In Hillbilly Queer, J.R. Jamison joins his dad on a road trip to Missouri for a high school reunion. J.R.’s dad is a conservative who voted for Trump in 2016; J.R. is gay, married, and out. In this Statesider conversation, Pam Mandel and J.R. talk about navigating that divide, what it’s like to be an outsider in places like Missouri and Indiana, and the hard work of finding common ground between family members.

First things first. I have been to Indiana and Missouri. I found them…difficult. 

I know people have mixed thoughts about my book. That’s part of creating art, right? Some people hate it. Some people love it. Some people are somewhere in between. 

So it’s absolutely clear: Fuck Trump, I don’t like Donald Trump at all. But I love my dad. For me, it was more of a journey of understanding my father and where he came from (which is Missouri) and understanding his motivations.

I believe the best conversations around understanding or trying to find a common ground, if that’s even possible, is with your family. You have to know it’s a safe space for you to have those conversations. I had a safe space to explore my questions, through the lens of my father and going back to his hometown with him. 

Missouri and Indiana. Both are problematic. Indiana is home; I was born and raised here. I always thought I would leave. I had the opportunity to leave. I’ve traveled, spent time living in China in the early 2000s, but Indiana has always brought me back. The politics here are messy. The politics of Missouri are messy. But I feel if I were to leave that would be exactly what some people want. I can do more by staying here. I don’t want to use the word “convincing,” but having people in these places who know me…they experience my life as a normal everyday person. It’s through those interactions that I can see people changing their viewpoints. 

[LGBTQIA people] are normal people like everyone else, right? We want to find a loving partner, a career, to enjoy life. If I were to leave, who would miss out on understanding this? How could politics ever change? 

It’s not for everyone to stay, but I feel like my work is to be where I am.

You’ve embraced the difficulties of Indiana and Missouri. When I go to a place like that as a tourist, I am a Left Coast Jewish girl from a sealed blue bubble. And I am confronted with attitudes that feel…alienating. You write about seeing Trump signs everywhere. I noticed this a lot when I was in Missouri, plus the “Jesus fish” everywhere. They’re on the hardware store and the bakery and I was like, do I need to be a Christian to buy a Danish?

You embrace the obstacles as agents of change. I’m curious about your thoughts on how an outsider should interact when they bump up against these things. 

I’m familiar with that and the unwelcomeness of that, especially because Indiana is pretty Christian-centric. Mike Pence was our Governor, became Vice President, and he is an absolute nightmare. A state like Indiana struggles with attracting businesses and attracting people to come here for tourism dollars. It does relate to our politics and our culture.

But the state of Indiana is more purple than people imagine. As someone who grew up here. I’ve had to navigate these conversations my entire life. I’m used to literally being stuck in the middle, right? The middle of the country and the middle of policy, right? Most people are somewhere in the middle. Most Hoosiers (which is what we call ourselves here in Indiana) are open to understanding and learning. But when they do present themselves you do find they lead with conservative and Christian.

To be clear, I found everybody very hospitable. And I remember talking to one woman who, after I told her where I was from, said, “I want you to know, we’re not all like you think we are.” That interaction stuck with me, She was making assumptions about what I thought about her as a resident of Indiana. She wasn’t entirely wrong. 

Folks going from coast to coast fly over us, and we think people view us as these hicks who live out in the middle of nowhere. Who are uncultured and have no interaction with the outside world. That’s not true. It is the stigma that we carry around with us because of where we’re from. I find myself saying that to my colleagues in other parts of the country. “I’m in Indiana but it’s not as bad as you would think. I’m not like other people that you may know from Indiana.” 

There’s a lot of apologizing; that’s part of Midwest culture. Midwest nice, where we can’t ever directly say something bad about anyone. 

Bless your heart. Right? 

We apologize for things that we don’t necessarily need to apologize for. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. When people think about this part of the country, they view us as a very red state, as redneck and backward, not a place you would want to visit. Some places are like that, but not everywhere. I think that this part of the country is misunderstood. 

Your book felt like a reconciliation tour, but you also carried around negative stereotypes. You did not look away. You were more, “Yeah. People are like that and it’s complicated.”

Growing up gay I was bullied terribly. Those past hurts never leave. They’re always there to remind us, to bring you back to those moments when you are terrorized as a child. I always equated that with geography. I write about in the book that I knew I was gay at a very early age, but geography and politics didn’t allow me to admit that. I had a deep fear of what would happen if I were the true me. Even though all the kids knew, you know, they picked on me, they knew I was gay. 

Coming out is a powerful statement, it’s not allowing anyone else to own your story. You’re telling people, this is who I am. So laugh at me if you will but this is my life and the joke’s on you. 

Over time, people (in my life) have changed perspectives but there’s still that kid in the back of my head. As I went on this trip and navigated old conversations, I was concerned about my safety. I was concerned about what people think about me, I made assumptions about what people believed, and sometimes I was right. 

But oftentimes, I was wrong. I wanted to unpack that, to not shy away from what I think about people or assumptions that I made. But I also wanted to show that nuance;  our lives are lived in the gray. It’s not so black and white or red and blue, even though, you know, Trump and politics have a thread throughout the book. It was about the human condition and understanding that we all are stories and mixed-up lives.

I was navigating Indiana and Missouri but also understanding what and who made me. Who I am and why I look at the world the way I do.

A few years back I took a trip to the Mississippi Delta and knocked around by myself for 10 days. I had the most awesome time. Some of the best travel I’ve done in years. I cannot shut up about the Mississippi Delta and how everybody has to go. But this friend of mine who is trans responded, “That sounds great. Would I be safe?” I don’t know the answer. 

Yeah. Same here in Indiana. We’re not as red as you imagine. If you look at us on the surface, sure, we’re very conservative. Here in Muncie, there’s a trans woman who is very out-and-proud in our community. A well-known figure, people rally around her. At the same time, if she were to travel 20 minutes away to a smaller community, she could be killed. I don’t know if that’s specific to Indiana or to the Mississippi Delta. I think that’s the whole country.

Look at California. People always think California is like this liberal oasis, but if I’m traveling east out of L.A. it’s pretty conservative. I think that story of safety is an issue across the country. 

We can look at Indiana as a place that’s really red, but the truth is that’s all over the country. Safety depends on who you are and how you identify. If you can pass or not pass. It sucks. 

And I don’t even know that that’s a US issue. I think that’s global, right? I mean, there are parts of the world where you can be executed for being who you are. That may not be the case in the US. In the US, it’s more of a slow burn that we do to our people and that’s so damaging in the long run. 

I’m hoping somebody in the rural part of the country can pick up my book and see themselves reflected in my story. I want to give them hope they can have a happy life where they are. That there may be possibilities to create conversations and connections. I worry about rural kids a lot. 

I want to write stories about rural culture and the intersection with weirdness because I feel like that is often overlooked. There’s not enough from those of us who are queer and living in really red parts of the country. I hope some kid out there can pick up my story and read it and it gives them hope to keep living for another day. 

That’s a beautiful sentiment certainly. And also — you’ve probably heard this — I found you very forgiving. I don’t feel particularly forgiving. You seem willing to advance a courtesy toward people who are not coming from the same place of good intent. 

I would not give those people a pass. It does get complicated. It’s again, it’s living in the gray. 

I’m not a left or right coaster because I’m stuck in the middle of the country, but I would consider myself fairly liberal. I was not keeping my eye on the rise of the Trump presidency. I was so hopeful about Obama, his message. Gay marriage became legal and then it was like we were hit with a ton of bricks, right?

Oh yeah, we did not believe that this could happen. We were so naive.  

When I look at people like those who marched in Charlottesville, and people who are into the whole QAnon conspiracy…that’s a whole different realm. But I look at people like my dad who I know do not buy into that. Somehow he’d bought into this whole Trump idea of bringing back jobs and strengthening the economy, but not into the other stuff. So I think, “What can I do to sit down to better understand you and try to build a bridge between the two of us, because otherwise, will I lose you forever to these people who are ready and willing to recruit you into conspiracy messaging?”

I was terrified to put the book out. I did not want people to think I was sympathizing with Trump, with racists. I was hoping to show that people were buying into the conspiracies that could be pulled back. I was willing to extend myself to bring my dad to common ground.

You have this personal relationship with your father and you both care for each other deeply. I can see the willingness to look at your differences and move past that. You have this deep personal connection driving you to breach this divide. You’re attempting to heal this damage and look past it. But what would you say to people like me who aren’t coming from that?  

When I’m traveling alone, there is that fear that exists. Am I going to be killed? Am I going to be beaten? What will be the outcome for showing up as myself? 

I had the privilege of traveling with my father. There are times where I travel the country by myself and I’m careful about how I present myself. Do I ever hide who I am? No. People may make assumptions based on their interactions with me, but I definitely would recognize that I also have more privilege than our trans brothers and sisters or people of color, right? 

I’m talking my way around not having a direct answer because you’re absolutely right.

How are you post-election? Are you feeling any more optimistic? Given your location, given your experience with your dad, how are you feeling about where we’re heading as a country? 

I’m feeling optimistic. My dad was pro-Trump until the pandemic. He voted for Biden. He says, “I think he’s doing a good job, but I also still love Trump.” 

The conversations have continued with my father beyond the trip in the book. We have common ground on certain issues. There are things that we will never see eye-to-eye on, but when I look at my family, there’s hope.

Cake or pie and where?

That is a hard, hard choice. Honestly, though, I’m a cinnamon roll person. Give me that sweet, flaky, buttery deliciousness any day of the week…but, please, no icing. And the best cinnamon roll this side of the Mississippi is served up hot and fresh at Queer Chocolatier in Muncie, Indiana.  

J.R. JAMISON is the author of Hillbilly Queer: A Memoir and a founder of The Facing Project, a national organization that creates a more understanding and empathetic world through stories that inspire action. He also co-hosts The Facing Project Radio Show on NPR. His work has been featured in The Guardian, Harlem World Magazine, The Huffington Post, and in numerous literary journals. He lives in Indiana with his husband, Cory, and their dog, J.J.

The post Red State Road Trip appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
A national pie emergency, a peek inside American restaurants, L.A. pigeon fanciers, a reconciliation road trip, the town that shouldn’t (and possibly doesn’t) exist, Zoom migration, Appalachian change, and bottomless waffles. Plus an opportunity to join us for a live Statesider Brunch.

Red State Road Trip

J.R. Jamison’s memoir, Hillbilly Queer, tells the story of how a kid who grew up gay in Indiana navigates his relationship with his Trump-loving dad. The Statesider’s Pam Mandel talked with J.R. about his book, visiting red states when you’re a blue state liberal snowflake, and why it’s worth staying put in a place where you’re an outsider. Read the Statesider interview with J.R. Jamison

Indiana is home; I was born and raised here. I always thought I would leave. I had the opportunity to leave. I’ve traveled, spent time living in China in the early 2000s, but Indiana has always brought me back.

Stories Across the USA

Pull Over, Pa! A photographer goes on a mission to capture the USA’s greatest rest stops before they fade away. Ryann Ford, Outside

The Way Pigeons Roll: The fascinating and surprising story of men from South Central L.A. and their multigenerational fascination with Birmingham Roller Pigeons. Shanna B. Tiayon, Pipe Wrench

Imaginary Destinations: Welcome to Agloe, the little town in New York State that never existed…until it did. Mike Sowden, Everything is Amazing

Native Routes: Minnesota’s first people primarily used waterways to get around, but sometimes, land was the only way. Did some of those portage routes lay the foundation for today’s well-traveled roads? Tim Harlow, Curious Minnesota

PIE EMERGENCY: Why have so many Americans forgotten how to make pie? You call that crust? BAKE UP, SHEEPLE. Megan McArdle, Washington Post

I want to convince you that American pie is special, because it is. American pie is great, in part, because of its rich, unlikely history. But American pie is also in dire straits, because American cooks have mostly forgotten how to make the most important part.

Duck Season: Last year, artists in the annual duck stamp competition were required to include duck hunting imagery. What better way to celebrate the majestic duck than with images of impending duck murder? A rule change is in the works. Andy McGlashen, Audubon
While we’re at it, you should totally revisit this story about the duck stamp competition.

