A Man Named Bill

This wood spirit (right) is my first attempt at wood carving.

I want to tell you about Bill Tripp from Michigan.
He and I have become buddies in the RV resort because he has helped me explore the possibilities of wood carving as a new hobby. Bill, who has a shock of perfectly white hair, is in his late 70s and is generally considered a bit of a character in the resort.
He is an old Marine, having served in Korea in the 50's. He has a busy, busy mind that rarely stays on topic for more than a minute or two and he tends not to hear too well. When you repeat a question he usually shoots his right hand up to his head and slaps his ear, saying, "I don't hear so well, y'know. It's the bombs! It's the bombs!"
What I like about this fellow is that he and his wife, Donna, have little money, like us, but they have a routine in which they help their fellow man.
Bill took me along the other day. He had already picked up free, nearly out-of-date bread and rolls from a bakery. He gave some to a Mexican family up the road who run a fruit and vegetable stand. They, in turn, invited him to take away the tired fruit and veggies from their stand.
We drove another few minutes north to a farm where he fed the fruit and veggies to a cow and her two calves. They moo-ed in delight as we split water melons apart and they dug into the fleshy meat of the melons. They loved the stale bread and the tomatoes, peppers and oranges that we threw into their field.
We then moved over to the fruit trees where we gathered ripe pink and white grapefruit and all manner of oranges - bell-shaped, tangerines. We put those into plastic bags and stacked them in the back of his truck.
We then chain-sawed the tired old boards of a house that he had helped demolish on the farm during the past few months. We heaped some of the boards into the back of his truck and drove up to the farmhouse where we dumped the wood on an outdoor fireplace where it will be burned.
Now we started to feed the pig that was snuffling and snorting and rooting around in her muddy pigpen. She is partial to melon but also loves stale bread and anything else he has available.
We moved over to the rooster and his harem. They get white bread. Next door was a peacock, his hen and their two offspring. They get whole wheat bread. By this time, the cow and her two calves had made it through the field and were lined up at the fence next to the pigpen to try for an additional tidbit. Bill opened a pack of dated Snowball sugar puffs, discarded by the bakery though they probably have enough preservatives in them to last another century. I made a friend for life with the cow when I fed her this sugary treat. She moo-ed for more and kept trying to nudge her calves away so she could enjoy this treat which probably will result in awesomely sugary milk.
We washed out the rear of the truck and headed back to the resort, tired from the exertion but knowing the final task was to provide the bags of succulent fruit, just plucked from the trees, to the folks who might want to increase their Vitamin C intake.

The Continuing Soap Opera

We're back in our slot at Terra Ceia RV Resort in Palmetto, Florida. Hello, Boyce, the dim-witted neighbor who worked hard last winter at two jobs - being a janitor at a local school and doing all kinds of things at the nearby Walmart - is gone. Gone. Gone as in his lot is empty and he has moved away.

It only takes a couple of minutes with the neighbors to find out that Boyce was thrown out because he failed to pay his lot rent. He also made a habit of borrowing money from his neighbors and then failing to pay back his debt. When they came to haul away his mobile home, the wheels apparently fell off and this caused a bit of a stir.

He had taken up with a woman in the resort who lived in another home. She, we are told, is a lesbian who is pregnant and large with the child by her black drug dealer. She and Boyce seemed to have a thing when we were here earlier in the year. So who knew. The woman still lives here. But the fact that she is messing about with a black man has incensed some of our more redneck residents.

Jo was bombarded with the word "nigger" by one of our neighbors within the first 10 minutes of our being in our slot. Apparently there is some fear that our black brothers are trying to move into the neighborhood. What they don't seem to realize is when we lived in St. Petersburg back in the 1970s - it is the city immediately to our north, across Tampa Bay - Palmetto then was known as a poor black enclave. Then the whites discovered the real estate values were much lower across the bay and residential developments sprouted like mushrooms.

Soothing waters

These two turtles take in the warm sun on a sunken log in Little Manatee Rivers Park.

