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.

Restoring the soul

This fine fellow is dressed as an officer of the 42nd regiment of the Black Watch which was sent to New York in 1776 to put down the rebellion in the colonies.

There was a drizzle permeating the air as we rolled over Mohawk Mountain and came to the little village of Goshen in northwest Connecticut where we attended the Scottish Games. This was the culmination of a soul restoration program over the past month that had taken us deep into the backwoods of Maine.
We had canoed in the silent, still waters of Acadia National Park. We had fairly stuffed ourselves with awesomely cheap Maine lobster. Because of over supply, the price has fallen sharply and we were happy to the beneficiaries of the sweet meat at $3.95 a pound.
We had launched our canoe on Sebasticook Lake in the middle of the state where we stayed with old sailing friends. And we had criss-crossed Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, admiring the screaming scarlets and magentas and orange leaves of the maple trees as they prepared to shed their beauty for the coming winter.
Now, on this drizzling day, we came to Goshen. The misty meadows seemed a fitting place for the Highland Games. And the visiting preacher noted the occasion by thanking God for making the day a "perfect replica of what we might experienced were we standing on the beloved old country."
We had come for the sheepdog trials and watched, laughing, as a woman shepherd called to her dog to "come by" and to "stay down; stay down" as he rounded up three geese and tried to bring them down the field. The geese were having none of it, though, and they had to be declared the winners.
Another dog did a great job of rounding up the sheep and bringing them home to the pen.
We watched rugged men and even-more-rugged women throw the hammer across a field. The women were hefty and did a pretty good job. But it took a powerful black man in a plain dark blue kilt to win the event with an awesome throw of 124 feet.
In one of the tents, Jo held up a silver goblet and asked me what it was for. I told her it is a "quaich" and that it's formally used for toasting friends. The owner of the tent spoke up: "You're the first person whose ever pronounced that correctly," he said. I explained I was a native of Scotland, which led to the questions about where. It turned out he and I were from the same town, Inverness. He wanted to know where in Inverness and I told him Haugh Road. He not only knew the road but knew the old grocery shop over which we lived 60 years ago. He and his wife told us they had come over from Scotland 10 years ago. She said Inverness is the fastest-growing town in the whole of Scotland because of a huge spurt in jobs from a medical supply manufacturer.
We wandered over to Camerons, the pie-maker. We bought our Scottish meat pies, some sausage rolls and Forfar bridies. These will be used slowly as we wander south to the warmth of Florida.

This young girl recounts her voyage across the Atlantic to Plimouth Plantation in what would become Massachusetts.