Legal Weed Gets Fancy: Mom-and-pop weed shops (that’s a thing?) are finding Maine’s policies for cannabis retailers put them at a disadvantage. Mona Zhang, Politico

They Said No: Artist Bernice Akamine made kalo leaves out of paper bearing the signatures of the thousands of native Hawaiians who objected to the annexation. It’s quite a thing. Karen Valentine, Ke Ola

Shut Up and Give Us the Money: Hold on a sec. The US Government funded a series of US travel guides? They weren’t all fine works of travel literature, but count us on board for a full revival of this program. We have thoughts. Scott Borchert, The Atlantic
This article is an excerpt from Borchert’s new book, Republic of Detours, a history or the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers and encourage Americans to rediscover their country.

The Mountain Traditions Project: What is changing? What remains the same? How are you adapting to the times? Photographer and journalist Michael O. Snyder returned to the mountains of his Appalachian childhood to track how the region is changing and evolving — and *man* these photos are something. Michael O. Snyder, Bitter Southerner

Zoomtown Blues: If you no longer have to live where you work, why not move to where you play? For some remote workers, the pandemic was a chance to try on a new place. In Northern California, everyone seemed to settle on the same place: Lake Tahoe. Rachel Levin, Outside

Are We Allowed to Talk About Mexico? Just south of the border, one Mexican town that helped enslaved Americans escape has been celebrating Juneteenth for 150 years. Taryn White, National Geographic

Restaurant Rebound

15 Hours at Waffle House: The guy who had to hang out in a Waffle House for 15 hours lives to tell the tale. We think we’d have had a better time. Lee Sanderlin, Mississippi Clarion Ledger

I’m going to do my fair share of moaning here. Mainly about how cold it was in the Waffle House, how cold waffles feel like you’re chewing on wet cement, how badly my gastrointestinal tract was screaming to me for help.

Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite Brat Pack actor turned travel writer Andrew McCarthy can’t stop eating at Waffle House.
Also, this Waffle House needlepoint canvas on Etsy has 5 stars and over 450 reviews, so maybe get one?

A Life in Dishes: Life lessons from a dishwasher who worked in the kitchen of a James Beard Award-winning restaurant for nearly 40 years. Javier Cabral, Pop-Up Magazine

North Carolina Drag Brunch: It’s drag! It’s brunch! It’s somewhat controversial if you’re in rural Kinston, N.C.! Photographer Madeline Gray captured the monthly event, and the performers trying to make the town more inclusive. Madeline Gray, WUNC

PNW Potatoes: “You get them from a supermarket or mini-mart, ideally one inside a gas station, out of a foggy cellophane bag. Or in truck stops and roadhouses, maybe a shack on a rural highway with a sign that has the word “broasted” on it. That’s where your jojos are.” It’s where we wish we were, too. Meg van Huygen, The Stranger

Have Brunch With Us

We have fun editorial meetings at The Statesider. Someone will mention tumbleweeds or famous canned cheese and an hour later we wonder if we should start the meeting. Turns out that the space between tumbleweeds and famous canned cheese is where the magic happens. We’re going to bring our Americana-tinged nerdy-tangent-chasing ramblings to a live brunch on Twitter Spaces, hosted by our friend and travel photographer Kirsten Alana. All you need is a Twitter account, a cup of your favorite whatever, and an hour to waste on Sunday, August 1st at 9:30 am Pacific. Watch this space — we’ll have a link soon!

We have some great original stories lined up for future issues. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter or waiting in line at Turkey Leg Hut.

The post Rest Stops, Red States & Restaurants appeared first on The Statesider.

Roycroft, the utopian community near Buffalo, New York, was a major inspiration for the Arts and Crafts movement; its distinctive design aesthetic is imitated to this day. As Melanie Haiken found, it may have inspired something altogether different: Scientology. Roycroft, like all utopias, eventually faded away — but it holds some important lessons for all of us.

“Life without Industry is Guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.” The forbidding message, carved into a pair of imposing oak doors, offers the first inkling that Roycroft, an artisan community in East Aurora, New York, might have been more than the back-to-basics utopia it appears. 

Picture the more than 500 Roycrofters who lived here during the community’s heyday sitting down to a collective meal in the rustic-beamed dining room, a row of heavy oak plaques swinging from chains above their heads. The mottos are cryptic: “Reciprocity. Mutuality. Moderation.” Some, like “Be Yourself,” feel like an eerie premonition of the sentiments so annoyingly ubiquitous during my 1970s California childhood, when the self-actualization movement, as it was un-ironically known, was in full swing. And then there’s my favorite, as enigmatic as it gets: “It Doesn’t Matter.”

Clearly, there was more going on here than craftsmanship, though Roycroft’s role as a preeminent center of Arts & Crafts design and architecture is the lure for the majority of visitors who make the 30-minute drive from nearby Buffalo. Founded in 1895 by followers of the John Ruskin and William Morris-inspired movement and mostly abandoned in the 1930s, Roycroft today has become something of a pilgrimage for fans of that era’s heavy wooden furniture, hammered copperware, and Medieval-inspired letterpress printing. 

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986 after being abandoned and all but lost, the Roycroft Campus has undergone painstaking restoration, with the print shop, furniture shop, copper shop, and chapel now open to visitors, as well as the Roycroft Inn and Restaurant. Governed by their overarching motto—Head-Heart-Hand—and stamping many of their works with a Medieval-looking symbol hearkening back to the craft guilds of the middle ages, Roycrofters put craft and a simpler way of life back on the American radar, pushing against the industrial revolution–fueled tide towards convenience and machine-made goods.

Life without Industry is Guilt.
Industry without Art is Brutality.

I’m far less interested in the mortise-and-tenon joinery of Mission-style chairs and library tables than I am in its founder, Elbert Hubbard, a former salesman for Buffalo’s Larkin Soap Company, a man whose creative hucksterism paid off in financial success, the proceeds of which funded the founding of Roycroft. Said riches also underwrote Roycroft’s print shop, which published Hubbard’s paradoxical treatises propounding everything from enlightened labor and political reforms to worship of wealth and financial success. Happy to pillory almost any aspect of society, Hubbard was an acid-tongued satirist whose views and personal life were equally contradictory. He was a dandy who favored Stetson hats and oversized velvet bow ties but expounded on the virtues of austerity and hard work. He was a moralist who maintained two families within miles of each other, fathering daughters by his first and eventual second wife just months apart.  

Wandering the dimly lit rooms, with their church-like arched mullioned windows, I’m mesmerized by the Roycroft leader’s pithy pronouncements, many of which read like dispatches from the world of those busy manifesting self-actualization in all its forms. “Use Your Friends By Being of Use to Them,” reads a slogan over one window; “Men Are Great Only as They Are Kind,” reads another. 

Hubbard’s philosophy, which morphed over time from anarchy and an idealistic worker-led socialism to impassioned championship of free enterprise, established him firmly in the long chain of business and personal self-help messiahs from Spiritualism’s Madame Blavatsky to positive thinking pusher Norman Vincent Peale to Rhonda Byrne, whose The Secret borrowed from them all. A quick perusal of The Notebook of Elbert Hubbard, a posthumous compilation of his writings, wields gems like “Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts.” Hubbard’s best-known essay, Message to Garcia, a slightly disturbing ode to perseverance and obedience, remains on the reading lists of many business schools and military training programs today.

Even Roycroft’s signature font — designed, I’m told, by early resident Dard Hunter — looks strangely familiar until I realize it’s almost identical to that used by modern-day letterpress artist David Lance Goines in his iconic posters for Chez Panisse, Peet’s Coffee, and countless other California restaurants, businesses and institutions.

If all of these threads of interconnection weren’t enough to get my neck prickling, there’s one more — the name Hubbard, which links Roycroft’s founder with another self-proclaimed utopian leader, L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Can it be a coincidence, I wonder, that the leader of what is arguably America’s most prominent and successful cult has the same name as the man who coined sayings like, “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one?”

It’s no coincidence; whether the man born Lafayette Ronald Hubbard shortened his name to L. Ron to sound more like Elbert or not, he did claim descendancy of a type, with a story of being a nephew through adoption — though researchers attempting to document the connection haven’t been able to substantiate the story. What is known is that the connection was important enough to the later Hubbard that he dedicated the 9th printing of his book Dianetics to his supposed namesake. And that at various times he had groups of followers read and distribute A Message to Garcia — perhaps unsurprising given the essay’s emphasis on subjugating the individual to the will of the greater group.

If all of this gives me pause, it’s also strangely impressive. In his 59 years, Hubbard made Roycroft a self-sustaining enterprise, with its own bank, blacksmith shop, and farms. He wrote a 9-volume biographical series detailing the lives and thoughts of those he considered influential thinkers and artists. In later years he became a supporter of the suffragist movement, a cause espoused by his second wife, Alice Moore. In addition to editing two magazines, he became a sought-after lecturer and even a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. It was in that role that Hubbard and his wife set sail for Europe on their last voyage — they died in the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. 

As I take a final walk around the grounds, admiring the hand-set stone walls and unrestored buildings not yet open to visitors, I try to understand why I’ve felt so unnerved by Roycroft’s exhortations to hard work and communal action — values I do, after all, believe in and do my best to abide by.  Perhaps it’s the sense that movements like this come and go, some disappearing with little trace, others sending out tendrils to take root anywhere they find fertile soil. And the realization that a legacy can stretch far beyond the original intent, its ideals inspiring generations of artists and designers while fueling the aspirations of leaders far less magnanimous than the original model. 

It occurs to me that such ironies would please Hubbard, who might have written his own epitaph in one of his most popular sayings, often illustrated by a heavily burdened skeleton: “Do Not Take Life Too Seriously — You Will Never Get Out of it Alive.” 

But there’s another epitaph, too, the final line on a bronze plaque placed outside the Roycroft chapel a year after the Hubbards’ deaths at sea: “They lived and died fearlessly.” This, I think, is the meaning I’ll take away from this infuriatingly inconsistent man and his clan who set themselves apart to live and work differently, changing the rules as they went along. It seems a fitting one for these times when one global problem seems to pile on top of another: fearlessness may be the value we most need to reclaim.

The post Life Lessons from a Lost Utopia appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
Arts and crafts utopia, roadside attractions, in praise of lesser-known parks, seeking California BBQ, hard history we need to remember, weird history that’s totally optional, Scooby-Doo and acid-shooting monsters.
Plus, join us for a live Statesider Brunch!

Life Lessons from a Lost Utopia

Utopian communities generally fail, often quite spectacularly. As Melanie Haiken found when she visited, Roycroft, near Buffalo, New York, was abandoned, but it didn’t exactly fail — in fact its effects on design have lasted to this day. Oh, and it just might have inspired Scientology. Read this Statesider Original Story

Stories Across the USA

Golden State BBQ: California BBQ, like most everything in the state, is many things all at once: spiced by influxes of immigrants, experimental and with a history all its own. Tejal Rao, New York Times

Editor’s note: I haven’t lived in California for twenty years, but I still have fond memories of making the drive to Gilroy to a tiny BBQ shack surrounded by garlic fields. The aroma there was a mix of wood fire, spices, and the ever-present scent of green garlic. –PM

Other editor’s note: I have lived in California for nearly all of my life, and just recently realized that tri-tip bbq isn’t something that exists most other places. Also, you should serve it with pinquitos and pico de gallo, because why would you not? –AM

Big Bend Monsters: Rains bring wildflowers to the prairie, but they also bring — and we need you to read this carefully — acid-shooting land lobsters. Nope. Hard pass. Abigail Rosenthal, MRT

Another Roadside Attraction: We think it’s always worth taking the detour; this roundup of roadside wonders shows you why. I mean … the world’s largest collection of the world’s largest objects? We’ll drive. Jennifer Nalewicki, Smithsonian

Another Another Roadside Attraction: We’re suckers for this kind of thing, obviously. Here’s more, this time in Wisconsin, including rhinestone cottages and rusty spaceships. Kristine Hansen, National Geographic

Cultural Burn: A fascinating story on the “cultural burns” of planned fires led by Indigenous communities. “This spiritual practice of ‘low and slow’ burning is done to tend the land, such as in other planned burns, but is also intended for cultural purposes—for instance, to encourage the growth of basketry materials, or to move elk and other animals integral to some Native traditions.” Michelle Bigley, Hidden Compass

A Magical Realm of Crabs and Chickens: A lovely ode to the wonders of the Delmarva Peninsula, the big dangly bit of the mid-Atlantic coast that includes Delaware. Tim Neville, Outside

North Carolina Mithai: Every city in America has Indian food these days, but what about desserts? The Gravy podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance goes in search of the sweeter side of Indian cuisine. Kayla Stewart, Gravy

Statesider Hero of the Month: This Portland Maine bartender and every word that comes out of his mouth. Chris Busby, Mainer

The Untold History Department

Dog is My Copilot: “The auto brand Jeep is named after a teleporting, interdimensional dog.” Steve Bryant, Why is This Interesting?

