Saturday, June 25

All the news on TV and radio is about Brexit. Few pundits expected the Brits to leave the EU, but here we are with everything now up in the air. No one knows how this will ultimately play out, certainly not me, but this I do know: for us it is a shot across the bow.

This is what scares the bejesus out of me. A large number of those who voted to leave– nobody knows exactly how many, of course, but a lot–did not understand what the implications of leaving the EU actually were. (This is based on Google searches, Twitter, Facebook comments, and post election interviews .) They did not vote against leaving the EU so much as they voted against the Establishment. The votes were pretty much along class lines with the more educated, the professionals, the well-off voting to stay in and the working class–and those whose lives are disrupted by the new globalism– voting to get out. The Establishment wants in? A vote against the Establishment sends a message. The same thing, of course, is happening here with the Trump phenomena. Trump is sticking it to the traditional leaders of both parties. A vote for Trump sends a message—throw the bums out. Hillary is quintessential establishment. It could happen here.

So what is behind all this? A few years ago when I was teaching a course on housing and urban policy at GW, I told my students that I could not understand the steep rise in housing prices since incomes determine how much house you can afford and incomes had been stagnant for years. All I knew was that the bubble had to burst. (If only I had been smart enough to do a Big Short!) The income issue is what is behind Brexit and behind the Trump (and Sanders) movement—along with fears of change, being left out of the new global economy and the changing nature of the  population. Of course people are angry, and many have good reason to be angry. They have been hurt as good jobs have been shipped off shore and competition for the scraps that remain increases. They do not see the current political system working for them.

As we cross the country on the southern route, I check online for basic demographic information, such as race and income. It is no surprise that many of the states we have visited—Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma—have median incomes below the national median in the low $50,000s. Try living comfortably on $50,000 for a family of four. Sure, prices are lower here than in DC, but not all that much lower.

Bottom line: this is the fundamental issue that has got to be fixed. The challenge is that in the brave new world of a global economy nobody really knows how to do it. There is no silver bullet. It is going to take a long time and will require a lot of smart people working on it. If it does not happen? Think housing bust of 2008 or worse.

The fear I have regarding Trump is that the same mentality that caused people to vote against their own self interest in the UK in order to make a point will happen here. Trump is the farthest thing we need—an insecure, ignorant, ego maniac with fascist inclinations. Yet voting for him makes a point.

It could happen here.

Visit me on Substack!
Subscribe to my Substack!

Friday, June 24

Mile 1,575. After a somewhat futile effort to swim in the Crescent swimming pool in the early morning rain (first rain we have seen)—shallow end about one foot deep—we enjoy a big breakfast in the somewhat tarnished “Crystal Room” and head off toward Oklahoma where we will spend the evening.

The drive through the Ozarks is beautiful as the rain subsides, the mist rises and blue begins to appear through the clouds. I am reminded again that extraordinary beauty is to be found throughout our vast country.

The beauty subsides as we drive through a small town at the intersection with I-49, the earth begins to flatten out again, and all the in-your-face signs for fast food, motels and gas stations clutter what would otherwise be the last vista of the beautiful Ozarks. How did we allow the junkifying of small town America to happen?

We have three days to make it to Albuquerque to pick up our eleven-year-old grandson, Jasper, in the afternoon. This will be the first of three long days of driving. Several people who are reading the blog have asked that we slow down, which is good advice, but actually we are not as tired as it might appear. At the end of the day we are pretty worn out but have been able to get a pretty good rest overnight and arise fresh and ready to go (more or less). (When I talk about being tired, you can bet I am writing in the evening.)

The highlights are the ever-changing landscape from the green Ozark mountains to vast fields of crops and then pastures and finally gray prairie. Unlike the Eastern U.S. rural areas, there are very few houses and surprisingly few cows or horses to be seen. The traffic on I-40 has thinned out considerably as well, relieving some of the stress of driving. Two things particularly stand out—the vast blue sky with white cloud puffs and a consistent, strong wind. I thought that this part of the journey would be rather boring but actually it is not for me. I am fascinated by the vastness of the landscape.

We pass the border to Oklahoma as the pastures change to plains. Then we pass through one “nation” after another of Native Americans—Cherokee Nation, then Kickapoo, Shawnee, Potatomi, Chickasaw, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. The plains are vast and from I-40 no sign of any settlements. I can’t help thinking, where is everyone?

Evening at the Best Western in Clinton, OK, Mile 1,967 with left over pizza from our dinner at the Crescent.

