Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 3

It’s Out There

Lately the hubs and I have been on something of a quest. For the last dozen years or so we’ve lived happily in a rapidly growing suburb of St. Louis. It’s been a great community for us with excellent schools for our sons, easy access to the city and its amenities, by which I mean baseball, and some of the best neighbors ever.

I’m really not in that much of a hurry. There are definitely some parts of moving that I’m not excited about. Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

But our youngest son is a senior in high school and almost a year ago, the hubs took a job that requires an hour long commute, so not too distantly in the future, it might be time for us to settle on a new home base.

We’ve been casually searching. Fortunately, we don’t have to be in a hurry, but I admit we’ve looked at quite a few properties and I’m starting to get a little frustrated. We’d like a bit more elbow room—space for a larger garden, a few fruit trees, and some chickens.

If we find a great plot of land and have to build a house, that would be okay, but ideally there’s a pretty little old farmhouse out there somewhere with a wood-burning fireplace and a good settin’ porch. Most importantly, though, it just has to feel right. Around every corner of windy country road, I hope that we’re going to spot this as-yet-unidentified perfect future home for us.

You just never know what might be waiting for you around the next bend in the road.

And it could happen, because you never know what a windy road will reveal. Last spring, on a family trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we rounded the corner of a windy road on Signal Mountain and discovered a UFO.

Actually, as much as it surprised me, I did have a pretty good idea what it was, because I had read about Futuro Houses, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968. These structures were prefabricated plastic homes constructed to resemble the Hollywood version of a flying saucer. Designed to be easily portable and to fit seamlessly into any terrain, the small houses contained a fireplace, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all behind a hatch door.

About one hundred of the UFO houses landed around the earth by the time the oil crisis of 1973 made the plastic structures cost-prohibitive to build. It also seems unlikely to me that there were ever more than a hundred people on Earth that might want to live in one.

A Futuro House just fitting in seamlessly with its surroundings. Henning Schlottmann (User:H-stt), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About sixty or so of the Futuros still exist around the world today, but I was surprised to discover that the flying saucer house on Signal Mountain just outside of Chattanooga isn’t one of them. Constructed in 1972, the Signal Mountain spaceship house certainly comes from the same cultural era as the Futuros, but with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full bar, plenty of custom curved furniture, and around 2,000 square feet worth of floor plan, there’s a lot more space in this spaceship. And as it’s constructed of bizarre building materials like steel and concrete, it’s probably less likely to actually take flight.

Much like its plastic Finnish cousin, to say that the flying saucer house of Signal Mountain fits seamlessly into its environment might be a stretch. Perhaps it would be better if it had a nice settin’ porch, and were located on a pretty piece of land in Missouri. I’m convinced it’s out there.

Just Don’t Tell the Historians

Many things likely happened in the year 1404. Numerous babies took their first breaths and plenty of people surely took their last. Battles were waged and both won and lost. Some powerful people became more powerful, while the power of others began to decline. And in Korea, the second king of the Joseon Dynasty, King Taejong, fell off his horse.

Taejong was on a deer hunt when it happened. As he drew his bow, his horse stumbled and the king took a tumble. History knows of the incident because of the Veritable Records, an important feature of the Joseon Dynasty, the last royal house to rule Korea. The records, written in Classical Chinese, were maintained by hired historians tasked with extensive and entirely neutral preservation of events related to the monarchy and the state.

And I mean the truth is, if Taejong hadn’t asked the historians not to write about the fall, they still might have, but we probably wouldn’t be talking about it 620 years later. Image by Joachim_Marian_Winkler from Pixabay

Historians in this role were guaranteed legal protection from the king for what they wrote, and in fact, he wasn’t allowed to see them at all. Only other historians could take a look. They were sworn to secrecy and faced severe punishment if they failed to keep it under wraps. To avoid any potential royal interference, the documents remained sealed until after the king’s death and the new king’s coronation.

So when Taejong fell from his horse that fateful day, we not only know that it happened, but we also know that he tried to hide it from the historians. Because they wrote about that part, too.

It’s an astonishing story, not that a powerful man fell from his horse, as I’m sure that could happen to anyone. And not that a powerful man would want to hide an embarrassing incident from history. But that powerful people believed so firmly in the importance of free and accurate reporting that they took pains to ensure it could happen, even when it meant they might wind up being the butt of the joke.