Misremember the Alamo: What’s included when we learn Texas History? What’s left out? Sarah Enelow-Snyder, Bitter Southerner

A Place of Terror: A present-day exploration of the place where a group of men lynched Emmett Till, and the local legacy of that horrific act. “Our eyes adjusted to the darkness of the barn where Emmett Till was tortured … Christmas decorations leaned against one wall.” Wright Thompson, The Atlantic

Iowa Airwaves and the Original Social Media: “There were so many lonely women on the farms in Iowa. Every day the men would leave and the wives would be left in their homes with their cooking and cleaning and gardening and children, and nothing but the radio for company.” Lyz Lenz, Men Yell at Me

Ruh-Roh, It’s the American Uncanny: Unpacking Scooby-Doo’s cultural legacy of … documenting vernacular architecture around the USA in the 1970s?? Feargus O’Sullivan, Bloomberg

Statesider Brunch: Join Us!

Sunday, August 1 at 12:30 Eastern, 9:30 Pacific. If you’re in Australian Central Standard Time, we’ll let you figure that one out yourself. All you need is a Twitter account to join. Click here to add a reminder and meet us for brunch.

Go Small or Go Home

Your Seattle editor is just back from a few days with family in Washington’s Clallam County on the Olympic Peninsula. We stayed in a spare but spectacularly located cottage on Sequim Bay. We listened to seals converse, crunched on empty oyster shells at low tide, and met the gumboot chiton. Best part of the trip? The county parks. We went beach combing on an empty stretch of shore, and the next day, tide-pooling on the rocky cliffs at Salt Creek Recreation Area. Sure, sure, the National Parks are America’s best idea and all that. You know what’s also amazing? State parks. County parks. They are cheaper, often less crowded than the big guys, and just as compelling. Go visit yours. Right now. Go on, git. Send us a postcard, why doncha? –PM

We’ll see you at the virtual Statesider Brunch, right? Don’t make us eat all the scones.

The post Paradise Lost & Found appeared first on The Statesider.

On one bank of the river: a New Orleans neighborhood long accustomed to visitors. On the other bank: a zoo of an unusual sort, decidedly not accustomed to visitors. April Blevins Pejic went to explore this unique experiment in wild animal conservation and found herself thinking of her own New Orleans neighborhood, and what changes when you find yourself under the gaze of outsiders.

Just across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter in New Orleans lies a tract of land with the rather generic name Audubon Wilderness Park. A friend and I went out there in spring to look for migratory birds passing through the area, and were shocked when we arrived. The entrance didn’t have the inviting brick sign surrounded by well-tended flowers like Audubon Park in Uptown, but instead had a massive iron gate blocking the road with a speaker box to buzz the guard posted at a small office inside. We weren’t entirely sure we were in the right place as it looked more like a prison entrance than a park. 

The guard explained that only a small area of the property is open to the public but we could walk around that area if we followed all the rules. He took our name, address, and license information, and cautioned us to follow the main gravel road to a specific area, and not to make any left turns for any reason. With those warnings and a list of rules that included securing the lock I would find at the entrance to the part of the property open to the public, my friend Melissa and I set off down the long gravel road. Dense forest and old growth trees grew all around us. It was lush and green and would have been beautiful, except the road was lined with tall fences topped with razor wire.

We passed the two roads off to the left the guard warned us about. Each was blocked by a heavy iron gate at least twelve feet tall. I wondered what could possibly necessitate such a large gate, but I shrugged it off when a barred owl flew low across the road in front of us. I was so excited about following the owl that I ignored any discomfort I felt about all the fences and razor wire and what might be behind them. 

We found the area he described as safe marked by a sign on a short chain-link fence. 

A gated area within a gated area should have concerned me more than it did, but I was excited about migration season and a new birding hotspot and the barred owl I’d just seen on the way in. 

Melissa and I doused ourselves in bug spray and took off down the path through the dense woods. We saw a hermit thrush and a hooded warbler, but a rising uneasiness grew with every step we took. Aside from the guard at the property entrance, we hadn’t seen any other people at all. Then, I heard a screech so loud and strange that I immediately thought “pterodactyl.” 

“What was that?” Melissa asked. “I’m getting strong ‘Jurassic Park’ vibes out here.”

I was, too. We’d been following the sound of a northern parula and having zero luck spotting it in the high canopy when we heard the unearthly screech again. I also swear I heard a roar. We gave up on the parula and walked quickly back to the car. As we drove back down the gravel road, I saw something move up ahead. When we got within a few feet of it, we realized it was the barred owl. I braked hard. The owl didn’t even flinch. He stayed right where he was in the middle of the road staring at us. We stared at each other for a long moment, Melissa and I watching him watch us, until he finally flew away. It was clear that there was some incredible wildlife here, but it was equally clear that we were on their turf. 

Despite its mythic reputation as a hedonist’s paradise, New Orleans is actually a small town. The city is surrounded by water on three sides and by marsh on the other, so it occupies a limited geographical space, but it’s also small in the way that everybody who lives here knows everybody else, or knows somebody who knows somebody. In fact, the population of New Orleans proper is fewer than 400,000 residents, a stark contrast to the roughly 20 million tourists who visit the city every year. The city may feel much larger than it is to those visiting, but to residents it’s a tight community. 

In true small-town New Orleans fashion, a few days after my trip with Melissa, I met a guy at a crawfish boil who works at Audubon Wilderness Park. When I relayed my experience, he was surprised that we gained entry at all.

“It felt like ‘Jurassic Park’ out there because it is ‘Jurassic Park,’” he said.

He explained that we’d happened upon the Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center. The center is home to the Frozen Zoo, a collection of cryogenically-frozen genetic material from endangered species, and the Alliance Species Survival Center, a joint program between the San Diego Zoo and the Audubon Zoo to promote mating and genetic diversity in endangered populations by giving the animals space to roam and a herd to choose from. It’s essentially a brothel for endangered species. The animals that have been bred at the Species Survival Center include giraffes, okapis, wolves, wildcats, whooping and sandhill cranes, bongos, elands, and yellow-backed duikers. I don’t know which of those animals made the roar that I heard, but the pterodactyl-screeching was likely a crane.

Since Audubon leases the land from the U.S. Coast Guard, and the USCG still has an active communication station on the land, there are government reports detailing the purpose and need for a zoo animal brothel in the driest possible language. One report explains, “The selective pairing of a male and a female of a given species in a traditional zoo enclosure was formerly the accepted method of breeding zoo animals. However, in the long run, zoo personnel learned that matchmaking had its problems and was not overly successful. Often as not, while the pairing looked good from an animal husbandry perspective, one or both animals would show an indifference to the other and the hoped-for romance would never develop. As in natural/wild settings, the use of herds wherein mates, through a selective process, can seek out each other has proven to be a more effective means of breeding for certain species.” 

As annoyed as I get at the tourists who can’t even acknowledge me with a wave, I can’t imagine the rage I would feel if it were my ruined home they were gawking at from the plushy seats of an air-conditioned bus.

Aside from having more options for a mate, I’m sure the animals appreciate having privacy, some time to themselves when they aren’t subjected to the gaze of humans. On a trip with my children to the Audubon Zoo a few years ago, the gorillas made a distinct impression on me. One gorilla sat off by himself, motionless and staring at the crowd. I can’t know what the gorilla was thinking, but it struck me that he seemed dejected. A kid nearby had a drink with a straw that he kept pulling out of the cup. He’d fling droplets of water towards the gorillas while his mother scrolled on her phone. The gorilla watched him too, then shifted his posture. 

“What’s it doing?” my daughter asked. 

I didn’t know. The gorilla watched the little boy fling water and screech. The gorilla held eye-contact with the kid while he defecated. 

“Ugh,” my daughter said. 

The boy stopped flinging water from his straw while the gorilla scooped up a handful of dung and shoved it in his mouth. The little boy made exaggerated gagging noises and yelled in disgust, but the gorilla just kept staring him down and eating his own feces. 

I thought about that gorilla when I read a recent New York Times essay, in which Emma Marris argues that despite zoos’ reputations for education and conservation, it seems morally questionable to keep animals in captivity at all. Marris explains that many zoo animals engage in behaviors that show distress like self-biting or mutilation, exaggerated aggressiveness and infanticide, endlessly repeated movements, and, yes, eating their own feces. Apparently, many zoo animals require mood stabilizers and antidepressants. Marris acknowledges that zoo conservation efforts and breeding programs, like the one at the Species Survival Center, are increasing the population of endangered species, but those species are rarely reintroduced to the wild, and even when they are reintroduced, the wild populations still face the problems of habitat loss that endangered them in the first place. 

Habitat loss and feeling the pressure of a constant outsider gaze is a problem New Orleanians can relate to.

After Hurricane Katrina flooded my home Uptown with five feet of water and I lived through the nightmare of the storm’s aftermath, I knew my heart couldn’t take doing it all over again when the next hurricane hit and flooded the city. So I bought a different house, a bright orange shotgun on the highest ground in the city, the Sliver by the River. It had holes in the roof, knob-and-tube electrical wiring, and plumbing that left the inspector shaking his head and tutting about shoddy workmanship. It was ugly and falling apart, but I didn’t care. I brought it up to code. I put a long table in the front parlor so I can look out the floor-to-ceiling windows to the street while I work. I painted the house a light lavender and the shutters a dark navy. I planted camellias out front and enjoyed the quiet neighborhood. 

That is, I enjoyed it until the tourists arrived.

For the last ten years, every morning at 11:30 am, a Cajun Encounters tour bus stops in front of my home. The driver always waves when she sees me working at the long table by the window, but the passengers never do. They stare slack-jawed as the guide explains the definition of a camelback shotgun (“a shotgun-style building with a second story rising at the rear”) and points to my house. It is a strange feeling to be on display, to have people pay actual money to someone else for the opportunity to peer in on your life. This particular tour begins in the French Quarter and ends in the Ninth Ward so tourists can see the lasting effects of Katrina. As annoyed as I get at the tourists who can’t even acknowledge me with a wave, I can’t imagine the rage I would feel if it were my ruined home they were gawking at from the plushy seats of an air-conditioned bus. 

Habitat loss and fragmentation are threatening biodiversity worldwide. Fragmentation occurs when a habitat gets divided into smaller and more isolated patches, often due to land development or farming. Even though patches of the original habitat remain, fragmentation affects microclimates, pollination, and reduces the abundance of all forms of life within that habitat: plants, insects, birds, and mammals. 

 In a recent study, researchers used high-resolution satellite imagery to analyze the extent to which fragmentation affects the world’s forests. They found that more than 70 percent of forests globally are within one kilometer of a forest edge. This information, coupled with a meta-analysis of long-term studies on fragmentation revealed that “consistently, all aspects of fragmentation — reduced fragment area, increased isolation, and increased edge — had degrading effects on a disparate set of core ecosystem functions.” 

Fragmentation causes genetic bottlenecks and inbreeding by isolating populations. Forest edges create inroads for predatoratory species and hinder plant pollination. Fragmentation can even reduce the nutrient retention of the soil. It’s a lot of bad news for biodiversity and species that are already endangered. Even if we have the ability to increase the populations through breeding from zoo populations or cryogenically frozen embryos, where are they going to live? On display at a zoo?

It used to be that tourists stayed in the French Quarter and didn’t venture outside of that area much. They might ride the streetcar down St. Charles Avenue or to the Garden District for a cemetery tour and dinner at Commander’s Palace, but it was rare to see tourists out en masse in other neighborhoods. The proliferation of short-term rentals flooding the local housing market in the last ten years changed all of that. I can’t tell you how many drunk tourists have had teary break-up arguments while sitting on my stoop, or how many discarded beer bottles I’ve pulled out of the camellias. I am lucky that these mild annoyances are the extent of my troubles. Many local residents are losing their homes.

According to InsideAirbnb, a website that tracks short-term rental data, New Orleans has 6,508 short-term rentals listed, 85 percent of which are whole homes. The city recognized that the short-term rental market was contributing to skyrocketing housing prices and a housing shortage and passed regulations in 2019 to curb the problem. But the complicated and seemingly arbitrary regulations have done little to address the growing problem of resident displacement. In my neighborhood alone, an area that occupies only three-tenths of a square mile, there are 359 short-term rentals listed on Airbnb. 

