Antique aircraft at Blakesburg, Iowa, for example

All the great diarists brought their work to abrupt ends. Clara Clemens’ teenage “autobiography” of her famous father ended in mid-sentence when she was called to dinner one day on a European vacation. Samuel Pepys called it off one day in 1669 when he became worried about his eyesight.

I’m taking the summer off to travel around a bit. Too many great sights loom ahead, and I tell myself that with a career of deadlines behind me, it’s some kind of masochism to be giving myself more of them.

Have a good one, all.

April in Iowa

 The path through central Iowa is famous for late blizzards, destructive spring winds, and miasmic germs. The trekking Mormons knew its reputation for deadly respiratory illness and tried to move all the faster toward the Missouri.

The modern strain of the bug is a virus, so there’s no help from antibiotics. No point in describing our own recent experience in disgusting detail, suffice it to say it was three weeks-plus in time, given over mostly to coughing and fighting off repeated assaults on the will to live.

Toward the end, the symptoms now reduced to dry throat and some weakness in the extremities, I put everything back into perspective by reading A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea, by container-ship captain Richard Phillips, with Stephen Talty. We had been led to the book by news accounts, and finally by hearing Phillips interviewed. He says frankly he couldn’t write a book and needed Talty to get it all down, but so much of him and his experience comes through on every page that it restores your faith in the “as told to” process. Phillips and his memory are remarkable. Full of dialogue, nothing in the book seems contrived in the slightest.

A tougher guy and a leveler head you would go far to find, and the book is a treat to read. In all the touchy-feely-weepy crap that’s put before us on television as examples of humans in ordeal mode, this one is the real thing.

It helps all of us to know that people like Phillips and his crew, his supportive family, and the SEALs are out there. Read the book and cure your cold.

Mouse, not Mickey

On my western trip I visited the new Walt Disney Family Museum in an elegantly refurbished building in the Presidio in San Francisco. The world is full of information about Disney, but this ten-gallery museum, established by the family, focuses in a new way on the beginnings and the development of Disney as a business (in fact, several businesses). The early immigrant history of the family is interesting, and likewise the early struggles and false starts of Walt’s collaboration with many talented assistants and partners. The presentation trumpets all the usual glories of Walt’s creativity, but it’s also rather realistic about the low points, such as the animators’ strike after the war. There is a wealth of high-tech animation samples, exhibits of techniques and optical equipment pioneered by Walt and his collaborators, and lots of dramatic history of the development of ideas within the organization.

The whole thing is colorful, musical, and worth the $20 admission charge ($15 for old folks, kids for $12.50).  The place also exhibits the unnatural cleanliness the Disney locations are famous for: the restoom is so spotless you are almost inhibited from using it.

We offer an ordinary cute mouse picture because it’s an intergalactic crime to reproduce any of the vintage Mickey images available in the gift shop. The image is protected even on the moon, the space station, asteroids, and on any other worlds yet to be inhabited by man, in spite of the fact that the museum said in several places that after he died, Walt  ”belonged to the whole world.”  They don’t really mean it, so don’t copy anything of theirs and end up in the slammer.

I was not around for the Civil War, but I was nine when FDR died, and I know just where I got the news. That evening we were in my dad’s 1932 Chevy with wartime stickers on the windshield and boots in the tires, headed out for an ice cream cone. We passed the Milwaukee railroad roundhouse on our way, I saw the flag at half-staff, and my parents, having heard the news earlier in the day, explained the event that they, as a railroad labor union family, regarded as a tragedy.

“Playing war” with my friends and listening to my uncles’ accounts of their overseas ordeals was about the extent of my participation in the great conflict, though I did win the status of Tin Can Commando, wearing an oilcloth armband while I roamed the neighborhoods, collecting flattened tin cans. I thought the New Deal saved the country from the Depression and that now I was helping FDR save us from the fascist hordes.

This week I hear of the flap caused by the governor of Virginia declaring a celebration of Confederate History Month that suggested remembrance of the sacrifices of officers, soldiers, and citizens while ignoring slavery, and I reflect on the changes in civil rights laws and attitudes since FDR’s day. To a person born in the 30s, these changes seem manifest in a thousand ways, all “on the right side of history,”  amounting to a fuller participation in American society on the part of African-Americans and people of color, altogether a good thing.