The Veritable Records are now digitized. With the exception of the those of the last two Joseon monarchs, which are believed to have been unduly influenced by the Japanese and are considered less reliable, they are part of the National Treasures of South Korea, and are included in the Memory of the World register of the the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

I’m cynical enough not to suggest that the Veritable Records are one hundred percent impartial. History is, after all, always written from the perspective of whatever imperfect human recorded it. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if the story was thrown in just to lend credibility to the rest.

Um, yeah. Probably not. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

But I still find it astonishing from a modern perspective. Because today it’s not uncommon to find out that a story that could show a powerful person in a bad light has been ignored, suppressed, or tweaked by an allegedly free press to suggest a secret organization of assassin horse trainers clearly has it out for a powerful person. Probably because the powerful person is racist. Or something.

Or, just as bad, that this allegedly free press has amplified, distorted, or misrepresented a story in order to make it seem like a tumble from a horse might just be a character-revealing act of animal cruelty by a person undeserving of power. And who is also probably a racist. Or something.

It’s a confusing place to be as a society, not to know if there are any trustworthy media sources out there, free from influence of the powerful attempting to control the flow of information to those of us schlubs that make up the confused masses.

I’m just cynical enough to believe that there aren’t.

Overcoming the Hangries

It was sometime in about 1840 or so that Duchess of Bedford Anna Maria Russell found herself getting a little hangry. At the time, surging industrialization had begun to transform the daily schedule of the English, the wealthiest of whom tended to eat breakfast around 9:00 in the morning, luncheon around noon or so, and then dinner not until around 8:00 PM. There might also be a late morning coffee or tea break referred to as elevensies, which I recently learned is not just for Hobbits. That still left a long stretch of time between meals in the afternoon and into the evening.

Anna Maria wasn’t having it. As a lifelong friend of Queen Victoria, serving as a Lady of the Bedchamber (which because my knowledge of aristocratic life comes only from The Crown and Downton Abbey, I assume is just the officially recognized BBF to the queen), she didn’t have to just accept her fate. She was a pretty important lady, so she decided to so something about it.

The duchess began ordering herself a cup of tea and a light snack sometime in the mid-afternoon, and soon found that made her day a lot more pleasant. It became such a habit that she started inviting other important ladies to join her. They liked it, too.

When Anna Maria occasionally took leave of the queen and traveled back to her countryside home in Wobrun, Bedfordshire, she continued enjoying afternoon tea, invited her countryside pals to join her as well, and the tradition of afternoon tea was born.

Then one sunny August afternoon in 2024, a group of pretty important ladies in the United States decided it was high time they participated in the grand tradition of afternoon tea, too.

Okay, so these ladies might not be BFFs with royalty, but they are pretty important to me. I do also realize this may not have been the first time afternoon tea was ever served in the United States. In fact, I remember participating in a version of it in my eighth grade social studies class.

All I really recall from that experience was that we had to wear fancy clothes, had to eat kind of gross cucumber sandwiches right after lunch that I’m assuming consisted of rectangular cafeteria pizza, were warned not to add both milk and lemon to our tea, and had to take at least one no thank you sip. It was a highly educational experience.

When more than three decades later, one of my pretty important friends decided to invite a bunch of her equally important friends to afternoon tea, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. Thankfully, eighth grade social studies had prepared me for such a time as this.

I donned fancy clothes, including a big hat of the variety rarely worn these days by American ladies unless they are either going to the Kentucky Derby or to high church on Easter Sunday, and they happen to be six years old. I enjoyed my tea with milk, and no lemon, and I ate delicious goodies including some cucumber sandwiches that were excellent and very welcome after I failed to eat a lunch of rectangular cafeteria pizza. Truth be told, by the time afternoon tea rolled around, I was getting a little hangry.

Could Substitute for Ordinary Food

In 1748 in a stroke of genius, the French Parliament solved an important problem by banning a loathsome and gnarled vegetable that while perhaps suitable for hogs, was known to cause leprosy when consumed by humans. The French people probably didn’t mind so much, because no one in their right mind would willingly eat a disgusting, likely poisonous, potato from the ground anyway.

I now understand why people might have mistrusted these things. The ants sure did enjoy them, though.

Fortunately the Prussians weren’t quite as persnickety. They cultivated the starchy root vegetable and didn’t hesitate to feed it to humans. And as it was cheap and easy to grow, they certainly fed it to prisoners during the Seven Years’ War.