Our laminated wooden paddles dip, dip, dip into the tea-colored waters of the Little Manatee River. It is so quiet that the dripping drops of water when we lift the paddles from the river make the only sound.
We slide along under the Spanish moss that hangs from the oak trees on the river bank. Not a sound. There are three turtles sitting on a half-submerged log. They watch our arrival, craning their necks to keep us in view since we represent the greatest threat to them in this peaceful wilderness.
Snook, 18 inches to two feet long, make their way upriver. They seem to move with purpose but nothing is chasing them. Perhaps they are chasing smaller fish. A pileated woodpecker flap, flap, flaps overhead. He/she lands on a dead palm tree and we hear him drumming his beak into the wood.
There is almost a guilty pleasure as we pass slowly and peacefully along this waterway in our canoe.
Earlier in the day, I had connected to the Internet and read that one of my favorite reporters from 30 years ago, Lisa Schnellinger, had just flown into Erbil, Iraq to train two groups of Iraqi journalism trainers on voter-oriented election coverage. Arghhhh! Why am I enjoying myself on the Little Manatee while she is putting her life on the line? See; there's that old Calvinist thing that creates guilt in those who are not struggling!
Well, I'll be thinking about this courageous young woman who's trying to make the world a slightly better place.

Man's Inhumanity

One of the Andersonville POWs at the end of the war.

It was a perfect day to visit Andersonville Prison in the back roads of southwestern Georgia. The drizzling, dreary day was the backdrop to this terrible place. For it was here that the Confederate Army created a POW camp for Yankee prisoners during the Civil War. It was here, in this 26.5 acres of open land with a filthy, bacteria-laden stream running through it, that 45,000 Union soldiers were incarcerated. And 13,000 of them died of disease or starvation.
We came here not to be uplifted, but to feel the pain of war and man's inhumanity to man. This terrible place now is a National Historic Site. It contains a museum honoring all POWs. This, on its own, is a bit overwhelming since it adds layers upon layer to the horrors we and others have perpetrated.
But it forces us, again, to confront our terrible history.

“My heart aches for these poor retches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia and go to Anderson and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!”
A Southern woman who climbed
a guard tower and looked down upon
the stockade in 1864.

The Southern captain who was in charge of the prison was hanged in Washington after the end of the war. His explanation: “I was following orders.”

Thirty miles away is Plains, Georgia, the home of President Jimmy Carter. We drove down there after lunch and spent time in the Peanut store and in the Plains High School that now is another historic site where Carter is honored. His brother, Billy, had a gas station in town and it has been turned into a museum. Billy died back in the 1980s.
Before we headed here – just 100 miles north of the Florida border, we stopped off in Atlanta to visit the CNN headquarters. I remember when CNN started back in 1980. My how it has grown. Even though CNN is not doing well in the ratings (coming in behind Fox and MSNBC among the 24-hour cable operations) it still is an impressive place to visit. We toured the multiple studios and our guide even took us to a mockup of a weather studio where we could see how the green screen works. He used three youngsters for the demonstration and made them disappear on screen when he placed a green cloth over them. The class clown, of course, had to raise his hand above the cloth and it appeared on the weather map as a disembodied hand.
CNN's International network had anchor studios in Atlanta, London and Hong Kong so they can track with the sun. CNN en Espanol is a massive enterprise, all in Spanish, whereas the International feeds are dubbed into around 40 different languages. All of this came spinning out of the brain of Ted Turner who conceived of the notion of have news 24 hours a day.

Buddha and the Bugs

I just came across this blog from 2004, written when Jo and I were in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It had been filed in a different place than the current blogs. But it made me laugh - again. Maybe it will have the same effect on you.