Is that governor’s declaration a pitiful attempt to rewrite history to make the white people around him feel better? Is it a calculated attempt to please “the base” in time for the next election? If so, it is dramatic evidence of what prisoners of denial his supporters are, and how far we have to go toward the more perfect union.

Is the nasty denial and denigration of Obama’s achievement, of his hopes for America, his own New Deal, tied to these times? Of course it is. The denial of slavery and its power to warp white arrogance and inspire its combativeness, and the resurgent economic  fears of FDR’s time have combined to stir the pot again.

It would be many years after that ninth birthday before any of this seemed important, or even registered on the personal radar. I had the good luck to be raised among work-ethic Iowans, and thought all Americans more or less of good will, the nation governable, the future aglow. I would submit that now, none of us are quite sure.

My lifelong experience as a Democrat is somewhat like that described by the late, great Molly Ivins, the Texas populist writer who before she died of breast cancer laid down quite a record of success in afflicting the rich and powerful with the humor-weapon.

Ivins said she’d always thought the two parties had their own special genius, that history would show that Democrats were on the right side of social issues like civil rights, education, extending the promise of America to everybody—and the Republicans really did know more about managing money and running the institutions that powered the economy. Then she stood amazed as the economy unraveled, as the rich and powerful, embracing deregulation and the further growth of the “rights” of corporations to do as they will, seemed to tolerate, or actually ignore, the depredations all around them.

Now the Swisher-size proportions of these expense-account scandals in the GOP suggests just how frantic and confused the party must be. In a time when an Iowa clerk can embezzle half a million from a school district, the tab for the trip to Voyeur—its owner describes it as a place of “provocative revelry,” if you’re provoked to revelry by simulated lesbian sex acts—seems strangely puny. Even a wholesome West Hollywood family outing for an extended family, such as dinner and a show, could add up to two grand pretty fast. And our guess is that seventeen grand doesn’t begin to light the fires of a private jet for a trip of any length. We suggest these amounts are simply not real, or that if they are, they serve as strange examples of excess on a cheapskate budget.

I would say the whole thing would be great fodder for Molly if she were alive, but who can keep up with the rate at which these stories (a mistress in Argentina, or having your aide claim your mistress’ child) come at us?

Perhaps the bottom line for this one has to do with the Voyeur thing itself: somewhere in all this is a joke about whether the Republican revelers could have had real sex for their two grand.

To the Grand Canyon?

Here’s the turnoff to Williams, Arizona and the south rim of the Grand Canyon, normally an hour’s drive from the Interstate, but on this day, rather intimidating. A tornado had passed within a couple of miles of my motel in Elk City, Oklahoma: now, an Interstate closure occurred behind me the next day. I pushed on, with dreams of California sunshine.

And as always, California comes through. Its more ungenerous citizens long ago trashed its tax structure,  made it ungovernable, and is leaving its educational system, once one of the best in the world, to the streets and gangland. But the sunshine is still there, and the wonderful congeniality of San Francisco. Eight days in the Bay Area and the coast around Santa Cruz made up for a lot of staring into snow on Old Route 66.

More later, as the glowing memories of this trip give way to some realities: New Mexico and Arizona are showing signs of deperate poverty amid some sickening opulence, and Phoenix-Tucson has invented eight-lane intersections where fossil fuels go up in smoke while 20-minute traffic lights try to deal with the situation. The only plus factor is the tolerance of legal U-turns nearly everywhere, and in some of these places I recommend doing one as soon as possible.

Here are cities and towns where I stopped overnight. Westbound from Iowa City:  Wichita, Kansas; Elk City, Oklahoma; Grants, New Mexico; Kingman, Arizona; Bakersfield, California; Berkeley, California (destination); and Santa Cruz, California (destination). Eastbound: Barstow, California; Tempe, Arizona; Tucson, Arizona; Los Lunas, New Mexico; Shamrock, Texas; Emporia, Kansas; Osceola, Iowa—and home.

A real sailboat: Pacific Seacraft 40

You can find a thousand descriptions of what a “real sailor” is, but most agree he/she is someone who can take a boat across oceans, perhaps by virtue of having actually done so. Knowledge, sea smarts, prudence, foresight, tolerance of discomfort, joy in the achievement all come into play.