One such prisoner of war was French pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier who discovered, much to his delight, that he neither died nor developed leprosy on his potato diet and that in fact, with a little butter, sour cream, or cheese, the pig food he’d been given might not be half bad.

When he returned to France, Parmentier set about repairing the damaged reputation of the veggie by going to scientific institutions and soliciting statements touting the safety of potatoes as a food source. Then when the poor harvest season of 1770 threatened famine, as was not an uncommon occurrence in European history up to this point, Prementier’s “Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables that in Times of Necessity Could Substitute for Ordinary Food,” won him a prize and some important attention.

They are kind of pretty. George Chernilevsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Soon King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette jumped on board the potato wagon, adorning their royal clothes with the potato’s purple flower. They also set aside a plot of land on which Parmentier could plant his favorite spuds, which he placed under guard during the day to bestow upon the tubers the appearance of great value.

Under the cloak of darkness, when the guards were strangely scarce, hungry and bold Parisians managed to sneak a few of the highly valued vegetable that nicely bulked up a stew, filled up empty bellies, and didn’t cause any of them leprosy.

I think that’s my favorite part of the story of this transformation from starchy enemy to super veggie. The humble little potato that only pigs would eat became a highly desirable rock star of a vegetable that helped stave off the cycles of famine and became so ubiquitous that instead of substituting for ordinary food as a necessity, it eventually became kind of plain potatoes.

My garden was supposed to yield up a lot of plain potatoes this year, but alas, in our attempt to garden as organically as possible, we left them unguarded just enough that an army of ants managed to feast on them before we could.

The best part of writing this post was that I had to make my favorite potato casserole. Alas, I had to do it with store-bought potatoes.

What we ended up with was a whole bunch of wrinkled, disgusting, half-decayed vegetables that surely would have given us leprosy.

Okay, probably not, but I’m not a huge potato eater anyway. I only really like them prepared a few specific ways—generally either fried crispy or baked into a casserole with a lot of butter and cheese (turns out I’m a bigger fan of fat than vegetables).

But now that I don’t have my garden potatoes to eat, I can truly appreciate the genius of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. After the ants got to my humble dirt vegetables, I was wishing I’d kept the garden under guard because all the other ordinary food I had to choose from just didn’t seem as appealing.

Guess I’ll get em next year.

T. Swift Vs. that Old Deluder Satan

It’s back to school time in my corner of the world, which means a couple of things: 1. It’s time to hit the Dixon Ticonderoga pencil sales and stock up 2. I’ve pretty much given up on watering my garden. And 3. I will (hopefully) be blogging more consistently every week.

It’s possible I have a tad obsession with these pencils.

Thank you to those of you who have still popped in to say hello through the summer as I followed a more casual posting schedule. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been pretty inconsistent about visiting the blogs of others, but I have high hopes of scooping up that dropped ball as well.

Even though my kids are no longer small and in need of constant supervision and entertainment through the summer months, there’s still something satisfying about beginning a new, regular schedule. My youngest son is a senior in high school this year, my oldest is beginning his second year of college, and I will be working at school in a full-time capacity for the first time since my college boy was a baby.

It feels good and right to all be participating in the wonderful tradition of pubic education that began in the United States in 1647 as a way to thwart the schemes of the Devil. That’s when the Massachusetts Bay Colony crafted a law firmly stating the guidelines necessary to ensure that its young people would be able to read the Bible and wouldn’t be susceptible to tricky demonic scheming.

All the desks have been scrubbed of bubblegum and graffiti, ready for the new year. Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay

The law, known colloquially as the Old Deluder Satan Law because it begins with the words: “In being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of Scripture . . .” was a more specific version of a similar law put into place in 1642.

The earlier law claimed that the responsibility to educate the young fell to the community. It’s replacement expanded on that by instituting firm guidelines, stating that a community of at least fifty households must appoint a public educator. If there were a hundred households, then there needed to be a qualified master who could prepare the young folks for Harvard where they could take Satan-fighting classes like ENGLISH 183:”Taylor Swift and her World,” GERMAN 260: “Writing the Body in the Posthuman Age,” or GEN ED 1090: “What is a Book?”

These are actual course offerings from the current Harvard catalog. Take that, you old deluder!

Take that, you old deluder! Image by from Pixabay

Of course our public schools are more secular these days, but there’s still some truth to the assumption that an educated public is one that is more analytical and is therefore less susceptible to being mislead by those with nefarious intentions.