The housing shortage in the city looks particularly problematic when you consider that the city’s largest industry, tourism and hospitality, consists primarily of low-wage jobs. The residents who clean the hotels, or cook and serve in the restaurants and bars are increasingly unable to afford to live here, which is leading to demographic shifts. In 2005 before Katrina hit, New Orleans was 67 percent Black and 27 percent White. The most recent census data (2020) shows the city is 59 percent Black and 34 percent White. These shifting demographics have created tension within the city. 

These tensions are perfectly encapsulated in the recent viral fame of the videoed confrontation between a native New Orleanian with deep roots in the community and a woman from Arkansas who used her car to block the street for a house party. In the video, the man tells the woman she can’t block the street without a permit, that elderly neighbors are complaining to him they can’t get to their homes. She asks if he wants a taco. He becomes irate at her dismissiveness and yells obscenities. She moons him. The video touched a nerve in the city because residents are increasingly being displaced from neighborhoods their families have lived in for generations by skyrocketing rents and property taxes, all driven by the short-term rental market.

Other people who attended the crawfish boil assured me there was fantastic birding along the trails but cautioned the bunkers were usually full of snakes.

The city has so heavily commodified the “Do Whatcha Wanna” myth of New Orleans that it hardly seems fair to complain that people have believed it. The city’s new ad campaign features actor Wendell Pierce walking around an empty hotel bar. “We’ve missed you,” he says. “We’ve missed doing what we do best, taking care of friends, old and new. Can I get you something to drink?” he asks as he swirls a cocktail toward the camera. The city absolutely depends on the revenue generated by tourism, which in 2019 was $10 billion, a fact made glaringly apparent by the devastation of long-term shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic on the local economy. It is also true that neighborhoods experience cyclical changes of growth and decline. But is it still a neighborhood if it’s functioning as a giant hotel?

Long before the land occupied by the Species Survival Center became Bourbon Street for zoo animals, it was a military installation where ammunition was housed in bunkers during World War II. The bunkers still exist, and are accessible by walking trails along the backside of the Audubon facility in an area called the Woodlands Conservancy. Other people who attended the crawfish boil assured me there was fantastic birding along the trails but cautioned the bunkers were usually full of snakes. Once I knew more, I wanted to see more.

So again, Melissa and I set out across the Mississippi River early one morning to go check out the trails and bunkers. We were prepared for the bugs and snakes. We were not prepared for the wild hogs. 

A huge storm a few days before our trip had made a mess of the trail. We had to climb over downed branches and trees as we side-stepped puddles and deep mud. As we walked, we realized we were probably the first people to use the trail since the storm. We saw all kinds of animal tracks in the mud, but no other footprints save our own, which unsettled me. 

We had only hiked in about a hundred yards from the trailhead when we came across a mulberry tree heavy with fruit. Birds love mulberries, and I hoped to see maybe an indigo bunting or rose-breasted grosbeak up in the branches. Melissa and I stared through our binoculars when we heard grunts and snorts. We froze.

“Oh my god, is that a wild pig?” Melissa asked. We stood still as we looked in the direction the noise came from. We saw brush moving, but couldn’t see the animal in the dense woods. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. 

I still wanted to explore the bunkers. “It’ll be fine,” I said. “It’ll go away. Let’s just wait a minute.”

We stood still and silent. A bird trilled above our heads, but I didn’t dare look up. Melissa and I have encountered all manner of wildlife while birding: raccoons and opossums, deer and armadillos, feral hogs and alligators. I don’t mind coming across alligators sunning themselves, but I do not like feral hogs. Aside from being huge and smart, feral hogs are insanely fast runners, able to swim, and have gored people to death.

 “We should make a pig plan. What have you got on you?” I asked. 

“Binoculars and a phone,” she said. She pulled out her cell phone to google what to do when encountering wild pigs. 

I had a bag of granola and a bottle of bug spray in my pack. “Will pigs eat granola?” I asked. We noticed all the hoof prints around the mulberry tree and decided that pigs who felt territorial about mulberries would probably like granola, too. Melissa grabbed a large stick from the ground at my urging while I got the snacks out in case we needed to throw it as a diversion. 

“This is stupid. We should just leave,” Melissa said. 

I might have agreed with her, except we had encountered wild hogs before. That time, the pig was pretty far away and skedaddled quickly when it saw us. Probably this one would run away, too. We stayed put until we no longer heard grunts and the woods went still. 

“Okay, it’s gone. Let’s keep going,” I said. I took a few tentative steps before I saw the huge pile of fresh dung in the middle of the trail. I pointed it out to Melissa as I stepped around it. We moved slowly and talked so we wouldn’t sneak up on anything. We took a few more cautious steps. “See, this is fine,” I said, though I felt like an interloper in that forest. 

Up ahead, the trail turned into a blind curve. I had only just registered that we should be cautious around it when the woods around us erupted in squeals and grunts. The underbrush to the left, right, and in front of us swayed violently.

“That’s it. I’m out,” Melissa said. I agreed, and we hightailed it back to the car where it took us several minutes to regain a normal blood pressure. 

As we sat there in the car, shaky and out of breath, I decided it just isn’t worth it. Those animals clearly didn’t want us traipsing through their home. As curious as I am about that wild place and as much as I’d like to see a whooping crane, I don’t need to go back out there. Some areas, I think, are best left to the residents.

The post Zoo Orleans appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
We got some news to tell you, oh-oh, about some wild, wild life. Running from 20-40 (okay, maybe it was three, but still) feral hogs in NOLA, botany at 60 mph, popular trash pandas, living inside a photorealist painting, everybody loves garlic noodles, and a message from your wild neighbors.

Zoo Orleans

A cryogenic zoo for endangered species. Bunkers full of poisonous snakes. Feral pigs that want your granola. Pterodactyls (unconfirmed). Just across the river from the French Quarter in New Orleans is a place that is much, much wilder. April Blevins Pejic went to explore this unusual experiment in wild animal conservation and found herself reflecting on her own New Orleans neighborhood, and what changes when boundaries break down. Read this Statesider Original Story

Stories Across the USA

Shrimp, Grits & Language Lessons: After nearly 40 years, Crook’s Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, closed for good. But it wasn’t just a place for mind-bending shrimp and grits for Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, it was where he learned to live — and talk — like a Southerner. Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Bitter Southerner

“Mike,” she whispered through a chuckle. “You can’t talk like that down here. This isn’t New York. People actually listen to what they hear.”

Swim Fan: An ode to the public pool: America’s wettest melting pot. Gregg Segal, National Geographic

A Minor Miracle: Minor League Baseball in the US is having a moment, and we have… clever branding to thank? I guess we’ll see you at the next Rocket City Trash Pandas game — maybe they’ll be playing the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. Marcus Gilmer, New York Times

United by Noodles: The unlikely story of garlic noodles and how they became a cross-cultural staple in the San Francisco Bay Area. Luke Tsai, KQED

“For us, Black people in California, we get asked, ‘Why are you not making soul food?’ This is soul food for us. It’s different from our grandparents’ generation. You’re going to find garlic noodles; you’re going to find Mexican food.”

Trail Travails: How a rail-to-trail project in rural Oregon became an unlikely symbol — and a target of far-right extremism. Leah Sottile, High Country News

Magically Empty Kingdom: Joy, small crowds, and making corn dog reservations at the newly reopened Disneyland. Barbara Neal Varma, Orange Coast Magazine

What is “Ethnic Food” Anyway? Why do “Ethnic Food” aisles still exist in American grocery stores? Shouldn’t a Mexican cookie sit with all of its cookie friends? Priya Krishna, New York Times

Extreme Botany: Taking a road trip? Interested in wildflowers? Have a budding naturalist in the back seat? Don’t hit the road without this FREE essential tool: “A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed.“ Chris Helzer, The Prairie Ecologist

You Say Yokwe, I Say Hello: A scientist travels to the Marshall Islands for a language lesson in what’s changed at the center of the earth’s climate engine. Emma Reed, Terrain

Into the Wild

How to Be a Lightweight: On a trip through Utah’s Buckskin Gulch, Ali Selim learns the secrets of ultralight backpackers and how to know what you don’t need to carry. Ali Selim, Outside

Texas Volcanoes: What do you mean Texas doesn’t have volcanoes? Tell that to these 10 sleeping beauties. Amy Weaver Dorning, Texas Monthly

Freedom in the Outdoors: Tope Folarin spent a lifetime building his vision of a perfect indoor life, but a childhood memory of the Wasacth Mountains in Utah — and a pandemic year — made him rethink his relationship to the great outdoors. Tope Folarin, High Country News

A Mountain Range By Any Other Name: Wait, is it “the Sierras” or “the Sierra”? As Freda Moon found out, the difference isn’t trivial to some folks, and they were happy to tell her just how wrong she was when she added an “s.” What’s the big deal? She decided to ask. Freda Moon, SF Gate

“Do tourists expect to be ‘liked’ or even welcomed when they behave like slovenly spoiled brats and self entitled sociopaths? We laugh at you. We make fun of you.”

So, This is the Outdoors: The pandemic spurred many people to rediscover the outdoors. And now that indoor attractions are starting to come back, many are sticking with their new outdoor hobbies. Nick Hyrtek, Sioux City Journal

…and the Wild into Cities

Hello, My Deer: A letter from your friendly neighborhood deer. John Yunker, High Country News

What is an Urban Pigeon? Checking in on Bert’s favorite bird. Rosemary Mosco, Pipe Wrench

Distance, Schmistance

We’re always saying that distance is overrated in travel, and that amazing experiences can be found just as easily close to home as anywhere around the world. The Statesider’s Andy Murdock took this to the extreme, and — much to his surprise — stumbled upon an unusual travel experience on the same block he lives on. How Andy found himself inside a photorealistic painting — and you can too. Read this story on SF Gate

Thanks to everyone who joined us for Twitter brunch recently — we had a blast! We’ve been planning an *actual* live reading event, but until that becomes possible/a good idea catch up on Statesider original stories here.

The post Wild Wild Life appeared first on The Statesider.

Nick Hilden pitched us a story on the growing wildfire threat in the West and how it’s disrupting travel plans, straining local business who depend on summer tourism, and upending long-held family traditions. Guess what happened next.

My plans for this story were disrupted by wildfires, of course.

There was a time when wildfires were considered a sporadic nuisance, but now the residents of the Methow Valley expect and fear their coming each summer, and know that the devastating imposition of fire will only continue to grow. I had interviews arranged with several local community members, but they all had to cancel. Right now, they’re too busy evacuating their horses, packing valuables and family heirlooms, and preparing themselves for the possibility — and, increasingly, a certainty — that they will lose everything.

The Methow Valley sits on the starboard shoulder of the Cascade Mountains in Washington, marking the place where — in the summer — the lush greens typically associated with the state give way to the dry browns of the high desert. The community is made up of three towns that sit along Highway 20: Mazama, Winthrop, and Twisp. Of this triad Winthrop is the most popular, known for its Old Western facades and wooden sidewalks and general bustle of tourism.

I’ve been visiting Winthrop my whole life. My family has been camping at a meadow near Falls Creek 11 miles north of town along the Chewuck River for nearly half a century, beginning a decade before I was born. When I was a young man, I spent summers living in a tent in the meadow and bartending in town. My father’s ashes are scattered there, and now the latest iteration of our family has begun making memories there.

There’s a trail that runs up Falls Creek past several tiers of waterfall, the second of which has been a favorite swimming hole among my cousins and I ever since we were very young. When I used to spend summers in the meadow, I would hike up to this pool to shower in the falls and bathe in its icy glacial runoff. We know it so well that any change is obvious. Recently we saw that a tree had settled across its span some thirty feet above its surface, and we discussed with my nephew how someday when it and he had grown a bit he could attach a rope-swing to it. In that moment, it wasn’t hard to imagine his children playing on that theoretical swing, and maybe even their children after that. 

This is our place, our legacy, and we are fiercely protective of it. But a threat looms.

The signs that they — the meadow, Winthrop, and the Methow in general — were in danger crept in slowly. When I was a boy, the burn ban never went into effect until August, if at all. But each year was hotter than the last — each summer drier — and by the turn of the millennium it was no longer quite the same experience. Today, campfires are virtually a thing of the past. If you hope to roast s’mores or gather around a campfire’s warming glow, you’d better go to the Methow before the second half of June.