I'm crouched in the forecastle of the Mayflower II, huddling to keep out of the brisk breeze rolling in out of the southeast. Beside me is a young girl, wearing at least four layers of rough-woven clothes. She grasps a pottery jug in which she carries a little water. She is recounting for me the horror of the voyage across the ocean in 1620 – for that is her reality. She tells me her brother and her sister died on the voyage. Her father, mother and another sister survived. There are no histrionics coming from her; just the honest simplicity of her narrative.
I am fully engaged in her make-believe world. I ask what her father did in England and she tells me he was a shop-keeper. But that reality trips me up. For this place to which she has come, Plimouth Plantation, the first settlement of white people in the northern part of the new world, is an inhospitable place. There is no possibility that a shop-keeper can thrive here for this is place where a man must turn his hand to pure survival.
Winter is coming, there are no crops possible for the growing season is over. The ship's master aboard the Mayflower wants to load the hold with furs and other goods to take home to England so his owners will gain something from this voyage. But there is no possibility of this and so he loads the hold of the ship with stones to provide the necessary ballast.
“Why did your father come here?” I asked her. “This is no place for a shop-keeper, surely.” A little smile played on her thin lips, she looked off into the middle distance and said quietly, “We came for the land.” Then she explained how each adult aboard the Mayflower was guaranteed a share. And a share translated to 50 acres of land. She, as a young girl, was entitled to a half share. Her baby brother would be allocated a quarter share – 12.5 acres.
“It is my dowry, you see, sir,” she said to me. This land could never have been her's in England. Now she tells me her father is struggling to get the shares of the dead children put in his name so that he can enlarge his holdings and make up, in a small way, for their deaths.
Jo and I had spent the morning in Plimouth Plantation, mingling with the Wampanaok Indians who worked the land, eking out a living while straddling time. They spoke with us in contemporary English and were able to provide us through their oral history the saga of death that followed the arrival of the white people. They spoke of how their village had been essentially destroyed before the arrival of the men, women and children aboard the Mayflower. French traders had come through and spread their diseases, including yellow fever, which wiped out more than 90 per cent of the village. These were not warlike people. I asked who they considered their enemies before the arrival of the white man and a middle-aged women, marked with zig-zag tattoos on her face and arms, drew her deerskin top around her shoulders and told me the tribe struggled with the Narragansett Indians to the southwest. But mostly they got along, she said.
We left her village and made our way along a primitive path to the Plantation where the new settlers worked at basic survival while fearing God and struggling to maintain order and solidarity in the face of the potential of attacks by the “heathen savages”.
We wandered into the thatched home (just one room inside) of Mr. Brewster who preached to the settlers. He told us he was not an ordained minister and could not serve the sacraments to the people. But all members of the community were required to come to the public meeting house at the top of the hill in the village each sabbath. There, he read from a bible that pre-dated the King James Version because, he told me, he could not accept that the king had the right to to remove all of the explanations in the margins which appeared in the earlier version of the bible. “The king believes – mistakenly, I believe, sir – that the common people need not know the explanations. He believes – mistakenly, I believe, again – that the priest can explain what they need to know.” He worked up quite a lather as he explained to us that the Puritans did not need a church building – for the church is within each person, he said. And then, as I drew him out, he explained there are still Church of England believers in the community and there are Separatists who have a much more austere view of the role of the church and the clergy than even the Puritans. They are a problem for Mr. Brewster for they can upset the potential stability of the tiny community.
We crossed the dirt street and came into the home of a middle-aged woman who worked at her wooden table, cutting eggs which she then placed in a clay bowl with butter and some mustard seeds. She placed that bowl among the embers of the fireplace as she explained to us how hard her life is. More than half of the settlers already were dead, she said. She did praise her rooster which she and her husband had brought across. “Ah, sir, I tell you it was something to see. When a fox came upon my 15 chickens, the fox managed to kill one of the chickens before the cock jumped on his back and rode him out of the yard. I think he will not be back,” she chuckled at the memory.
She told me about a learned man whose house was filled with books that he had brought aboard the Mayflower. I asked her is she was able to read and she half smiled at such a silly notion. “What need do I have for Greek and Latin texts, sir, in this wilderness? I do not read. But my husband does read some.” She then explained that there was no need for a woman to have the reading ability. Her husband would explain to her all she needed to know.
She asked me, if I found her husband up the hill working on making coal – by which she meant charcoal – to tell him she has made buttered eggs for his dinner and he should come home. I promised to do this if I found him.
We found three men, with rich Lincolnshire accents, working on the charcoal. I asked if they sold the charcoal and they laughed and said this was not a commercial enterprise. “We make the coal for the forger, sir, so that he can make nails and spikes for us.” He explained there is no commercial venture possible because there is no money and no need. I asked if he would not trade the charcoal with the Indians and, again, he looked at me as though I had just dropped in from another planet.
“No, no, sir. The Indians have no need of coal for they have no metal except for what we have given them. They have no need for this precious coal and they would know not what to do with it.” I told him his wife awaited him with her buttered eggs and that clearly brightened his day.
Back aboard the Mayflower, we chatted with John Alden, a young fellow, with greasy hair and dirty clothes. He said his job aboard was to be a cooper, making barrels. He suggested I meet the ship's master who would fill me in on the trading with the natives.
We found the master below decks. He played with his stocking, pulling them up and stuffing them under his pantaloons. He had a sharp, aquiline face, not unkind, but you could sense he'd suffer no nonsense aboard his ship.
“I am God aboard my ship, sir. I care not whether you are Puritan, Separatist or Church of England. You can worship any God you choose. But on board this ship my word is the law.”
He told of meeting another captain, John Smith, who had played a major role in setting up the Jamestown Plantation in Virginia.
“Ah, sir, John Smith was a master at negotiating with the savages,” he told me as he pulled his dagger from his belt. He handed me the dagger outside its sheath and then turned away from me. “That is how Capt. Smith negotiated, sir. He handed the Indian such a dagger then turned his back on the savage to show that he trusted the savage not to drive the dagger into his back. In this way, he showed he trusted the savage and, the Indian thus became his friend. I have learned much from Smith,” he said.
And so it went, we were transported back three centuries to that special time when the first settlers left their imprint on the land.
We met many others who helped us understand how the Mayflower worked out by dead reckoning where the ship lay in the great unknown of the vast ocean. We came away with a great sympathy for those who made that initial step. The next time this will transpire most likely will be when we build a settlement on the moon or Mars. The only difference will be that while we might botch the settlement and contaminate a new planet, we probably won't mess up the natives. But do we really know that?