I’d like to think that’s true, though the tone and quality of much of our public discourse leads me to believe we still have a lot of work to do. And so, I guess it’s time to get back to it. I’m armed with a stockpile of Dixon Ticonderogas, and I am ready.

Bring on the school year!

Wrong-Way Angleton

Recently, the hubs and I returned, via the back roads, from a quick getaway to commemorate our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was a lovely, relaxing couple of days. We hiked and swam and ate well and just generally enjoyed the kind of meandering schedule that’s hard to follow when you’re toting around bored teenagers.

And so it felt right when the hubs asked me if on the way home I’d like to explore the back roads where not so much as a single bar of GPS-supporting data signal can be found. It was a suggestion he made almost apologetically because he assumed I’d be more comfortable sticking to roads I know better.

That was a considerate thought, because I have been known to lose my way from time to time and it has occasionally been a traumatic experience. The truth is, though, I have pretty much accepted that this disadvantage is just part of who I am, and if I have the time, I’ve even enjoyed getting a little turned around, because one never knows when you might end up somewhere better than you’d intended to go.

That could have been the case for one pilot who has gone down in history for going the wrong way. Eleven years after he helped ready Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis for its famous nonstop flight across the Atlantic, mechanic Douglas Corrigan made headlines himself as the last of the great aviation transatlantic daredevils. For his efforts, he was inducted into the Burlington, Wisconsin Liars Club and his pilot’s license was suspended.

On July 17, 1938, not long after landing in New York in a rickety modified aircraft salvaged from the junkyard and held together by little more than the audacity and ingenuity of its pilot, Corrigan took off again to make the return trip west across the country. Then to the surprise of onlookers, he turned and headed east instead.

When he landed twenty-eight hours later in Dublin, he asked the locals where he was and explained that he and his unreliable old compass had gotten turned around in the clouds.

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, looking pretty happy to be wherever he is. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course not everyone believed the man who quickly became known as “Wrong-Way Corrigan,” possibly because his tale came with a wink and a grin. Also maybe because he’d already attempted to file a transatlantic flight plan in New York and had been denied since his plane was (I’m paraphrasing here) a hunk of junk.

The the public loved Corrigan, most likely because it’s kind of fun to root for an antihero who thwarted the rules and got away with. I have to assume, too, though, that there were a few sympathetic souls out there who thought there was a chance he was telling the truth.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who believed him was a gullible fool. I’m suggesting that they may have been the type who live with the condition I have come to know as directional insanity. As a fellow sufferer of this terrible malady, I could sympathize with a person who accidentally, delightfully, ended up in Ireland instead of California.

I’m not alone, either. In fact, there is a growing number of us. While I have been so afflicted since my earliest days of childhood, long before the era in which we all carry GPS devices in our pockets, the habitual use of such gadgets has been shown to negatively affect our spacial memories.

It’s also true that most of us have a harder time navigating as we age, so there really was never any hope for this gal who at one time went the wrong direction on an interstate she traveled regularly and didn’t realize it until she’d driven the amount of time that it should have taken her to get home and instead arrived at a town she’d never heard of.

This same gal, maybe a year ago, ended up about two hours north of where she was supposed to meet her sister for lunch because she got confused in a construction zone and took an exit she never takes from an interstate she travels regularly. The worst was the phone call to said sister who has never experienced a moment of directional insanity in her life, and rarely relies on GPS. Said sister wasn’t the least bit surprised.

So, card-carrying Wisconsin Liars Club member Douglas Corrigan would have had my sympathy had I been alive to see his possibly accidental triumph. He stuck to his story for the rest of his life and didn’t really get in very much trouble over it. His pilot’s license was revoked for about two weeks, the length of time it took him to make it back to the United States by ship, and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by where he ended up.

Stolen Olympic Dreams

In 1903, David R. Francis, former mayor of St. Louis, former governor of Missouri, former US Secretary of the Interior, and then president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, had a couple of big problems. 

David R. Francis, whose impressive resume could include “Olympics Stealer” under Special Skills. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Under his leadership, the City of St. Louis was attempting to carry off the grandest world’s fair yet. It was set to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase land deal in which Thomas Jefferson bought from France the rights to be the conquering power in a gigantic territory that was inhabited already by quite a few indigenous people. It was a giant leap forward in the Get Really Friggin’ Big Destiny of the young United States. 

