundreds of years of bondage and brutality, enshrined in the foundations of our political and economic systems, ended through the extraordinary heroism and sacrifice of so many.

Harriet Tubman. John Brown. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois. William Lloyd Garrison. Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks. Warriors, thinkers, organizers, leaders whose accomplishments, sacrifices, and contributions to justice for and freedom of Americans in every way the equal, at least, of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Paine, Roosevelt, and so on. Yet it seems an inescapable fact that we don’t venerate them as a nation to nearly the same degree. Their stories are told not as American History, but as Black History, as Civil Rights History. They are treated as figures in their small chapters of our narrative, not as universal heroes of the American republic.

American History will be healthier when towns that aren’t demographically black are as likely to have a Tubman Blvd. as a Washington Blvd., when Rosa Parks is recognized with monuments in places she never visited, when putting MLK Jr.’s face on our currency is seen not as an act of political correctness gone amok, but rather that it’s about time.

March 12, 2018 / 0 Comments

Stressful Sounds of Storm

It was quite stormy last night when we went out in Nashville, and I already had rough weather for the next week on my mind as we get ready to relocate further east. As a result, the massive downpour I listened to all night and early morning had my thoughts racing – worries about leaks, more electrical issues, dreading the hour or so it was going to take me to pack up the truck and various outside bits.
 
I finally rolled out of bed, climbed down the ladder, and nuked myself some coffee as it slowly dawned on me that the torrential sounds that were still thundering through the trailer were, in fact, from a noise generator app Stephanie had rigged in bed, likely to drown out my snoring.
March 11, 2018 / 0 Comments

Electrical Problem Whack-a-Mole

Yesterday I decided to finally tackle an annoying, but seemingly inconsequential, problem in our truck: the ABS light had been tripping on/off on our dashboard since encountering the many spectacular potholes of New Orleans that shook our truck silly.
The ABS system itself is working fine, so I wasn’t terribly worried, but idiot lights get annoying, and every time the light triggered it switched off the cruise control, so it was at least nominally a safety concern. According to all that Google could find, the likely culprit was one of two ground wires being loose. Makes sense – it started happening only when we hit a severe enough rough patch. One ground was easy to get to, right on the frame under the driver’s seat, but it was completely intact. Yesterday I went after the other, which required removing the battery, tray, and other bits to get down into the engine bay. I’ve pulled these part before – easy, but takes a bit of time. Sadly, didn’t help at all.
 