Back on a Boat

Jo paddles down the Winooski River between Burlington and Colchester, Vermont.


We pretty much knew it was a matter of time before we found a boat that met our need to be back on the water.
Our requirements were quite particular: It had to be a canoe. It had to be built of Kevlar to keep it light, light, light. And it had to be affordable. You are in conflict when you use the words Kevlar and Affordable. Kevlar canoes, because they are so light, are at the top of the cost chain. But I kept checking, checking checking as we drove through the country.
We found a demo canoe last year in Freeport, Maine. But it was terribly expensive and we held off. As time went by, however, that canoe looked more and more appealing so we made plans to revisit the manufacturer this year to see if they had another demo.
In the meantime, I would browse Craigslist at every stop along the way as we rolled through Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ontario, New York, Connecticut and, now, Vermont. And so it came to pass that Vermont delivered the goods. An old man with bad knees in St. Albans, VT - the most northerly town in the state - offered his seven-year-old Kevlar canoe for sale. We made contact and visited with him Thursday.
And, today, we own a canoe. It seems to be hardly used. And it comes fully equipped with two life jackets, two paddles, car-carrying pads and straps and even a woven seat back so old guys can have some comfort. And, best of all, it weighs only 42 pounds at 14 feet long.
Jo and I launched it after driving it back south to daughter Stephanie's place in Colchester, VT. We paddled through Malletts Bay, visiting the myriad sailboats moored in the bay. Delightful. We look forward to getting it back to Florida where we can explore the bays and backwaters, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, we are homeless while the repair shop tears apart our damaged coach and rebuilds it.
Before we left Kent, Connecticut, we were invited to one of the best parties we've ever attended. Celia and Rich Pomerantz have been good friends since I employed Celia as an ad sales person back in 1984 after I took over as publisher of the weekly newspaper group in New Milford, CT.
She has the uncanny skill of collecting disparate but interesting people and throwing them together. She did it again last Sunday. We met a screen writer and her boyfriend who is a farmer, two gay guys who are in interior design, and a magazine editor. The designers were fascinating because one of them had just completed a two-year contract to decorate the interior of a - wait for it - $275 million home in Palm Beach, Florida. That's not a misprint!
He regaled us with stories of buying stupendously expensive lamps and Ian Calder mobiles. The owners of the home liked the mobile but were not sure about whether it would fit. So they had an artisan replicate the mobile in finest detail and color and hung it to confirm it was "perfect" for the space. The designer then went ahead and purchased the mobile. He asked if he could keep the replica since it was, for all purposes, a Calder mobile. But the owners insisted it be destroyed so there would be only the original. The great irony is that this $275 million home remains unoccupied because the wife doesn't really like it. We offered to drive down and move in as a house sitter so long as they'd allow us to plug in our motor home at the side!
The designers defended this excessive consumption as the epitome of the American way, saying this is how America stays economically strong. Jo and I, of course, represent the extreme other end of the consumption spectrum and so the debate was sparkling. The screen writer was moderator as she probed our belief system of "simplify, simplify, simplify". She grilled Jo on whether or not she was happy in our modest little motor home and Jo's comment that it was "okay" was seen by Celia as a Maine native's high praise without being too gushing!
The party went into the night and the two designers headed back to New York City, still convinced, I believe, we must be un-American at the very least.
Maybe if they knew we'd bought a Kevlar canoe they would perceive us as at least pulling an oar in doing our part to put the American economy back on its correct footing.