But it turns out that pulling off the largest world’s fair in history is something of a logistical challenge and the whole project had to be pushed to 1904. That still worked because the famous explorers Lewis and Clark didn’t set off into the Louisiana Territory until 1804, so with some minor fudging, that was good enough. 

Another big problem, however, was the fact that in 1901, the Olympic Committee in charge of determining the site of the third modern Olympic Games in 1904 had chosen Chicago. This would be the first Olympic Games on US soil and, though the Games didn’t yet garner nearly the attention they do today, it was still a world event that would compete directly with St. Louis’s moment in the spotlight.

Though founder of the Modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin didn’t attend the St. Louis Olympiad which he feared “would match the mediocrity of the town” (ouch), in 2018 the IOC did finally allow the city to install Olympic rings (not a thing yet in 1904).

The two cities already had a strong rivalry going because the proud, historic City of St. Louis, Gateway to the West, on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi River had been usurped as the preeminent western city by some swampy upstart village to its north that became important only because someone decided to dig a ditch from the Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes. Whatever.

Francis wasn’t about to let the swampy upstart ruin his fair which, in case anyone is keeping score, was more than double the size Chicago’s little exposition had been in 1893. He saw to the planning of numerous athletic events and even managed to contract with the Amateur Athletic Union to hold their 1904 track & field championship as part of the fair. Presented with the very real possibility that this could spell failure for the burgeoning tradition of Olympic world competition, the Olympic Committee begrudgingly agreed to move the Games to St. Louis.

If you want to explore another, non-Olympic aspect of the 1904 World’s Fair, you can check out my newest historical mystery. https://sarah-angleton.com/paradise-on-the-pike/

Some Olympic historians have suggested that this was a blight on the history of the Games, but given that the whole concept of the Modern Olympics was still fairly new and in a bit of flux anyway, I’m not convinced that’s very fair. Yes, only twelve countries were represented and more than eighty percent of the athletes represented the United States. Yes, fair organizers tended to refer to every sport played on the fairgrounds as “Olympic,” which caused quite a bit of confusion. Yes, there was a deeply problematic “Anthropology Games” competition in which indigenous peoples were paid to compete in events in which they’d had almost no training in order to demonstrate the general superiority of western athleticism. And yes, the gold medal in the marathon was very nearly awarded to a man who’d completed much of the course in a car. 

But it was also the first Olympic Games in which gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the top competitors, hurdler George Poage became the first Black athlete to win a spot on the Olympic podium, and competing with a wooden prosthetic leg, George Eyser won multiple medals in gymnastics. Also, there was not a single allusion to menage a trois in the opening ceremony. Nor was there an opening ceremony.

In the interest of not making every reader from Chicago completely hate me, I should clarify that I actually really like deep dish and think that it is infinitely better than the Provel and cracker crust garbage St. Louis likes to pass off as pizza. Chris6d, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One could even argue that because the Games were part of this gigantic fair, which welcomed nearly 20 million people and became the only Victorian era fair to make a profit, this boosted the visibility of the Olympics, which were already a little bit of a hot mess with an uncertain future at this point. 

So yes, David R. Francis and the City of St. Louis were a little bit sneaky and underhanded and totally stole the Olympics from Chicago, which still hasn’t hosted the Games. The city does have a lot going for it, though. They have a river they’re fond of dying green every St. Patrick’s Day, an interesting cheese casserole dish they refer to as pizza, an alarming number of murders, and a somewhat irrational, now mostly friendly rivalry with a tiny little proud city to the south on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi.

Not bad for some swampy little upstart.

Boredom Busting and Sportsball History

It was one of those long boring afternoons in 1965 when thirteen-year-old Frank  Pritchard and his siblings were in a pickle. They had nothing to do and were getting a little cranky. That’s about the time their dad, then a Washington State Representative, Joel Pritchard arrived home with his buddy Bill Bell after an afternoon of golf, and made sportsball history.

I suspect every great sport has a vaguely ridiculous origin story. Image by Nils from Pixabay

The two men jumped in to solve the problem by suggesting that the kids make up a game. Frank, apparently a typical 13 year old, turned it around and challenged them to make one up themselves. The two friends readily agreed and set out to see what they had handy.

The property had an old, little-used badminton court, but a quick search of the family’s sportsball equipment yielded no rackets or shuttlecocks. What they did find were some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball. 