But then a new wrinkle: stereo doesn’t work. Which means our backup camera, speakerphone, and other things we’ve grown to depend on don’t either. 
Annoyed, I gave up for a while to let Stephanie take the truck for the afternoon. I settled in to do some work and a few hours later it started to cool down, so I turned the furnace on in the trailer for the first time in a few days.
Nothing.
The furnace and the A/C are dead. A quick panic set in, but on investigation the only other damage I could find was the outside porch lighting. Odd.
The wiring in this old beast is a bit of a mystery to me, mainly because so much of it seems buried inside inaccessible walls. It’s also important to realize that unlike a house, which has a single power system – 120v AC, or a car, which is basically 12v DC, RVs are hybrids, with both 120V AC and 12V DC, which can be interconnected in a number of ways, often multiple ways on a single vehicle, and with different approaches being popular over time. There are various inverters, generators, 20, 30, or 50amp hookups, low amperage power coming in from the truck, and more. I have a decent understanding of these things in theory, but since I didn’t build it, nor did I get a wiring diagram when I bought it, so the exact workings are largely a matter of speculation and assumption.
I spent an hour climbing around underneath the trailer, trying to trace the 12v power system from the umbilical that connects to the truck, the deep cycle batteries, through various harnesses, distribution boxes, fuses and relays. Also, my handy multimeter, was in the truck, across town with wife and baby. I found lots of new parts, and formed a mental image of how I thought things were wired, but without my tools and parts, I was powerless to fix. So I waited.
When Stephanie got back she was beat, but I walked her through the issues we had to tackle before we even got back to fixing the truck and its radio. After some contemplation, she recalled the previous owner pointing out a breaker panel – something I had unsuccessfully looked for that day, and thought was conspicuously absent, but had chalked it up to prolific and inconsiderate use of small fuse boxes and inline fuses. In a couple hundred square feet, it’s hard to hide things, but it turns out it was right in front of me the whole time, sandwiched between the bathroom door and fridge.
Opening it up, there she was: a burned out 15amp fuse. A quick trip to the spare parts bin for a fresh fuse, and we had power to the A/C, furnace, and porch lights again. Whew!
The next morning was Sunday in Nashville, which as it turns out means that nothing is open except churches, so I decided to take a stab at figuring out what was wrong with the stereo in the truck. I pulled the dashboard apart, yanked the radio out, and started probing around. It was a mess back there – the installer we paid generously did a really poor job, which is of course hard to tell after the fact when a dashboard is hiding the mess. We paid for a plug-and-play wiring harness, but he seemed to have pocketed that and instead crimped the couple dozen wires by hand. There was a lot going on, but all I cared about was seeing if the radio was getting power, so it was just three wires I cared about: ground, battery, and ignition-switched power. Ground and battery were fine, but no matter what – off, engine running, or just ignition switched on – the switched power was dead. That was a good sign. I mean, it’s a bad sign, but at least I had a cause I could focus on.
I bypassed the switched power, but still the radio was mostly dead. It sounded like it was trying to move its eject motor, and then nothing. The screen never even flickered on.
My working theory was now that I had somehow shorted the ignition line, and before the fuse could protect the radio it somehow fried its computer. Something like that. Oh, there was one big problem though: I couldn’t find any fuses that had burned out, so maybe the fuse on that line was overrated, providing no protection at all. In any case, it didn’t look good for the stereo. Fuck.
I decided I needed a professional opinion, so we hopped on Yelp and found a single car audio shop open on a Sunday. I put the car mostly back together – you don’t really need a dashboard cover while you drive – and we headed over, and got there just after they opened.
At the shop I approached the car audio department and was informed by a manager that they couldn’t help on service as their installer had died yesterday and his replacement wasn’t available yet. Yup. They helpfully noted that there wasn’t a single other shop open for installs on Sunday in Nashville except Best Buy, which we both knew I wasn’t about to stoop to. William was eager to help though, so in a Hail Mary I asked if they had the same model radio in stock, and he looked it up. Miracle of miracles, they had a single unit in all of their stores, it was in that very store, and it was installed as a demo model in a display their now-dead specialist had been disassembling. Seriously.

JVC KW-300BT

We walked into the back and sure enough, they had exactly my stereo, mounted in some painted plywood, still turned on. He offered it to me as-is, no backsies, for a steeply discounted price. After a quick consult with Stephanie I rolled the dice and bought the stereo, figuring at worst I’d end up spending just a bit more on it than I would have on labor for a shop to assess my problems. Also, it was Sunday, we were leaving Nashville the next day, and I wanted to make some progress, so we set our plans on hold and raced back to the campground with an exact duplicate of our busted radio.

I got everything swapped out, but I still couldn’t get it to start properly – though it was showing more signs of life when I tried, which was encouraging. Of course, I still hadn’t solved the switched power problem. I was frustrated as hell. It had to be a fuse, so I started pulling, checking, and reseating fuses again. Dozens of them. No luck. They were all fine. Filthy, hard to pull, but fine. Same for the fuses under the dash. Meanwhile, I had to repeatedly disconnect or reconnect the battery ground, and start and stop the truck, for testing.

Looking for switched power

Short of ripping out the factory wiring harness and tracing it all the way back to its source – a fools errand, bound to end with us stuck in Nashville with a dead truck and trailer – I was at a bit of a loss. So I decided, perhaps I could just ignore the dead wire and run another wire from a switched source, which in a truck like this are abundant.

I quickly realized I was short on electrical supplies – no connectors for the fuse block, no crimping connectors, I didn’t even have electrical tape, and I definitely didn’t have anything I felt terribly comfortable using to tap a power line unless it was an emergency, and this wasn’t one. I walked back to the trailer defeated, and we discussed next steps. We could stay in Nashville an extra day so I could go to a shop to have a professional deal with my mess, or we could put it all back together and drive to our next destination, where we could find a shop. We flipped a coin, and fate told us to move on and deal with it down the road.

Add-a-Circuit Fuse Taps

This didn’t sit well with me. I hate unsolved mechanical problems. And then it hit me – I had bought a bag of “Add-a-Circuit Fuse Taps” on advice from a friend. These are a nifty little invention that, along with a spool of wire, was exactly what I needed to run another switched power line from the ignition to the radio. I rigged up a quick test, and it worked like a charm. I was in business.