The big news of the day, of course, is Brexit and what it means for the UK, the EU, and for the U.S. More on that to follow….

Visit me on Substack!
Subscribe to my Substack!

Thursday, June 24

When we arrived in Memphis Wednesday evening, the elegant lobby of the Peabody Hotel was packed with convention goers—men in dark suits and women in business dresses—sipping drinks, talking enthusiastically and seemingly enjoying the high energy setting with a jazz pianist playing away but hard to hear with all the chatter. I remember those days myself and briefly ponder the scene with mixed emotions. I admit I loved such gatherings then but I am glad I am standing here now wearing a golf shirt, shorts and a baseball cap, observing it all as a bystander.

We were so tired we ordered dinner in and crashed around nine. (Embry had another All Souls rector search interview.)

Thursday morning was a highlight for Embry. We met Curry in the lobby for a long breakfast in the Peabody dining room. Curry and Embry were classmates from first grade through high school, and his family was very close to the Martin family since his father was dean of the faculty of Davidson and hers president. They re-bonded immediately, sharing childhood and teenage stories and catching up on almost 50 years of going their separate ways. Like Embry he also had earned a PhD (geophysics), and has recently retired from the faculty of UT-Memphis where he was an earthquake expert. This visit marks our last reunion for a while, which I am not too unhappy about since the energy involved in such reconnections is very high and my energy level at this point might be described as very low.

After breakfast we visited the National Civil Rights Museum. This is an extraordinary museum, which should require a day though we had only a couple of hours. I spent a good bit of time in the section on the early years—especially the Albany Movement where we had worked in 1966, while Embry visited the museum annex across the street focusing on King’s assassination . What a privilege and blessing to have been part of the Civil Rights Movement! How lucky we were to be alive at that time and in that place.

Now off to the Crescent Hotel, a Nineteenth Century historic hotel located in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. The first 100 miles were tedious as we made our way along a bumper-to-bumper I-40, squeezed between 18 wheelers going 80 miles an hour—even worse traffic than on I-81 on our way to Asheville. Eventually we turn off onto Arkansas state road 23, which is the complete opposite—more like a country lane, weaving up and down green mountains with towering trees, making us feel at times like we were on a roller coaster. For the first 50 miles we could not have seen more than a dozen cars and very few houses or signs of human life. Eventually the road leveled off a bit, and billboards started to appear advertising hotels in Eurika Springs, the location of the Crescent hotel. It was close to sunset when we entered the outskirts of this Victorian village, with gingerbread-looking houses, cute, touristy stores of all sorts and pleasantly crowed sidewalks. It took another 15 minutes to find the Crescent Hotel, which involved going down narrow streets, up steep hills and one sharp turn after another.

After a day of another high energy reunion, the Civil Rights Museum and 250 miles of driving in trying conditions, boy, were we ready for this hotel! Embry had found it online and noted that it was one of the most historic hotels in the country.

Now at this point I have to admit that ever since we moved from our house on Macomb Street to the Kennedy-Warren, I have come to expect as normal a somewhat higher level of excellence in living standards. I am the first to admit that this may be a dangerous sign of elitism, but it is what it is. At the K-W, there is a doorman, concierge, world class fitness center, lap pool, and elegant bar. Images of the Kennedy-Warren were swarming in my head along with those of the Homestead and Greenbrier– Five Star, world class resorts in remote locations as certainly this resort hotel was. As a destination hotel listed in the National Register of Historic Places, this would be one of those special hotels. I could already taste the martini and was wondering what delicious choices would be on the dinner menu. Embry was obviously wondering the same thing and said she hoped she had brought a nice enough dress.

As we parked and headed with our baggage to the main entrance, I did notice signs of peeling paint and rusty railings on this five-story, stone structure but did not think much of it. Besides the temperature was in the mid 90s with sweltering humidity. I could not wait to get inside to cool off and unwind.

A lean young man dressed in a shabby uniform opened the door. I immediately realized this was not the Homestead. There was no air conditioning, and it was probably hotter inside than out. Ceiling fans were swirling futilely. The walls were dark paneled with dusty pictures of the building decades ago along with news clippings of events in the 1920s. A tarnished gold plaque boasted, “Renovated in 1922.” Bits of paper and trash were on the floor. The dark rugs in the hallway were worn and in some places stained, the modest lobby furniture was drab and pretty beat up, and the ceiling lights so dim you would have a hard time reading. People dressed in jeans and shorts were milling around, but no one was sitting. We soon learned that they no longer served any dinner, but we could get some pizza on the third floor if we were hungry.