And the Lord Buddha looked down on Room 15 of Earthwalkers Guest House in Siem Reap Town and he saw the biting bugs climbing on the walls, all one thousand of those bugs. And he saw the bugs walking on the ceiling and on the floor of Room 15. And the Lord Buddha said, “This probably is not so good.”
And the man and the woman in Room 15, trying to sleep in the hot, sultry night, tried to make peace with the one thousand bugs. And they were queasy for the bugs they were not afraid, nor were they shy about biting the man and the woman. And, lo, there were three crickets in the room, placed there by the Lord Buddha so that the man and the woman might find respite from the biting bugs. And the three crickets sought diligently to reach out and eat each of the one thousand biting bugs. And they were sorely unsuccessful.
And the man said unto the woman, “Let us turn off the light that lighteth the room, for the light be the attraction for the biting bugs.” And so they did. And the man and the woman lay in the darkness of Room 15 and they felt the biting bugs jumping upon their persons. And the bugs did bite. And even as the crickets did their best to eat many of the biting bugs they were not successful. And the man rose up in the darkness. And he cursed the biting bugs and said he could not live side by side with the biting bugs.
And the man went unto the first floor of the guest house and spoke with the manservant, Narith. And the man said unto the manservant, “Get thee unto the Room 15 and slay the many biting bugs for it is impossible for us to lay down our heads and sleep. And the manservant picked up the spray can of insecticide and went unto Room 15 and slew the many hundreds of biting bugs, all those that the man had not slain and those that the crickets had not eaten. And there was a great cloud in the air and the man and woman left the room while the manservant slew the biting bugs, for the air was unfit for breathing.
And the manservant brought a broom and he brought also unto Room 15 a shovel and he cleaned the room of the dead biting bugs and even the dead crickets. For they had to be sacrificed so that the man and the woman could inhabit the room. There was no joy in Room 15 that the crickets had to die so that the man and the woman could sleep.
And peace fell upon Room 15. And in the morning, the manservant said unto the manager of the guesthouse that he had never seen so many biting bugs in one place. He said that he was sore afraid of the biting bugs but he had dispatched them and they would bother the guests no more. In the sun of the new day the man and the woman knew in their hearts they would return to the earth in another time and they would come as biting bugs for they had much penance to pay for the death and destructions that they had brought upon the community of biting bugs.

On the Mountain Top

A fast-rolling river cuts through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Elkmont, Tennessee.

“They carefully got all the mud and they laid it out on the rocks. And when it was dry enough, Grandfather threw it out into the water, and it became land. And the buzzard flew with his great wings. Each time when his wings went down, it would make a big valley. And each time the wings would go up, it would make a big mountains.
- Adapted from Living Stories of the Cherokee, “How the World was Made.” Kathi Smith Littlejohn


In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.
- Genesis 1:1,9,10, The Bible, King James Version

It came to pass that we came into the Great Smoky Mountains to camp amid the mountains and the billions of falling leaves. The creeping walking pneumonia that I have been battling since sitting on a ridge in Reston, Virginia, is not better. But sitting in the national park lifted the spirits. Outside our RV on Tuesday night was a man with a sophisticated telescope. He had it trained on Jupiter so we watched that planet in the pristine night air. Four moons orbited around the planet and he said if we watched long enough we would be able to see gas trails coming off the planet. What a treat!

You have no electricity, running water or sewers or other niceties in the National Park. So it was a cold night: temperatures dropped to 36 degrees. Jo and I huddled under layers of comforters and blankets and the cat snuggled into the bend of Jo's knees. She was content to have us back in the rig after two nights when we luxuriated in the welcoming home of old boating buddies Terry and Susan in Banner Elk, North Carolina. Their home is perched on the side of a mountain and sends out vibrations of peacefulness. They took us up Grandfather Mountain. It's a mile high and the ice coated trees at the summit. But there's also a million dollar view up there and we loved watching the bears, deer and two cougars. This was a rare treat.

Now we are enjoying the beauty of the Smokies. But the road in, through Sevierville, Pigeon's Forge and Gatlinburg was the most horrendously commercial, filled with the ticky-tacky detritus of the worst of American consumption and gaudiness. It took more than an hour to drive 18 miles because of the nose-to-tail traffic.

So it was a spiritually uplifting moment to drive to the top of the Smokies and make our way to Clingmans Dome, a sacred mountain to the Cherokees, where the Magic Lake was once seen. The Great Spirit told the Cherokees that, “if they love me, if they love all their brothers and sisters, and if they love the animals of the earth, when they grow old and sick, they can come to a magic lake and be made well again.” My cough and rattling lungs were not healed by the climb to 6,600 feet. But I have faith that the journey in itself is the healing part.

This is where the Cherokee Trail of Tears began. You may remember, back in June, when we parked at the Trail of Tears Park alongside the Mississippi, we told a bit about the trail. This is the place where the Cherokees lived for thousands of years. And this is where the white settlers discovered gold and the fertile land they craved. So the Army pushed the Indians to the unexplored west.