I quickly finished up, making all the connections as secure as possible, and started to clean up. Getting the radio back in the dash was tricky – the wiring was messy and prevented the radio from sliding all the way back, but eventually I got it snug and put back together. The dashboard and kick plates snapped back in place, no extra screws leftover, and the new radio looked just like the old one. And the best part: when I turned the key, it turned right on.
That ABS light is still on though. But I’m starting to like it.
March 7, 2018 / 1 Comment

Montgomery and Selma

We arrived in Montgomery from New Orleans after a long but easy drive – other than a brief detainment by Border Patrol – not knowing what to expect of either place, but seeking to experience some of the history of the African American Civil Rights movement, perhaps to purge the memories of our awful experience near New Orleans. We gave ourselves three nights, which meant one day to see each town.

Our campground – no, “resort” – was more a gravel parking lot behind an Arby’s on a major highway, but not actually the worst place we’d parked our home, so we deferred judgement and decided to explore the area the next day. We got up and drove into downtown Montgomery for breakfast, parking the truck at exactly the spot where Rosa Parks had boarded that famous bus ride.

An amazing breakfast of biscuits and whatnot fueled us up for our day in Montgomery, but as we looked around we realized we really didn’t have much we wanted to see in Montgomery. When those heroes of 1965 marched, they gathered, and prayed, were beaten and murdered, and then found their voices in Selma; they only came to Montgomery to make their demands in the capitol. Our hearts heard Selma beckoning.

We made the reverse trek down to Selma. With the Neville Brother’s Yellow Moon softly playing as soundtrack, the drive was silent and punctuated by lots of tears of contemplation.

Our first stop was at the Selma Interpretive Center and its staff of three incredible young women warmly welcomed us to the quiet museum focused on putting the events of 1965, and its aftermath, into context. It was powerful and honest, as later was the walk across the bridge to the Voting Rights Museum.

At the center we discovered to our good fortune that the weekend would bring Selma’s annual jubilee, commemorating the march through public celebrations, fundraisers, speeches and sermons, and culminating in a march across the bridge. We decided to come back the next day, and the next, and join the people of Selma, along with John Lewis, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dr. Cornell West, Maxine Waters and so many others. Everything and everyone we wanted to see was in Selma.

Everytime we turned around in Selma, we were greeted warmly by people inquiring to know where we came from, where we were going, to tell us where to eat, where to stay, and what we should see. After describing our accommodations in the capitol to a sympathetic local newspaperman he recommended we check out a campground nearer to Selma, on federal land, which we had skipped as we heard it might be closed for the season.  We stopped for an unreasonably tasty and cheap BBQ dinner at Lannie’s, then headed back to out to the highway.

No sooner had we left Selma than we saw an office for the Army Corps of Engineers which operated the presumably closed campground at Prairie Creek, so Stephanie hopped out of the car to inquire and found that it was, indeed, open to guests and only a few miles away. A few moments later we were in a stunning forrest, surrounded by creeks and rivers, making reservations to stay three nights there, starting the next morning.

We raced back to Montgomery and got packed up and ready to scramble back down to Selma first thing in the morning for the jubilee and the most beautiful campground we’d stayed in yet. Our weekend in Selma was powerful, cathartic, and far too eventful to cover in this post, so it’ll have to be continued in another installment.

March 6, 2018 / 0 Comments

Selma to Chattanooga

We woke up this morning in a torrential rainstorm in the middle of a beautiful forrest on a small peninsula, packed up, unhooked, and hit the road. An hour later, the skies were clear and we were cruising north towards Chattanooga, to visit Rock City and see the gnomes Stephanie recalls vividly from a brief visit when she was five.

Since our planning was last minute, we decided to stay at a Chattanooga West KOA – KOA’s are our easy go-to since they are generally clean, safe, and well equipped, if not always exactly stunning. As we drove north towards the Alabama-Tennessee-Georgia border, the scenery got more beautiful by the mile. Leaving the highway we kept expecting to pull in behind a Walmart or Arby’s and sleep under flood lights, but instead we wound our way up into the hills and eventually arrived at a stunning, and almost empty, KOA.

Being the small world that it is, the maintenance guy at the camp used to live in Seal Beach and just came back to Chattanooga on his last long haul as a trucker, switching gears to work year round with his wife tending to the needs of the campground.

Tomorrow we see the sites, and then we leave the following day, heading eventually for Nashville.

March 5, 2018 / 0 Comments

The Jews of Selma

Rabbi Heschel with white beard, two to Dr. King’s left.