We looked at each other, groaned under our breath and made our way in the sweltering heat to our third floor room. There were some 15-20 people, mainly high school or college age, listening intensely to a slim young woman talk about spirits, ghosts, weird deaths, and pointing in the direction of our room. We managed to squeeze our way through the group and open the door to find a tiny room with dark red walls and red ceiling, torn brown carpet, one light hanging from the ceiling and barely enough room for a small double bed. There was an air conditioner in the window but it did not work, nor did the fan. We could not open the windows.

This was our introduction to the Crescent Hotel, founded in 1886 and now in its “Second Renaissance.”

The story has a happy ending. After protesting we were given a cottage suite, about a quarter mile down the hill, which was pretty nice. We did manage to walk back to get a beer and a pizza where we were one of only a handful of people and waited on by a very friendly, African American, 19-year old basketball player on his way to a junior college at the end of the summer, determined to succeed. The pizza was good enough, and we learned that the big draw of the hotel is that it is “the most haunted hotel in America.”

Not the Greenbrier but worth putting on your list—if you want a good story.

Visit me on Substack!
Subscribe to my Substack!

Monday, June 20-Wednesday, June 23

It turns out that doing a blog post every day is a bit of a stretch so here is a brief summary of our next three days, all spent in Tennessee.

• Monday, a wonderful visit with Eslick and his wife, Annie, dear friends from high school days on their 200 acre farm about 40 miles south of Nashville in one of the most beautiful parts of Middle Tennessee. Steak dinner that evening with the cousins and sister-in-law, Kathy, at Curt and Val’s house.
• Tuesday, hanging out with Kathy at her house where we are staying. (My brother died of cancer seven years ago in his early sixties.) Afternoon visit with cousin Buck in his law office on floor 29 of a downtown skyscraper, tour of downtown Nashville and the Country Music Hall of Fame, dinner with the cousins at the Firefly, Curt’s restaurant in the Green Hills suburb of Nashville. (Embry had to miss the two dinners to listen to telephone interviews with candidates in the All Souls search process.)
• Wednesday, off to Memphis, via Vanleer, a tiny town about 50 miles northwest of Nashville, where we visit Ashley (friend from Union Seminary days and our housemate in Southwest GA in 1966 when we worked for SNCC in the Civil Rights Movement) and his wife, Susan, on their beautiful 175 acre farm. Arrival in Memphis around eight where we stay at the famous Peabody Hotel. We just pass Mile 1,100 on the trip meter. I wonder again how long we can keep up this pace.

These were three jam packed days mainly spent renewing old and precious friendships and experiencing Nashville, which has changed in many ways (bigger buildings downtown and sprawling suburbs) but still looks pretty much the same in the neighborhood where I grew up, Belle Meade. I marvel at the stately mansions and manicured lawns and wonder where the money comes from to buy these things. It also occurs to me that when I grew up in Belle Meade, all the people owning these homes were in my parents’ generation. Now they are younger than me, some probably in our children’s generation. Of course, you think, that is the way life works. But it is a reminder as to how fast time goes by, how much things change and yet stay the same.

I grew up thinking that the Nashville environs was the most beautiful place on earth with its green hills and fields, winding streams, meadows and farm lands. Now, having traveled to scores of countries around the world, I still think so and suppose this is not all that unusual for people to do, though I will now concede that Middle Tennessee is actually only one of the most beautiful places.

I was sorry not to be able to visit more friends but time was limited. I think how lucky I was to grow up here, to have loving parents, and to have so many friends, many of whom have had distinguished and fulfilling careers and interesting and, I believe, fulfilling lives. I wonder when and if I will see them again.

Visit me on Substack!
Subscribe to my Substack!

June 15, 2016

Mile 347. We are in the Tennessee part of Bristol and it is Thursday morning. The mountains are shrouded in mist, which creates a feeling of enchantment. Just before ten we check out of the Hampton Inn and head downtown to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum. When the early recording industry was taking off in the 1920s, a record producer from New York spent ten days in Bristol recording local musicians playing mountain music. The event became known as the Bristol Sessions of 1927 and was the first time anything like this had ever happened. Dozens local musicians (including Maybelle Carter) and scores of “hillbilly” songs were recorded. Now a Smithsonian museum, which opened just over a year ago, occupies what was once a factory building where you can hear these early recordings and see films and videos of contemporary artists playing and talking about early country music. The museum is fabulous—worth a trip from Washington just to see it and nothing else. But we discover that actually there is much else going on in Bristol and environs, which it turns out is in the middle of a 10-day music festival where dozens of musicians play bluegrass, “Old Timey,” country, and folk music. We lament that we do not have time to see any of this and make a note to come down for the festival in 2017 or soon after.