My family’s most recent visit — which inaugurated a longer trip I would be taking down the coast — was in early July this year, already several weeks into the burn ban. This time there were about a dozen of us, small numbers by our family standards. My brother couldn’t make it. He was off fighting wildfires somewhere in Southern California, a job that began many years ago as a part-time volunteer gig but was by now a beyond-full time role that demanded his attention all summer long.  

“Cousin,” I said, pressing the gas to the floor, “we might have just made a terrible mistake.”

Our family filled the days with hiking and swimming in waterfalls and relaxing by the river. Occasionally we went to town for essential supplies like ice cream from Sheri’s Sweet Shop or drinks at Three Fingered Jack’s Saloon. On one such visit, we found that the community park had been taken over by fire trucks with their ladders aloft and decorated with streamers — a memorial for a firefighter who had died. I couldn’t help but wonder after my brother, and selfishly wish that he was there with us drinking by the river rather than risking his life amidst the flames. 

After a week our stay came to an end. I’d driven to the valley with my cousin Spencer, and we were the first to leave.

When we emerged onto Highway 20, we saw a great billow of dark smoke coming from somewhere up the road. While getting gas in Mazama, I was told by a visibly nervous cashier that the fire was just up the hill at Cedar Creek and that everyone was worried. Word was the highway could be closed at any moment. Spencer and I decided to tear ass over the mountains and get out while we could.

As we blew past a roadblock that was in the early stages of implementation, I stared nervously up at the angry-looking plume that poured from the forest off to our left. We were the only vehicle on the usually busy highway.

“Cousin,” I said, pressing the gas to the floor, “we might have just made a terrible mistake.”

I really began to sweat — and not from the heat — once we were in the fire’s shadow. The world around us was cloaked in a murky umber, as if we were driving into Dante’s nightmare. Off to the left we could see the flames stabbing out from the treetops in angry flickers. For a few long moments I had serious questions about my judgement, but then we passed out of the shadow and were clear.

That was six weeks ago, and the fire is still going. In fact, the situation became much worse when the first fire was joined by a second that leaped up just north of Winthrop. Evacuation orders were organized. The highway was closed indefinitely, choking off the region’s much-needed flow of tourist dollars. Speaking of choking, the possibility of tourism was killed off entirely by a thick haze of toxic smoke that settled into the valley. Now, even while these first summer fires are sputtering down, a new one has erupted an hour or so east that threatens the tiny fishing town of Conconully—another place that is dear to my family.

According to the news, northern California is riddled with fires. Of course it is. It’s summer in the West, and this is just a fact of life now.

For Winthrop and the wider Methow Valley, this was the second ruined summer in a row—first the pandemic, now the fires. And while it’s uncertain how the former will shake out (it’s certainly not going as well as we all hoped), the impact of the latter is only going to worsen. As if the wildfires that we’re seeing with our own eyes weren’t evidence enough, these particular fires happened to correspond with the release of the IPCC’s latest report on climate change. Suffice to say that the news isn’t good, with this prestigious scientific body declaring, “In high-latitude regions, warming is projected to increase disturbance in boreal forests, including drought, wildfire, and pest outbreaks (high confidence).” I find their use of italics on “high confidence” especially disturbing.

For those in the Methow Valley — and indeed much of the rest of the West — the future looks to be aflame.  

As I write this I’m camped out just south of Crater Lake, and the air is choked with smoke. Last night I was camping a few hundred miles to the north where I fell asleep beneath a clear sky, but by the time I awoke in the morning it was thick with ashy haze. I drove for hours trying to escape it, but it seemed to be everywhere. It had been the same a week ago along the Columbia River Gorge — smoke so dense and pervasive that visibility dropped to a couple hundred yards.

I had planned on journeying through the Cascade Mountains of central Washington and Oregon, then down on through northern California, but it increasingly appears that those plans have been smoked — or in some cases burned — out. According to the news, northern California is riddled with fires. Of course it is. It’s summer in the West, and this is just a fact of life now.

I’m not sure how smoky it will be or if I’ll be able to reach my destination at all. Judging by what I’ve seen — not only now but over decades of watching the temperature rise, the landscape increasingly turn into tinder, and the wildfires burn up more and more each year — this is only the beginning.

Ironically, my earliest memory of the meadow in the Methow — from when I was about six — is of a particular instance when fire seemed elusive. My brother and I had been told to gather firewood, but we claimed that there was none to be found. Dad snorted and said something to the effect of, “When it’s dark and cold you’ll realize that there was plenty of wood around the whole time.”

He was right. Once the sun had set and fire had grown more appealing, it seemed as if there was firewood everywhere we cast the beams of our flashlights. As we darted around collecting sticks by the armful, the now-raging campfire rose, bats swooped low overhead and the sky broke open and out poured the Milky Way. My father sat by the fire and watched us race about at our task, his eyes glimmering from the light of the flames, a satisfied smile on his lips. 

I learned some obscure lesson that night I couldn’t conjure into words then, and it remains vague even now. Something about what can be accomplished if we only try. Something about how we only act once the sun has set and night has come. Something about putting in the work before our backs are against the wall. Something about acting before it’s too late.

Nearly twenty years later, I reflected on that night as we poured dad’s ashes into a calm eddy just downstream from the first of the Falls Creek waterfalls. Are we doomed to only recognize a problem once it is too late?

I don’t have any answers, at least none that will solve the problems at hand. It might be too late as it is. Maybe now we’re just scattering ashes in the stream.

What I do know is that the meadow burned in the most recent blaze. My brother’s fire crew was stationed somewhere else — awaiting another fire, of course — and he messaged me saying that he wished he could go fight for it; for our family’s memories. I didn’t realize that one could transmit such despair via text message. 

I also know that next year when I visit, while the scars from the fire will remain, there will already be regrowth. That won’t mean the danger has passed, but when spring comes, the shoots that grow through the char and ash will bloom hope. 

But who knows? Maybe — probably — the fires will return. My plans may have to change again. My family and I, however, will try. Beautiful places are increasingly hard to find.

Top photo: Rupert Ganzer (CC-BY-NC-SA)

The post Burning Memories, Scattering Ashes appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
The West’s new season: wildfire season. How it’s changing travel, upending family traditions, and making us rethink our relationship with the outdoors. What to do when you want to go to Hawai‘i, but Hawai‘i says no. Plus say hi to tie-dye, a healthier guy, the folks who make festivals fly, and making lobsters cry.

Burning Memories, Scattering Ashes

Wildfires in the West have gone from an occasional worry to an annual certainty — and it’s changing how we live and travel in some of the US’s most treasured landscapes. Nick Hilden set out to tell this story and how the specter of fire looms over his family’s annual traditions, but the specter quickly became all too real. Read this Statesider Original Story

Stories Across the USA

Feeling the Mississippi: “It’s a park and it has a theme, but it’s not a theme park.” Revisiting the model Mississippi in Memphis — a graphic essay. Martha Park, Oxford American

Preserving the Beat: Bill Summers is a living museum of percussion. He founded Klub K.I.D. where students learn what it takes to be a working musician. No, that’s not right. They don’t learn, they live it. Tami Fairweather, Preservation Hall’s Salon 726

Muir Woods, Corrected: Rangers in this popular California park are revising the interpretive exhibits to present a more accurate and inclusive history. Ashley Harell, SFGATE

Bantu, Maine: How Maine’s population of Somali Bantu are creating a new model for American farming. Katy Kelleher, Down East Magazine

Dead Parking Lots Resurrected: The parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert used to be at least as much of a scene as the concert itself. The tradition is back outside Dead & Company shows. Mordechai Rubinstein & OK McCausland, New York Times

Fans may be wearing their favorite shirts, but they don’t appear dressed up in costume. They are in uniform. A group of people who wear the clothes rather than the other way around.

Rise of the Guardians: The story behind the Cleveland baseball team’s new name, and the history of the 43-foot-tall Guardians of Traffic. Vince Guerrieri, Belt Magazine

The Great (White) Outdoors: There’s a long history to the hesitancy of Black Americans to explore the great outdoors — and it didn’t happen by chance. Joe Kanzangu, Undark

Me, Myself & Sandwich: How Fat Joe became an obscenely large sandwich at the Stage Deli, but the sandwich never materialized. Now Fat Joe is Upset Joe even though Fat Joe is trying to be Healthier Joe. Peter Fearson, New York Post

“Anyone can win a Grammy, but not anyone can take a seat at the Stage Deli, point to the menu and say, ‘I’m a sandwich.'”

Don’t Call Them Carnies: Inside the world of the traveling carnival workers who make state fairs happen. Ian Power-Luetscher, Racket

Dumpster Delights: An Emmy Award-winning television host and a food and travel writer looks back on the childhood delights of the Entenmann’s Outlet — and its dumpster bounty. Kae Lani Palmisano, Food & Wine

Dumpster diving shouldn’t be illegal. Not paying people enough money to survive so they resort to Dumpster diving should be illegal.

I Saw Miles and Miles of Kreplach: Why is cowboy culture seen as synonymous with Christianity? The long history of Texas Jewish cowboys tells a different story. Dina Gachman, Texas Monthly

Statesider Hero of the Month: We’re crazy for Virginia Oliver, the 101 year old Maine lobsterwoman. Imagine being the lobster she rejects. Ouch. Brian MacQuarrie/Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe

The Wildfire Desk

Fire Anxiety: A change in the wind can mean everything changes. How do you plan for that? Jane Hu, Last Word on Nothing

Rethinking Outdoor Travel: That summer vacation in the West looks very different now that fires regularly affect some of the most popular destinations. Concepción de León, New York Times

Land of Smoke and Fire: These beautiful and terrifying photos capture the staggering loss of a hard season in Califorina. Jeff Frost and Lauren Markham, Lit Hub

Incarcerated Women Firefighters: Thousands of prison inmates fight fires every year. Since the 80s, women have participated in the program, too. But don’t call them “volunteers.” A new book by Jaime Lowe tells their stories. Erin Berger, Outside

To Hawai‘i or Not to Hawai‘i?

Hawai‘i: The place that seemingly every mainlander — err, statesider? — wants to be right now. And yet, COVID cases are surging, the governor wants tourists to stay away, there’s a shortage of rental cars, businesses are understaffed, and locals are getting increasingly fed up with over-tourism. Meanwhile, the popularity of The White Lotus brought attention to Maui, but not without some controversy. When it comes to Hawai‘i, it’s always more complex than you think — if you’re paying attention.

Hawai‘i Is Not Our Playground: Centuries of colonialism. Constant thoughtless over-tourism. These locals are trying to get visitors to think about Hawai‘i differently. Chris Colin, AFAR

“Even people who are otherwise politically conscious—they’d get to Hawai‘i and their brains just slip into vacation mode.”

Don’t miss the rest of AFAR’s package, A Better Way to Visit Hawai‘i, with articles on the Hawai‘i Sovereignty Movement, learning about aloha ‘āina, bringing back traditional voyaging, and how to connect with and support the islands’ culture and natural spaces.

Social Cures for Over-Tourism: Hawai‘i residents are using social media as a tool to try to divert tourists away from sensitive areas and to educate, one tweet at a time. Cassie Ordonio, Civil Beat

Vaccine Island: Hawai‘i: “Please don’t come.” Guam: “Come — and get your vaccine of choice.” Lyric Li, Washington Post

Ask The Statesider: Should I Go to Hawaii? Right now? Nope. At some point in your life? Yes, if you can. And read Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawaii by Liz Prato before you go.

We’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain, but we always know we’ll see you again. Meanwhile, catch up on Statesider original stories here.

The post Up In Smoke appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
Why the perfect destination is where nobody else is thinking of going, an interview with the guy who “borrowed” a Citi Bike from Manhattan and rode it across the country, what to do with all those statues, professional boat jumpers, Native murals, Presidential pyramids, vanishing utopias, and Mick Jagger’s quietest pint.

Citi Bike: Far From Home

Jeffrey Tanenhaus enjoyed getting around New York City using the local bike-share program, so much so that when he found himself between jobs and facing a “pre-midlife crisis,” he hatched an unlikely plan: Step 1: Rent a Citi Bike. Step 2: Ride it across the country. How one crazy idea turned into a scouting trip for a new home and a new way of life. Read this Statesider Interview

Stories Across the USA

The Perfect US Destination: Writer Jon Mooallem gets offered the chance to travel anywhere he wants for the NY Times Magazine. His answer: “What if I drove to Spokane?” He did. And he went to a Minor League baseball game. More of this, please. Jon Mooallem, NY Times Magazine

The mascots kept coming, too: the blue dinosaur, the other dinosaur and, most beloved of all, making his traditional appearance in the middle of the sixth, Ribby the Redband Trout.