Just up Broad Street, half a mile from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is the empty Temple Mishkan Israel, a remnant of a formerly thriving Jewish community in Selma that has dwindled in recent decades. 

While their structures are all but abandoned, many there recall the actions and importance of Jews in the Civil Rights movement, whose own lives and synagogues were in jeopardy across the south. When Dr. King came to Selma after Bloody Sunday, sixteen rabbis joined him, with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the lead cohort walking arm in arm with John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

March 5, 2018 / 0 Comments

Good Travel Challenges Notions of Defaultness

Traveling across cultural boundaries can bring a powerful perspective shift, if you’re open to it, by challenging implicit biases inherent in all of us about what’s proper, correct, and particularly what’s normal and default.

The most obvious example is language: when travel takes you through regions that speak the same language you do, but with a different accent, at first the contrast is striking. You notice it everywhere – people speaking unusually, the sounds and rhythms different, the idioms foreign, manners and tone unusual to your ears and, especially, to your brain. But as anyone who’s ever thought for a moment about these dissonances has noted, it isn’t just they who speak with an accent, or has regional idioms – we all do – and there is little inherently correct or proper about our own form of our language, it just is.

Food also embodies so much about a place. Even where common dishes seem to be available, such as a hamburger, you quickly find that outside of homogenized fast food joints, even a simple burger has so much locality embedded in it, from the beef itself, to the way it’s cooked, to how its dressed and served. I’ve had a burgers in NM, TX, LA and elsewhere on this trip, and none of them tasted like the burgers from home. And they were all a joy to consume. I’ve long held that it’s always worth trying the local foods – unfamiliar, even weird though they may seem – because, simply put, people like them so they are probably good. I’ve never turned down an opportunity to try something offered me, and I’ve never felt worse off for having done so.

Manners are complex to grapple with, as we are so quick to judge people – are they friendly or rude? generous and warm, or cold and unwelcoming? – by the way they first engage socially, but even this is largely a product of local social norms and it’s often best to try to look past that first impression. Everywhere I’ve ever been, once you get passed the anonymous greetings of strangers and get to know people even briefly, it’s a safe bet you’ll find them open, friendly, and caring. Communities don’t survive well if they aren’t.

As we go from place to place, we’ve encountered so many instances of contrasts with home, and we’ve savored them all. Humans are at once richly diverse with their cultures, but in so many ways also the same everywhere.

February 28, 2018 / 1 Comment

Laura Plantation’s Shameful Tour

Imagine visiting Auschwitz and the over-compensatingly proud German tour guide presents a narrative fixated on the social melodramas of the former SS officers, their dysfunctional families with whacky nicknames like “Gaschamber”, takes the occasional jab at the Allied liberators, and makes only the most fleeting mention of the inhabitants of the camp who were worked to death or just summarily exterminated.

Welcome to the best analogy my disgusted soul can concoct for the tour we experienced of the Laura Plantation, billed and recommended to us as a sober and honest site that explores the painful history of slavery in Louisiana.

It’s been several days since we left and I’ve still yet to fully process the experience, but I am certain that none of this impression is either overstated or the result of hypersensitivity.

Our tour guide, a middle aged woman who boasted of having given roughly 2000 tours at this site, could not help but cover her extraordinary callousness with tasteless jokes, often directed at a young visitor, perhaps 10 years old. The attempts at humor would be inappropriate at best given the context, if they weren’t also so incredibly revealing.

Much of the time was spent on the various comings and goings of the wealthy family who owned the property and its slaves, and a few bits on the several house slaves with whom – we were assured – they were quite fond. However, the many more men, women, and children who toiled in their fields for generations being whipped, raped and brutalized to create the wealth of this family ranked barely a mention but for a few quick asides. Likewise, the glorious Confederates were barely deserving of an insult, and only ever on the basis of personal flaws like business incompetence – even finding an opening to joke about a man whose nickname was “the Whip” – while creating for herself plenty of opportunity to insult the Union, President Grant, Reconstruction, and to promulgate a general notion of both-sideism that entirely undermines an honest assessment of the role of Southern society in enslaving and exploiting millions of innocent people.

Early in the tour we were repeatedly admonished not to record video or audio of the tour – only photographs – and in retrospect it seems patently obvious why. If anyone has the fortitude to visit this site for a tour, please do so anyway.

I look forward to sharing this post with the management once I track them down. I’ve been reassured by several local friends and a number of positive reviews online that this was an exceptional and unusual experience there. I hope so, which makes it even more important that I document our recollections.

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