The ball bounced surprisingly well on the asphalt court and once they’d lowered the net a bit, the two men got the kids playing a made-up game that was a little bit like badminton, a little bit like tennis, a little bit like ping pong, and at least at first, a lot like Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that two decades later would introduce the world to the greatest game to never have the same rules twice.

Also, this new made-up-on-the-spot sport was evidently pretty fun.

The family played the next weekend as well, and Pritchard and Bell introduced the game to another friend named Barney McClallum. Together, the three of them decided to write down some rules to their new hodgepodge sport that made Joel’s wife Joan think of pickle boat races in which the leftover or mismatched rowers team up and race just for fun. 

It was probably only a matter of time until someone decided a wiffle ball would be more fun to try to hit with a racket. Image by 기석 김 from Pixabay

So the game became pickleball. Whereas most sports that fall into the category of made-up-because-someone-was-bored fade into obscurity after a family reunion or two and someone has inevitably broken an ankle (which could maybe, possibly be an absolutely true story from the depths of Angleton family lore), pickleball became an official thing in 1972.

That’s when its inventors established a corporation to protect the integrity of their burgeoning, accidentally-kind-of-super-fun sport. By 1976, the game started getting some national press, and in 1978 it was included in a book titled Other Raquet Sports. 

By 1990 pickleball had made it to all fifty states, and in the mid-nineties, it was my favorite sport to play in my high school P.E. class, even though I was pretty sure my P.E. teacher Mrs. H. had made it up one afternoon when her kids were bored. 

Of course now, nearly thirty (thirty?!) years later, it seems like everyone plays pickleball. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association boasts more than 70,000 members, there are organized leagues and tournaments, and there’s even a restaurant in my part of the world called Chicken N Pickle where you can, get this, eat chicken and play pickleball. Brilliant.

Move over tennis. There’s a new game in town. Stephen James Hall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hubs had a birthday recently and he got a couple of rackets, so we decided to hop on the bandwagon and give it a try at a local park converted in the last few years from a baseball diamond (because who would ever want to play baseball?) to generally busy pickleball courts. Neither of us remembered precisely how to play, but after a YouTube video or two we were ready to go.

I vaguely recall being pretty good at the sport in high school. It turns out that thirty (thirty?!) years is plenty of time to get a little rusty. The hubs hadn’t played the sport in several decades either, but he does have a much more impressive background in tennis than I do, which gave him a definite advantage. Still, the game really is super fun. 

Like the kind of fun one might expect to have on a long boring day when the family goes searching for something to do among the sportsball castoffs in the garage. And a great game is born.

Pomp, Illuminations, and the Hard Work of Revision

So, today we celebrate a pretty big holiday here in the United States. We follow in the footsteps of John Adams who wrote to his wife Abigail that Independence Day should be recognized with “pomp and parade, with [shows], games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

It’s a little rainy today in my corner of the world, but most of us will have all that pretty much covered. Of course, we aren’t really celebrating the anniversary of the day the Continental Congress first declared independence, nor the day one of history’s most famous breakup letters was drafted. The holiday doesn’t fall on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it doesn’t mark the moment when King George III read it and decided to sing a love song about sending an armed battalion.  

John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s July 4th celebration does commemorate all of that, but what it actually marks on the calendar is the day of the final pen stroke of the final draft of the document that spurred a war that birthed a nation.

As a writer who recognizes that first drafts rarely amount to much and that most of the best writing occurs in the rewriting, I find this pretty satisfying. It seems John Adams would not have agreed with me. When he wrote of his future nation’s Independence Day, he was referring to July 2, 1776.

I get it. He was excited. He’d had a hand in the original draft, working with Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman, and of course Thomas Jefferson to get it just so. Like a student who waited too long to start his final term paper and stayed up all night before the due date, assuming that in his push to get it finished, he’d written the most brilliant words ever penned by any student in the history of students, Adams was probably anxious to get it turned in to the Continental Congress, send it on to the king, and sit back to watch the fireworks.

Image by Johnny Maertens from Pixabay

Not surprisingly, however, Adams and his fellow committee members weren’t the only ones who had something to say about the wording of the Declaration. The debating began. In some ways, this important American document was improved by a few tweaks here or there, a little tightening of language or nuance of phrasing. And in other ways, it was made worse, like in the removal of all references to the immorality of slavery.