Maisel’s Murals: Since 1939, an Albuquerque storefront has hosted murals by a who’s who of Native American artists. Now efforts are underway to document and preserve the paintings. Gwyneth Doland, New Mexico Magazine

What happened when Mick Jagger walked into the Thirsty Beaver? No, this isn’t a dirty joke. Or maybe it is. Anyway, Mick went for a beer at a low-key Charlotte saloon and not a single person recognized him. One intrepid journalist dug deep into the story of what happened that night. Jeremy Markovich, North Carolina Rabbit Hole

Always Ask a Local: There was big news in archaeology this past month: a series of footprints at White Sands, New Mexico provided strong evidence that people lived in the area before the last Ice Age, some 23,000 years ago — long before the scientific consensus. This wasn’t news to Native people. Nick Martin, High Country News

Yankee Pyramids: A look at the history and design of a peculiar American tradition: Presidential libraries. Delaney Hall, 99 Percent Invisible

Letters from Wisconsin: In Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, mail is delivered by boat. More precisely, it’s delivered by an elite group of “mail-jumpers” who leap from a moving (and tourist-filled) boat to the docks around the lake. Sometimes they miss and fall into the water. Rebecca Deurlein, Atlas Obscura

Save the Gumbo: Gumbo isn’t gumbo without filé, the powdered leaves from the sassafras plant. But sassafras is struggling, and only a few people are trying to keep the tradition — and the flavor — alive. Jonathan Olivier, Bitter Southerner

Streams of New York: One underground explorer goes deep under New York City to discover its hidden waterways. Steve Duncan, Narratively

Wrestling, Redefined: Devon Monroe doesn’t look like a wrestler. But maybe wrestling is ready for a refresh. Jerard Fagerberg, Racket

The 22-year-old performer comes to the ring draped in a gay pride flag, his cheekbones polished into gems. At 5’11” and 155 lbs, he’s bird-chested and sharp around the shoulders. He gambols to the ring like a Drag Race contestant, flaunting his ass to the crowd. When the bell finally rings, he flitters from turnbuckle to turnbuckle, a smirk drawn across his face.

California’s Vanishing Utopias: In the hippie generation, some idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land. Those days are drawing to end. David Jacob Kramer, GQ Style, of all places

Statesider Hero of the Month: “Armed with only a solar charger, a vibrator and some marijuana gummy bears, I rode out the pandemic – and my fear of spiders – in a California commune.” What else is there to say? Stephanie Theobald, The Guardian

How to Love Our National Parks: National Parks are crowded like never before. The answer isn’t more National Parks, it’s actually funding the ones we have. Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

Tax Backpackers? Should backpackers pay a tax to conserve the land they use for recreation? [Editor: No. Land conservation helps everyone, and taxing backpacking makes the outdoors only accessible to the wealthy.] Christine Peterson, Outside

Bigfoot, Vermont: You’re heading to Vermont to see the foliage change color, but something else catches your eye. Was that…Bigfoot? Meet Jake Swanson, professional Bigfoot sculptor. Aaron Calvin, Stowe Today

A Moment on Monuments

An Audit of America’s Monuments: More mermaids than congresswomen, more people fighting to preserve slavery than to end it. The story we tell of our country through the monuments we’ve chosen to erect. Gillian Brockell, Washington Post

Statues in the Balance: How Franklin, Tennessee found an alternative to tearing down Confederate statues by telling the full story. Jill Robinson, Saturday Evening Post

“There wasn’t a single piece of this project that’s been easy, but history has always been messy. If we didn’t choose to look at the truth, we’d continue down this path of intentionally not knowing as a culture.”

What Would We Do Without Statues? How can we possibly learn our history without statues? If only we had other ways. Alexandra Petri, Washington Post

What little we know of the past of this country has been supplied to us exclusively by statues. As far as we can tell from the statue record, America was founded by Washington-Jefferson-Lincoln-Roosevelt, an enormous four-headed rock monster dozens of feet high with every possible permutation of facial hair.

Order Your Copy Now

The Best American Travel Writing 2021. Edited by Padma Lakshmi (Series Editor, Jason Wilson). In stores everywhere October 12, 2021. We’re a big fan of this series every year, for obvious reasons, but we’re especially eager this year. Why? Because, for the very time, an original story by Elizabeth Miller from The Statesider was selected for this year’s volume! We’ve got good company, too, with stories from Kiese Laymon, Leslie Jamison, Bill Buford, and more. Pre-Order Now

Spend an hour in Chicago with Statesider editor Pam Mandel: Pam’s a virtual guest at 5959, an arts and culture series based in Chicago and hosted by Statesider friend Amy Guth. She’ll be taking about travel writing, her book, The Same River Twice, and probably the Statesider, if there’s time. Tickets and information here. 

If you ask us, all our stories are among the best American travel stories. If you can’t wait for the book, get your fill of Statesider original stories here.

The post Into the Great Wide Open appeared first on The Statesider.

In 2015, Jeffrey Tanenhaus rented a Citi Bike in New York City. This was often his commute of choice — in fact, he had grown to love the freedom and control he felt navigating the ever-changing obstacle course between his home and work — but he had different plans for this ride. The bike would go where no Citi Bike had gone before. Suddenly out of work and feeling the urge to find a fresh start, Jeffrey decided to try something unexpected: he would ride a Citi Bike from coast to coast. Was it possible? Would the police be after him for stealing a hefty blue bike? Was he out of his mind?

The trip was not guaranteed to go well. Citi Bikes are notoriously heavy, designed for the abuses of city life, but not for hills. Jeffrey had essentially no experience with bicycle maintenance, was relying on free places to sleep through friends and volunteer hosts found on the Warmshowers.org network, and — perhaps most importantly — he had never attempted anything like this before.

His new book, West of Wheeling: How I Quit My Job, Broke the Law & Biked to a Better Life, tells the story of his journey, the people he met along the way, and how an unlikely bicycle that came to be known as “Countri Bike” helped him chart a course for the next phase of his life. I spoke to Jeffrey from his new home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a place he fell in love with on his cross-country ride, and where he is starting a local tour business.

Some of your happiest moments of the ride were on the long rail-to-trail projects that have been popping up around the country. I’ve never considered them as anything more than a local feature, but it sounds like they proved to be a real advantage to you on your trip.

These rail-to-trails are essentially old railways that have been torn up — and railroads do not do well uphill. If there is a hill, it’s a very slight grade, you know, 1% maybe, so following a former rail bed basically guarantees a flat ride. In the cases where there is a hill — in my book I mentioned a 23.5 mile hill in Pennsylvania — and that sounds insane, but when it’s at 1%, even on a Citi Bike, it was no sweat because it was very gradual.

Since I’ve finished writing, even more rail-to-trails have opened. They opened up one [the Empire Trail] across New York state, where you can go from Buffalo down to New York City, and then up from New York City to around Plattsburgh. Then that’s connecting into something called the East Coast Greenway, which is supposed to go from Maine to Key West mostly along trails or at least bicycle friendly roads. I think you’re going to hear more about these rail-to-trails or greenways as cycling becomes more popular. If there’s any kind of silver lining to the pandemic it was that it got people on bicycles more just to be outside or at least away from crowded public transport.

You said in the book that every detour you take is a big choice when you’re on a bike, because that’s all extra effort. But on the other hand, you’re often writing about places that cars don’t go. You saw a side of the US that you wouldn’t have experienced in a car.

There’s back roads and then there’s like really back roads, right? Back roads where cars can’t go because they’re a rail-to-trail or a greenway. The railroads connected all of these little towns where the road through the town was the railroad. So you pass through small towns often that suburbanization has skipped. On a bicycle you can’t be doing 60 miles an hour. You’re going to need to stop in this next little town to see if it has a vending machine, or you hit up the local diner for a chocolate shake. And I was very partial to my chocolate shakes.

You were also partial to beer. Beer comes up a lot in the book. I’m assuming you’re a beer fan, but it seems like there’s a lot of cases where bike culture and beer culture converge in the same place and in the same people. Is there a reason for that? 

That’s a great observation. Yes, I am a fan of craft beer, not because I’m snobby, but because I think it tastes better than the mass-produced beers. Although I did hit up the Anheuser-Busch factory in St. Louis and it does taste better from the source, so I’ll give them that. But yeah, I did try to stop at as many breweries as possible just because these craft breweries have interesting people that are hanging out there and they are often bicycle-friendly. Beer brings people together. Food brings people together. A brewery is a great social spot for gathering, and a hyper-local spot as well. 

Bicycling also brings people together. It’s a social activity. But it can also be solitary, and I enjoyed the solitary aspect of it as I was trying to get through a pre-midlife crisis and figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to do it.

You said that you think of yourself as a bit of an introvert. Did having the bike, having your story, did that help you connect with people that you may not have been able to?

The bike was my icebreaker. The bike looked unusual, so people had questions about it. And then I had a souvenir New York license plate attached to it. So even if they didn’t quite know what the bike was, and maybe were too intimidated to ask, because maybe they were introverts themselves, everybody knew where New York was and the farther west I got, the farther away New York was. It almost became easier to approach me and ask, “Did you really ride that from New York?”

I was almost a little bit worried about advertising the fact that I was from New York. You know, riding through places, rural areas that may associate New York with different values from their “Heartland” values, and that NY license plate may have been an unwelcome sight. But in fact it was not, and it inspired a lot of questions, curiosity, and that created a conversation.

The way you described the cities you visited, it seemed like you were almost shopping for a new place to live. Was that explicitly on your mind?

It was very much on my mind. I didn’t know if it was on my mind on day one, but as I began making progress, I realized that I was auditioning these cities. Could I see myself living in DC? I had spent time there on a government internship in college, but I hadn’t been there in 16 years It’s a pretty cool city. It’s got a very low skyline compared to New York, and I got a good vibe. 

Then I ended up in Pittsburgh and liked that even better. It had a grittier spirit that I kind of liked compared to the DC political scene. Maybe Pittsburgh was where I needed to be? Lots of entrepreneurs, it’s a tech-friendly city and also very bicycle progressive. I arrived right on time for a big bicycle event and ended up getting connected with a woman who had started her own bike touring company. I wrote about her story quite a bit in the book, and she became a lifelong friend. So yeah, I was like, “Hey, Pittsburgh is pretty great.”

Then Cincinnati was the next big city and I already had cousins there, but had never visited. When you’re from New York, why would you ever go visit Cincinnati? You should just come visit me because New York is the end-all be-all. But I went on some group rides there and, hey, there’s these cool breweries in this place? It has all this old, historic residential and commercial architecture. These buildings are just crumbling, and they have these adopt-a-building programs. I am really interested in placemaking to make an impact for the community. How cool would that be to fix something up and create a B&B or a brewery or something?

Then there was Louisville, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Flagstaff and Los Angeles. I was hanging out in these places, meeting other bike-friendly, like-minded people and seeing the city through their eyes. 

It sounds like you mostly had really great interpersonal experiences across the country, with other bicyclists, Warmshowers hosts, and people in local businesses wherever you went. Did it leave you with any sort of big takeaways about your fellow Americans?

This was all before the election of 2016, which really began to accelerate the partisan polarization. And now there’s disinformation and there’s a pandemic. I mean, there’s some real fractures in our society. But at the time, I certainly was attuned to the fact that I was riding places that were not aligned with me politically, but I was very much not going around sharing my New York City viewpoint of how I think the country should run. So by being a listener and being humble and respectful I was able to have great conversations without getting into politics or religion and things like that.

When you just have a conversation, it can still be personal. I told people where I was from and why I was on this ride, how I was trying to see America. I think that’s something everybody can relate to.

Pie or cake? And where?

I’m still going for the chocolate shake on this. I’m a chocolate shake fan. I know that wasn’t an option, but I was on a mission to find the perfect chocolate shake. 

I did have a really good slice of a German chocolate cake in Hermann, Missouri, which was founded by two German immigrants, because they were worried that Philadelphia was becoming too corrupted, so they established this more remote community to better preserve their traditions. About an hour west of St. Louis by car, there’s this fabulous small town right on the Missouri river. They chose that area because it looked like the Rhine.

Did you know that German chocolate cake is actually named after a person from Texas whose last name was German?

Don’t tell Hermann, Missouri.

Did you ever find the perfect chocolate shake?