The sailing world holds two kinds of sailors, the ones who race and the ones who cruise. The ones who cruise look down on the racers as people who wrench the design of a sailboat into forms designed to live fast for a day. They sacrifice seaworthiness to pursue what the cruisers dismiss as “go-fast techniques”: ever-more-high tech sails, bizarre keels, onboard computers, even encrypted communication with onshore computer strategists.

Since the first America’s Cup, the boats have been mostly the darlings of rich men on shore, sailed by hired help, in the early days by death-defying crews of immigrants from seagoing nations, these days by a kind of sophisticated boat bum. A pretense of national pride, the sort that pervades the Olympic Games, was supposed to be part of the deal. In fact, the race is a race of corporate sponsorship.

This year’s example is a kind of low point. Sports Illustrated reports the America’s Cup “recaptured” by the BMW Oracle Racing team, sailing USA-17, a 90-foot trimaran (a three-hulled boat), against Alinghi of Switzerland and their catamaran (two hulls).

The race was hard-fought, said SI, before the boats even hit the water. Oracle’s backer had spent nearly two years in court, first for the right to challenge Alinghi (corporations are people, in case you haven’t heard, and now have a right to fight over money, or the chance to make money, in court). A later fight came over boat construction rules and the right to deploy a 223-foot wing sail.

These are not real boats, sailed by real sailors. A catamaran or trimaran  is a liability at sea, with multiple hulls to monitor and repair and the danger of overturning (a stout cruising sailboat will right itself, the catamaran becomes an upside-down raft). There are those who go to sea in one, but there are fools on every moorage, put there to make us better sailors.

I enjoyed the first TV broadcasts of America’s Cup races, back in the 80s, when they seemed more like real boats, before the endless litigation and dreary money-grubbing was involved.

But they can’t really spoil sailing. Kids still race small boats in college competitions among class boats, and there are still honorable international competitions for small boats, even the venerable Snipe, the boat I learned in.

Across the country, sailing is alive and well in a younger generation. And real sailors are still going to sea.

The usual and overriding reason for most Iowans is to escape the Iowa winter, but it’s now a bit late. The usual blizzard during the girls’ state basketball tournament in March may be yet to come, and we have seen snow in April, as well, but by and large the record snowfalls and bitter cold seemed to be bunched up in February, this year.

But there are several other driving trips scheduled for this year, and it argues for making this one now. There may be some headwinds in Kansas and Oklahoma, but we’re turning south as soon as possible, and New Mexico and Arizona should show us some sights on the way.

Time might allow for a little side trip to the Grand Canyon, where last time I heard a young wife tell her husband, who was fooling around near the edge of doom, “If you fall, throw me the camera so at least I can show them the pictures.”

Then there might be Vegas, where as I understand it there are few natural wonders: if they wanted a Grand Canyon there they would just dig one and light it up like crazy.

We’ll try our hand at a triplog, to be presented on a new page. The vehicle: a 2007 Honda Odyssey. The plan: stay in motels and campgrounds on alternate nights, stop early, start early, see a major attraction that involves walking, each day.

I’ll try to be in a motel with reliable television somewhere west of Kansas City for the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 7th, my first day on the road.

The year is 2010. The word “Awesome” is finally run into the ground and appears on a car wash in Waterloo, Iowa. Let it rot there! But no, owners of dirty cars will beat a path to the door, there will be an Awesome III and an Awesome IV, and so on, unto the final dumbing down of mankind. Awesome.

But now the Cedar Rapids Gazette has come down on the side of the students with its lead editorial this morning, four columns wide and four inches deep, saying the administrator’s decision “set a poor precedent that has nothing to do with the merits of the film” and noted that the Bijou, funded by ticket sales and student fees, had shown the film in 2007 to packed audiences without objection, and that audiences could have voted on the issue at any time by staying away, a decision “in a free and open society” that they had been denied by the administrator’s ban.

After one U of I film student said the Bijou knuckled under because “you have to pick your battles,” the Gazette has taken up the banner: “It’s difficult to defend the right to free expression that is silly, crude or objectionable. But in a free society, it’s still important.”

Chalk another one up for Iowa’s defense of free speech. We suppose that every little nasty bit counts. There is something very reassuring and Iowan in seeing the Gazette speak for those whose rights are being even mildly afflicted, and we can hope that recognizing Disco Dolls afflicts some of those who are so comfortable in their propriety that they feel it their duty to tell young adults in their educational institution to shut up.