Lunch was in The Eatz, a small and busy mom and pop lunch spot around the corner specializing in home cooked soul food. After we polished off fried cat fish, collard greens, coleslaw and mac and cheese, the owner came over to ask us about how we liked the meal and where we were from. An African American in his fifties, after retiring from the postal service ten years ago, he and his wife started the restaurant catering to the few people who still work downtown and occasional tourists. We commented that we were impressed with way that the small downtown area had been preserved and revitalized, to which he responded that actually Bristol was in real trouble—especially the part that is in Virginia (which is a separate town from the Tennessee portion).

He complained that the town was continuing to lose population and that his children all settled elsewhere after college since few jobs were available in Bristol. He said this was true of most small towns in the region. The shopping malls and big box stores had sucked the old town centers dry leaving vacant stores and dilapidated buildings. Bristol had at least preserved one street and did enjoy some tourism, but in his view it was a case of too little too late. Listening to him describe a fairly bleak picture, it occurred to me that Bristol could be the poster child for small towns throughout much of rural America. Only remnants remain of what used to be a vital downtown core, now surrounded by several rings, the first an ugly ring of used car lots, junk yards, fast food joints, honky-tonk bars, vacant lots, pawnshops, flea bag motels, auto supply stories and the like. The next ring includes the older neighborhoods with a few big old homes, most here built in the nineteenth century and mostly decaying, and a predominance of smaller, modest, brick houses. The third ring is dominated by the big box stores and national chains located near the interstate intersections. Near them you can find most of the newer and nicer homes.

In the case of Bristol, all the homes we saw were very modest. The Eatz owner explained that 18 families controlled 80% of the wealth in Bristol and that for the most part the rest of population was struggling to make ends meet. I checked out some of the demographic facts on the internet: total population for both cities under 50,000 and stable (Tennessee) or shrinking (Virginia). Median income for a family of four in 2010, $37,000 and probably no higher in 2016. Population 95% white. Trump country. How I wonder can a family live comfortably on that amount of money? The answer is that they can’t, and this has got to be a major factor in our summer of discontent.

From Bristol we take the shortest route to Asheville, only 85 miles, which we thought might be the most scenic, which it would have been were it not for the motels, chain restaurants, car lots, gas stations, churches (mainly Baptist and Pentecostal) and garish billboards plastering the roadside. Thinking of our Big Trip last summer and the quaint charm of villages throughout Europe and much of Asia, I can’t help concluding that what we have done in this country to sully and demean the natural beauty of our land has got to go down as a national tragedy. It did not have to be this way. We could have done better. Trained as a city planner and having taught planning-related courses at GW and Maryland, I wonder if there is any other profession that can boast of the kind of abject failure that has occurred on our watch. There are bright spots, of course, with concepts like New Urbanism, which promotes compact, high density, mixed use, transit-oriented development , but these sophisticated concepts might just as well be on the moon when it comes to towns and villages losing jobs and population and trying to hang on by a thread.

As we leave Bristol we observe a mega structure situated in what probably was once a corn field, rising like a gigantic fortress, probably 15 stories high and surrounded by an empty parking lot that is probably larger than what is left of Bristol’s downtown. It turns out to be a giant stadium, at least as big as FedX Field in Washington where the Redskins play. Impossible, I think. This is a mirage. Bristol does not have a NFL team. As we get closer, we see the sign: “Bristol Motor Speedway.”

Just as we realized how much we were missing by not being able to take in some of the music festival, we think if only we could have planned to spend a day in the stands of the Bristol Motor Speedway along with 150,000 screaming fans. Then perhaps we would understand the Real America.

Still shaking our heads, we spot the exit on to Interstate 25 which will take us the remaining 70 miles to Asheville. This stretch of road—which cuts through a national forest– is what all interstate highways should be like: no advertising or billboards anywhere, only breathtaking views around every curve of the tallest mountains east of the Rockies with many peaks reaching 6,000 feet or higher.

Ashville here we come!

PS. Photos to follow when I am able to solve the upload problem.

Visit me on Substack!
Subscribe to my Substack!