There was a great one that I wrote about in leaving Pittsburgh, which was a very tough day climbing out of the Allegheny Valley. And getting out of Pittsburgh was a bit of a mess. You’re going through some depressed little suburbs, and not good road conditions. Then I came across a diner creatively called “The Diner,” in Oakdale, Pennsylvania, and had a nice little interaction at that diner and stopped in for a chocolate shake and was so glad I did, because that was a very sweet end to my Pennsylvania experience. 

West of Wheeling: How I Quit My Job, Broke the Law & Biked to a Better Life, by Jeffrey Tanenhaus (2021, Houndstooth Press). Order a copy today and support local independent bookshops across the country.

All photos courtesy of Jeffrey Tanenhaus

The post Citi Bike: Far From Home appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
The real inspiration for Dune, carnivorous plants, dead moose, haunted cemeteries and goat men, Bavarian kitsch towns, the deeper meaning of Chinese chicken fingers, San Jose grub, things we can all agree on about candy corn, and America’s greatest Kevins.

Strange Creatures in the Woods

A full campground that should have been empty. A liar. Unidentifiable screams emerging from the woods at night. The Statesider’s Andy Murdock just wanted a quiet camping trip and a chance to check out an unusual carnivorous plant, but instead he found himself camping in the middle of a mystery. Read this Statesider Original Story

Stories Across the USA

Dune, Oregon: In the 1950s in Florence, Oregon, roads and buildings were being swallowed up by blowing sand from nearby dunes, and locals were fighting a war to take back their town. A young journalist came to town to tell the story — his name was Frank Herbert. John Notarianni, Oregon Public Broadcasting

Moose Tracks: Ted Genoways was lucky that he survived a collision with a moose on an Alaska road trip — but his adventure was just getting started. When you kill a moose, the moose is your responsibility, whether you want it or not. Ted Genoways, Outside

It’s often said that the dirty secret of adventure writing is that something has to go wrong, that it’s not really travel until your plans go out the window.

The Day the Great Lakes Burned: 150 years ago, the deadliest fire in American history swept through northeast Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. If you’ve heard of it at all, the story you’ve heard is likely wrong. Susan Lampert Smith, Belt Magazine

Bizarro Bavaria: The US is dotted with kitschy pseudo-German tourist towns. Anjali Enjeti, author of Southbound, became intrigued by Helen, Georgia when a friend described it as “the armpit of Georgia.” She’s been going ever since. Anjali Enjeti, Bitter Southerner

Haunted Hawai’i: The Hawaiian Islands are home to many cultures…and all of their ghosts, too. Catherine Toth Fox, Honolulu Magazine

Friday Night Frights: The Tall Tale of the Sabine River Goat Man and the Haunted Cemetery. Joe R. Lansdale, Texas Monthly

At night, the river and the woods were a crawling black velvet of sound. Things unseen moved along the river bank, slithered or crawled or pranced between the thick growths of trees that ran for miles.

Chicken Fancy: How an evil sea captain and a beloved queen made the world crave KFC. Ben Marks, Collectors Weekly

Chicken Fingers: The Chinese chicken fingers of the Boston area may not be “real” Chinese food, but to Ranjan Roy, they tell the story of what immigrants will do to adapt and survive. Ranjan Roy, Margins

Pawpaw Party: Andy has a quibble with calling pawpaw’s “the largest fruit native to North America” because we’re clearly forgetting pumpkins. The pawpaw may not be the largest, but it’s possibly the most delicious — and it isn’t easy to find. Dan Pashman, The Sporkful

The Way to Eat San Jose: San Francisco is the gravitational black hole of all things food-related in the Bay Area, but don’t sleep on San Jose. This great package of stories shows why San Jose is one of the US’s great immigrant food scenes. Luke Tsai (and a team of others), KQED

Sprinklegate: Here’s a story that will fill your heart with patriotic pride (and FD&C Red No. 3). A U.K. bakery was forced to stop selling its popular cake, known as “Bruce,” because it used illegal American sprinkles. Bill Chappell, NPR

“It is HIGHLY unlikely that we will find any legal sprinkles that we will use as a replacement. British sprinkles just aren’t the same, they’re totally shit and I hate them.”

Children of the Candy Corn

Bipartisanship: Candy corn. Love it or hate it, there’s one thing we can all agree on: watching it get made is really cool. It uses cornstarch as a mold? And you can reuse the cornstarch over and over? McKenna Ewen, Washington Post (You can go visit the Jelly Belly factory in person in Fairfield, California if you’re keen to see the process in person.)

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice: The “confectioner’s glaze” used on candy corn? Yeah, that’s made of the resinous secretions of the female lac insect. Delish! Brendan Borrell, Scientific American

We’ll Pass: The best thing we’ve read on candy corn this month came in the form of a Twitter thread reviewing Brach’s new Turkey Dinner + Apple Pie and Coffee Candy Corn, which is apparently a real thing that somebody thought was a good idea. Skip the candy maybe, but don’t miss this hilarious thread from Heather Martin.

The Other Candy Corn: A brief history of corn candy — candy that tastes like corn, not candy that looks like someone’s idea of a corn kernel. Doug Mack, Snack Stack

The Kevin Department

“Report: U.S. Still Leads World With Highest Density Of Kevins” declared a classic headline from The Onion. This issue, we bring you two strangely connected stories of American Kevins.

Kevin the Bigfoot: New Jersey man claims to have befriended a Bigfoot named Kevin. Joe Kelly, Cat Country

Kevin vs. Bigfoot: Washington’s new hybrid electric ferry needs a name. Among the contenders: Kevin and Bigfoot. Alec Regimbal, Seattlepi [We are sad to report that neither made the cut]

What We’re Reading

Miracle Country, by Kendra Atleework. One of my favorite books of California writing, a book that brims with the essence of place, is Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, a decidedly odd collection of vignettes from the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra published in 1903. Austin was writing just as William Mulholland was working to rob the Owens Valley of all of its water to make Los Angeles thrive. Atleework takes on the same rugged country, 100 years later and still struggling with the loss of its water. Hers is a story about family, tragedy, childhood, and returning as an adult to the place that shaped her. It’s a glorious piece of writing that defies easy categorization — it’s a memoir but it’s packed with history, science, legend, childhood memory that merges into fantasy — and, as with Austin’s writing, the Eastern Sierra is more than a setting, it’s the main character. Buy now and support independent bookshops

By the way, The Land of Little Rain is available free online — the Project Gutenberg version has nicely preserved the original illustrations from the 1903 edition, which really add to the experience.

We’re more about treats than tricks around here, so come on by and fill up your bag with sweet Statesider original stories.

The post Irregular Haunts appeared first on The Statesider.

People go camping for a variety of reasons. Andy Murdock wanted quiet and a chance to check out an unusual carnivorous plant. But there were others at the same Northern California campground for a very different reason — and mysterious screams in the night.

It’s said that when humans mastered fire, it brought us the power to conquer the darkness. Whoever says grandiose things like that hasn’t spent much time around campfires. A glowing fire makes the darkness beyond the reach of its light feel even darker. When you’re camping and the sun sets into a moonless night, the horizon shrinks to a radius of just the few meters illuminated by the firelight.

When you wander out into the darkness to see the stars or water the trees, you see one thing fire does quite well: it allows whatever is lurking in the darkness to have a clear view of everything that happens around the fire. This unsettling thought has occurred to me more than once, but I don’t dwell on it. I’m typically more concerned with where I put the cookies than what lies in the darkness — unless that’s where the cookies are. 

But on a chilly autumn night camping along the shore of Gumboot Lake, a scream came from woods, and my priorities suddenly changed.

Strange things happened at Gumboot Lake the moment we arrived. They began with The Liar.

We were hunting for solitude. Midweek, after school was back in session, at an out-of-the-way campground in Northern California west of Mt. Shasta, we expected the place to be empty. That was the point: find somewhere with as few people as possible. 

This year it was just three of us: me, my brother, Aaron, and our old friend Steve. We’ve been doing some variation on this trip for years, a small group of friends, scouting for new spots around California, looking for those 45-minute-drive-down-a-bumpy-road kinds of places that guarantee a quiet, peaceful spot, away from crowds, drunken yahoos, and RVs with noisy generators. If there were going to be any drunken yahoos in the campground, it would be us.

As we pulled into the campground, it was clear that we had miscalculated. Every campsite was taken. We managed to find one informal overflow spot on a little dirt track along the eastern shore of the lake. There was no table, no steel lined fire pit, just a flat space with a hastily built rock ring that had hosted a fire or two. That was it: take it or leave it. We took it.

Why the campground was busy, none of us could guess. You won’t find Gumboot on a list of prettiest mountain lakes in California, but it’s a pleasant spot with easy access to a beautiful stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail and remote enough to lose the crowds. Usually. If it was this packed at Gumboot Lake, we figured, why risk losing the one spot we had by gambling on space at the more popular campgrounds in the area?

We got out of the car to stretch our legs and scope out the site. It had room for a couple tents, only a handful of trees between us and the water, and we were far enough from the main part of the campground that we felt mostly in our own little world. I walked to the lake to do that thing that cityfolk do when we find ourselves at mountain lakes: stare out over the water, letting the quiet ripples of light and breeze slowly rinse the city off you. This would do nicely.

My reverie was short-lived. A man — white, early 30s, ripstop pants, baseball cap, looking fresh from a Bass Pro shopping trip — approached along the lakeshore heading toward the center of camp.

“How’s it going? You guys with the group?” he asked, smiling. He clearly assumed we were.

“There’s a group?” I asked. “I guess that explains why the place is so full. We weren’t expecting to see much of anyone around here.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, surprised. “There’s a group of maybe 20 or 30 of us.”

“Reunion of some sort?” I asked.

“No, we’re here on a biological survey.”

This added up. He had a generically outdoorsy weekend naturalist look about him. If he had pulled out a pair of binoculars to track the flight of an osprey across the lake, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“In fact,” he added, “I just walked around the lake, and there’s a big patch of some kind of carnivorous plant on the far side. It’s really cool, you should check it out.” He waved in the general direction.

Just his luck: out of everyone in the world, he ran into me, a California plant nerd with a head full of Latin plant names that I can recall faster than my own phone number. 

“That’s right,” I said, “Darlingtonia californica. I’ve seen it here once before.” 

The Latin caught him off guard. I had intended it as a sort of biologist’s secret handshake, but he looked confused.

“What was that again?” he asked.

“Darlingtonia. The cobra lily. Pretty rare to see it in the wild, and this is one of the best patches I know.”

I had scoped out Gumboot Lake a year earlier, and slammed on the brakes when I spotted a small patch of cobra lilies along the road. It was one of the reasons I had suggested this spot for our camping trip, though I had probably neglected to mention that particular detail when pitching the idea.

“Wow, okay, cool,” he said, eyes glazing.

“Are you with a university?” I asked.

“Oh, well…we’re from all over. Kind of a loose group of friends. We meet up occasionally to survey interesting places,” he said. It was a dodge. He suddenly seemed uncomfortable, though I couldn’t begin to guess why.

“What are you surveying for?” I was probing a bit now.

“Just a general survey. We just want to see what’s around here.” He was getting increasingly fidgety, and just as I was starting to get interested, he cut it short. 

“Well, you guys enjoy,” he said and walked away toward the center of the campground.

Why did he have to ask if we were with the group if it was a group of friends? Who organizes vague biological surveys late in the year after school is back in session? Something didn’t add up. 

I walked back to the campsite, processing the conversation. 

“Who was that guy?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know, but he was a liar.”

It’s worth taking a moment to introduce the cobra lily. It’s neither a cobra nor a lily, but the name is spot-on: the inflated leaves look more like the arching heads of serpents than leaves. It’s veined with a translucent web of green with splashes of crimson as they age and the snake-like effect is completed by a keeled hood and what almost looks like a long forked tongue. Even those who happily walk through life blind to plants around them will stop and wonder at the sight of them.

If you happen to be a flying insect who buzzes into a patch of cobra lilies, though, you’re in for a different experience. At first, everything’s calm. Unlike the Venus flytrap, cobra lilies don’t move, they lure. The forked tongue-like structure displays droplets of sweet nectar. A pungent blend of volatile fruit-like fragrances waft up from somewhere. Colors only visible in the UV range show you where to land. When you land on the tongue, you can tell where the scent is coming from: a small, circular opening tucked under the hood. Crawling through the hole, you find the inside is very waxy and slippery. Then you tumble down a long tube into a pool at the bottom.

When you try to leave, something is very wrong. You can see daylight above, but angled hairs make it hard to ascend. When you manage to fly up toward the light, you bump into a wall you didn’t see: clear “window cells” look like paths to freedom, but are as solid and unyielding as the rest of the tube. 