It’s still possible to make the wrong decision in revision, too, which is one of the things that makes the process so difficult. But the Continental Congress figured out where they had to compromise in order to make the declaration work enough for all the representatives in the room to move forward. The final draft would be signed nearly a month later on August 2. The date at the top of the document, however, remained July 4, which became an officially declared federal holiday in 1870.

The date is pretty ingrained at this point and I think, all things considered, it’s the right one to celebrate, though with the a full day of rain expected, and much to the frustration of my poor dog, I suspect many of my neighbors will celebrate with illuminations on the 5th and 6th this year.

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

But in my mind, the 4th is the day the United States truly embarked on the notion that freedom and liberty sometimes require compromise and consideration of those who don’t agree with us, and that revision is painful, difficult, and necessary work.

The United States, such as it was imagined by the Second Continental Congress, wasn’t a perfect nation, nor was the vision of it perfected yet. That would take many, many years. So many, in fact, we’re still counting, and I suspect always will be.

But the best work comes in the difficult, painful revision process in which debate and compromise occurs. No matter how politically divided we may think we are, or how we as individuals may feel our nation is doing in this moment, I hope that’s something every American can be proud to celebrate.

If you are celebrating American Independence today or perhaps in the coming days, please be careful with all your pomp and illuminations, and have a wonderful holiday!

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I originally posted a version of this a few years ago, but it’s a holiday and the post still feels pretty relevant

For the Bragging Rights

On October 4, 1986 the Missouri River flooded its banks and damaged the stretch the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad track that stretched between Sedalia and Machens, Missouri. This in itself wasn’t particularly unusual. The area is prone to flooding and had proven a problem for the railroad company since the earliest days of the route. What was unusual about the 1986 flood was that the company decided to abandon rather than repair the route.

This is the last remaining signal from the MKT Railway.

This turned out to be good news for the biking and hiking enthusiasts of the Great State of Missouri. With help from a generous donation from Ted and Pat Jones (of the Edward Jones Financial Investment Company based in St. Louis), the Missouri Department of Natural Resources purchased the abandoned right-of-way to use as a trail. 

The first section of the crushed limestone MKT trail, shortened to KT, which became simply “the Katy” opened in 1990 around Rocheport, Missouri. Today it officially extends from Clinton in the western part of the state to Machens in the east, comes in at about 239 miles, and is the longest recreational rail trail in the United States. Several spurs offer additional distance, including a 47-mile Rock Island Spur that runs to Kansas City.

Sock Monkey Steve came along as well, but his skinny little monkey legs weren’t much help.

My sister and I were happy enough last week to hop on our bicycles and crush the route between Clinton and St. Charles. That’s officially 12.7 miles from the end in Machens, but St. Charles is a better place to stop and get picked up and taken out for celebration barbecue and cookies. Also, if we add in all of the spurs into towns that we took along the way, we more than made up the difference.

It turns out a lot of cyclists (and some hikers) tackle the whole Katy. We met quite a few cyclists, some of them traveling the same direction as us, some day riders who had done the whole thing on previous occasions, some with light loads and dedicated sag wagons, and others carting their own camping gear. Some riders do the full length in as little as three days. Five to six days seems to be the most common. 

We reached the high point of the trail on the first day, but it definitely was not all downhill from there.

We did six, which was good enough for us. And we stayed in hotels and B&Bs along the way, because we couldn’t imagine that sleeping on the ground was going to be restful enough for us after forty-plus miles of biking on crushed gravel to then be able to get back up and do it again the next day. We did carry our gear with us, though, which was enough of a burden. 

The trail, though straight and flat-ish, requires a lot of work. Some patches are very well groomed. Some not so much. After one stormy night, we had to dodge quite a few downed branches. There are some stretches where large gravel and washouts make the riding all the more challenging, and the western portion of the trail all the way to about a mile outside Boonville is often slightly uphill, just enough to be a slog.

A train tunnel near Rocheport.

But the trail is beautiful, with much of it running between the Missouri River and gorgeous bluffs. It crosses over numerous creeks on pretty truss bridges, through tunnels, forest, wetlands, prairie land, rolling farmlands, and past historic remnants of the railroad.

As challenging as some days were, as sore as our bodies ended up being, and as tired as we were by the time we lugged our bikes from the trail to our stops each night, I’m awfully glad we did it. I don’t know that I learned anything profound from the experience, though someday when my backside is less sore, I will probably think of some way to turn the experience into a terribly moving and deeply reflective personal essay. For now, it’s enough to have crushed the Katy for the bragging rights.