A Ford van from Ohio pulled up alongside us and out stepped a gaggle of Mennonites. The men's pants don't have much in the way of pockets; they had a single button that held a triangular patch that, when closed, acted as a pocket. The ladies were in their white linen hats. All spoke in old German. They, too, came to feel the spirituality of the place.

Meeting George Washington

George Washington rides out.

We've parked our rig on a hill overlooking the capital. We took advantage of our location to visit the home of George Washington at Mount Vernon in Virginia. And we took, among other things, a slave tour. We were left in awe about this rich farmer who managed more than 300 slaves by the end of his life. Our tour guide, a Virginia gentleman named Allen Sandler, did a super job of shining light into the darkness of slave life.
George, like nine other presidents of the U.S., first inherited his father's slaves when the old man died when George was aged 12. When he married Martha, a widow of one of the richest men in the the commonwealth, he picked up about 200 slaves through her dead husband's estate. Interesting to us was that he did not have any right to sell the slaves he had acquired through marriage.
After the war that resulted in independence for the colonies he began to rethink the moral issues of owning other men and women. He decided he never would sell his slaves on the auction block. And that, in itself, created a huge problem for him. It meant he had to feed and clothe these people as their number increased. Remember, when a slave got to be too old for work, you had to effectively put them out to pasture but still feed and clothe them. At one point he complained that the number of slaves could bankrupt him. The entire slave culture was a no-win situation. You had totally unmotivated workers who spent more time trying to figure how to avoid work instead of trying to accomplish tasks. They also spent much of their time trying the cheat and steal from their master because morale was not at highest priority. Then you had to have a class of overseers to push and prod them.
He actually included in his will that his slaves would be freed upon the death of Martha, assuming she outlived him. She in fact lived for more than two years after he died and told her friends that she lived in fear because so many slaves were awaiting her death. Could she really trust Lilly, the cook, for example, or the black ladies who cleaned her house?
We met up with a black re-enactor who was George Washington's riding aide. He did a grand job of explaining his life at the side of his master. I asked him why he felt loyalty to his master and he made an elegant and moving response about believing that his master's leading of the fight for freedom was like a small snowball at the top of the mountain. He said many of the slaves believed this snowball's fall down the mountain would eventually encompass the needs of the slaves. He said he and they didn't realize it would take 63 years after his master's death before the Emancipation Proclamation would be signed by President Lincoln.
We wandered through Mount Vernon, a sprawling home that is quite spectacular. Washington designed it and redesigned through the years. It looks as though it is built of stone, the blocks being beveled and snugly placed row upon row. It turned out, however, that the huge home is built of wood. The wood was cut and beveled and then was varnished and painted. While the paint was still wet, sand was sprinkled on the wood resulting in the fake stone look.
It is situated on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. It sits on around 5,000 acres. The land mostly was used to grow tobacco – the only crop that could be exported to Europe back then. But George changed that over to wheat and grains because he built a distillery and he could supply his own ingredients for the booze.
But it was labor intensive to farm that many acres in those good old days before the tractor. Hence the need for the Africans.
He also brought in many white indentured servants and Mr. Lee, his riding aide, made it very clear that these indentured servants were similar in many ways to slaves. They signed a contract that paid their passage over and they agreed to work for the master for seven years. But, once here, you began to owe your life to the company store and that, along with transgressions, extended the contract year after year. So the Irish and the Scots who worked his farm were there, effectively, for life.
George brought in a gardener from Scotland and he oversaw a large number of slaves because the master liked fancy gardens and kept a substantial vegetable patch. He also had trees planted, some of which stand majestically along the approach to the house to this day.
His greatest contributions, I think, were twofold. After winning the war of independence he resigned his commission instead of following the advice of some of his officers who suggested he should name himself king of the colonies. And, when he was elected the first president, he ran for only two terms. This set the precedent for all other presidents.
Jo was most impressed with a small exhibit in one of the museums. Inside a low-light room, inside a circular case, were his false teeth. They were not made of wood, despite the circulated myth. These fine choppers were made from human teeth, along with pieces of bone from a cow. They were set in a plate of lead so it is a bit of a miracle that the lead didn't affect his brain.