You slip back down the waxy chute. 

You try again, but each time the same thing happens. How did you get into this place again? Wasn’t there a hole somewhere? Each attempt makes you more and more tired, until finally you sink into the pool of fluid at the bottom and drown. Trust me: you don’t want to know what the bacteria and mites living in the plant do to your body after that.

A full campground and a random liar didn’t dissuade us. We had a private site, a lake view, and the idea of getting back in the car seemed terrible. We were staying.

We set up our tents, built up the fire pit with some new rocks, scrounged for some kindling in the nearby forest, and grabbed baseball gloves to play catch along the dirt road — a fun but painful reminder to the muscles in my shoulder that I don’t do this more than once a year.

A car pulled up and a man asked out the window, “Are you with Bill’s group? Is this where we’re supposed to be?” 

We didn’t know Bill. We didn’t know where he was supposed to be.

A little while later, another man walked past and asked, “You boys here with the BFRO?”

BFRO. Biological Foray Research Organization? Bullshit Friends Roving Outdoors?

The Liar had said it was a group of friends, yet no one seemed to know anyone else. The Liar looked outdoorsy, the next person looked like a pediatrician, another was an IT guy straight from central casting. They all saw three nondescript white men camping and immediately assumed that we were part of the group, whatever this group was. 

The scream echoed across the lake. It was the first of several.

We had finished our dinner, played Hearts, and settled into chairs around the fire with some bourbon and cookies. We were puzzling out why The Liar would need to lie and who this group of mysterious campers might be when the first shrill howl from the far side of the lake interrupted us.

We turned toward the darkness. There was nothing to see —  too far, no lights in the woods, our own fire too bright. Then it happened again. The howl was animal, but also clearly human. It wasn’t someone in distress or angry — if anything it sounded somewhat…horny.

“Somebody’s been drinking,” my brother said.

By the third or fourth time, we decided to join in. Horny animal call. Exaggerated drunken response. Horny animal call. Even more exaggerated drunken response. We were having a great time. The howling monster person doing whatever it was they were doing in the woods? Unclear.

Eventually, whoever it was fell silent, leaving the crackle of our fire and a growing chill in the air.  I grabbed my headlamp and picked my way along the small track toward the center of the campground to find the bathroom. Something was bothering me, but I didn’t put my finger on it until I started heading back to our site. It was dark but not late, somewhere in the 9 o’clock hour, yet in a completely full campground, ours was the only lit fire. There was darkness at every other campsite, as if everyone had disappeared — but all of the cars, all of the tents were still there.

I hurried back to camp. “Guys,” I said, “I think we’re in the middle of a Bigfoot hunt.”

I got up before sunrise to spend time with the cobra lilies. When I’m camping, my brain will click on when the barest light of the day is visible. It’s a great time to grab a camera and take a stroll, to capture the fleeting golden moments of the morning light, and scope out the flora.

My theory that we were surrounded by Bigfoot hunters was met with amused skepticism by Aaron and Steve. They agreed it was a possibility, but only I was completely convinced. I needed more evidence.

But first, I wanted to visit the cobra lilies. The largest patch at Gumboot Lake is on a wet slope, a boggy seep with water oozing out of the soil, trickling slowly down to the lake below. Even in the cold morning, before most insects are active, the bog feels alive with action, rich with decay. It’s a hard place to get a solid footing. Just being there feels itchy. You can’t kneel or sit without getting soaked. I sacrificed a pant leg to get a closer look and snag some photos of the cobra lilies in the early light of day. It was a fair trade.

How did these peculiar and complex traits evolve? Why don’t local insect populations learn to avoid them? Is the community of microbes inside the cobra lily leaves the same in every place? Every question answered raises several new ones in its wake. The more I learn about the natural world, the more I realize how little we know about things that are right in front of us everyday, much less rarities like the cobra lily. 

There’s a bias in the sciences known as the “streetlight effect.” It comes from an old joke where a policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight at night. The drunk man says he has lost his keys, so the policeman kindly stops to help him look. After a few minutes with no success, the policeman asks, “Are you sure you lost them here?” The man replies, “No, I lost them in the park, but this is where the light is.”

We often look for things where it’s easiest to look, not where we’re most likely to find the answer. It’s easy to think we have the full picture, when we don’t know what lies beyond where we looked because we simply haven’t looked there yet. But it doesn’t mean that the truth is out there waiting for us in the dark.

We put the mystery of these other campers on hold for the day, taking a day hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. For the evening, I had plans to do a little reconnaissance into the main part of the campground to gather more evidence for my theory. I didn’t have to: the evidence came to us. 

As we started our dinner, all the other campers gathered at a campsite just across the tip of the lake from us. It was time for an audio presentation, amplified through two large portable speakers. Sound carries across water, so we got free seats for the show.

The recording first presented a series of animal calls to aid identification in the wild: wildcats, coyotes, some unidentifiable howl, bears, wolves, that same unidentifiable howl repeated. It sounded vaguely familiar. After a time, the audio switched to recordings of phone conversations, 9-1-1 calls.

“I just saw a… I don’t know. A big creature crossed the road. It was standing upright. It jumped down off the road into the woods and then I couldn’t see it anymore.”

“Where did this happen, sir?”

“Right in front of my truck, on my way home…”

We had come to Gumboot Lake expecting to find nobody; they had done the same. They were having a Bigfoot hunting party and we crashed it. It explained everything: the strange howls in the woods, the campground that emptied at night, a man on a “biological survey” that he wouldn’t define.

I was torn between screaming with delight and desperately wanting to catch every word drifting across the water. Aaron and Steve felt the same. If you had walked into our campsite at the moment, you would have seen something that looked like a crazy mime celebration: three grown men, wide-eyed, jumping around gesticulating wildly while trying to stay completely silent.

With the mystery out of the way, our question changed from “What the hell is going on here?” to “Now what do we do with that information?” I had to learn more about what these Bigfoot hunters were up to. Answer one question, it raises many more. What’s involved in a Bigfoot hunt? What type of people are drawn to a Bigfoot hunt?

As we strolled down to the center of the campground after dinner, we chatted idly about the day, tossed a few pebbles into the lake and tried to look as nonchalant as possible while scoping out the scene going on around us. At each campsite, people were decked out in camos. In place of weapons, various electronic gadgets were being readied. Sitting on the gate of a truck bed, one man was making sure the straps on his night vision goggles fit snugly. No one paid us any mind.

A man walked by wearing a hat that said “Gone Squatchin’.”

This was a group of people — almost entirely white men — happily getting ready for the main event. This was their chance to head out into the woods at night with a bunch of high tech toys and a group of new friends. They were buzzing.

There are natural reactions to finding yourself in the middle of a Bigfoot hunt: laugh or run. But seeing the group getting ready for a night of fun made me twist the dial from mockery to amused curiosity. I got up before dawn to kneel in a bog and ponder the mysteries of an obscure carnivorous plant. I’ve taken trips to remote locations specifically to find miniature, nearly invisible ferns called moonworts. I’ve had leeches suck blood from my ankles, slipped down muddy cliffs in rain storms, and nearly leaned on a sleeping pit viper, all in the name of finding some obscure plant that might be just around the corner. I wasn’t about to go traipsing off into the night with these guys, but if they want to creep through the woods with sasquatch-o-scopes whirring, hollering Bigfoot mating calls, who am I to judge?

Still, I can’t help but worry about the Bigfoot hunters and what it means that so many people are ready to believe the unbelievable. Around 11 percent of Americans believe Bigfoot is real, according to a 2020 survey, but no one has bothered to ask how many Americans believe in cobra-shaped bug-eating plants that live in serpentine bogs; that’s clearly the wrong question. 

But why invent mythical creatures when there’s no shortage of real wonders in the world?

On our last day, I paid another visit to the cobra lilies, hoping to get some photos of the morning light shining through the translucent cells on the top of the hood, or of an insect on the edge of making a very bad life choice.

As I started back down the hill, I noticed another camper up and about, one of the Bigfoot stalkers. I could see picking his way around the lake, shoulders hunched from the chill. When he reached the spot between the cobra lily patch and the lake, he turned up the hill in my direction, although it didn’t look like he had spotted me. 

This lifted my spirits. Perhaps this was one Bigfoot hunter who could also appreciate the marvels of nature that we can actually see and touch.

A few yards up the hill, he stopped and stepped up onto a stump within easy view of the cobra lilies. Then he turned his back on them and looked east, toward the rising sun.

I passed by him and said good morning. He was holding his cell phone up in the air trying to find a signal, hoping that the stump might help. There wouldn’t be a signal for miles in any direction, stump or no stump, but he’d find that out soon enough. The rising sun lit up a patch of wildflowers by the lake, and I headed off to investigate.

All photos by Andy Murdock

The post Strange Creatures in the Woods appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
Running the river, Thanksgiving beyond the mythology, root beer in the wilderness, strip malls in the valley, dysentery on a 1980s Macintosh, singing walruses, long bike rides, Thanksgiving pie, and an investigation into the unlikely roots of pecan tassies.

Paddling for Glory

From a trickling stream leading out of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, the Mississippi River runs more than 2,500 miles along its path to the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer, two teams set out to break the record for canoeing the entire length — which stood at just over 18 days — battling storms, cargo ships, frayed nerves, and the fatigue of paddling all day and all night. For Outside, Frank Bures tells the gripping tale of how it all went down.

The stern naturally followed Johnson down into the vortex, then up the other side. When the canoe exited, it spun. Casey screamed as it tipped, then she stood up and — mimicking a sailing move called hiking — leaned out over the water to keep the boat afloat. It worked. The two sleeping team members woke up in half a foot of freezing water, shivering and disoriented. But the vessel righted itself.

Stories Across the USA

Let Us Now Praise Strip Malls: Strip malls were designed for transitory car culture but for one writer in the San Fernando Valley, the local strip mall acted as a community center. An Uong, Catapult

At a Teletype Terminal Near You: Don Rawitch created “The Oregon Trail,” a game that defined a generation. (No, really. Looking at you, Xennials.) And in an act that seems absolutely insane in today’s wired world, he … gave the code away. The rest is a not entirely accurate version of history. Robert Whitaker, Slate

East L.A.: They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re representing the LGBTQ+ community at this monthly market. Interesting side note from the rule book? No reselling stuff off Amazon. If you’re in LA and entering this season of shopping, this would be a great field trip. Frank Rojas, LAist

Secret Tacos: San Antonio is known for its puffy tacos and its breakfast tacos, but it has a third signature taco — one that may be hard to eat, but it’s worth the effort. José R. Ralat, Texas Monthly

The Root Beer Lady of the North Woods: Meet Dorothy Molter, a legend of Northern Minnesota. For decades, she served sweet soda to thousands of parched canoers who paddled past her island home deep in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, with no electricity or running water. Terri Peterson Smith, Atlas Obscura

Mendocino and Trinity, California: A ginormous private ranch in Northern California has been purchased by the Wildlands Conservancy and will soon be a ginormous — and free — park. Kurtis Alexander, MSN

Friends Without Borders: “I was trying to remember which album it was that we listened to first as we drove north toward the border — was it Harvest Moon, or was it Graceland?” Letters between a border patrol agent and an immigrant. Javier Zamora & Francisco Cantú, Granta

Riding High: During the pandemic, a group of students from Saint Augustine’s University with very little cycling experience became the first competitive cycling team at a historically Black college or university. Joshua Steadman, Bitter Southerner

Going the Distance: The new 750–mile long Empire Trail across New York lets you pedal all the way from Manhattan to Canada. And that’s exactly what the New York Times did. Jane Margolies and Wm. Ferguson, New York Times

Singing Walruses: It’s Alaska, it’s an island, there are singing walruses. When do we leave? Acacia Johnson, National Geographic

Resources, Natural and Otherwise: In the northeast corner of Alaska, the Gwich’in people have been reliant on the migratory caribou population for thousands of years. Oil and gas companies say they can develop the land without disrupting the herd; the Gwich’in aren’t so sure. Eva Holland, Smithsonian

The Somewhat Magic Kingdom: Disneyland is way too crowded, plus, it’s magically expensive. Rod Benson, SF Gate

Statesider Hero of the Month: Meet the Mullet Queen of Lansing, Michigan, where business (in the front) is booming. Michelle Jokish Polo, NPR

Thanksgiving in Perspective

Good Riddance to “Squaw”: The word “Squaw” is all over place names around the USA, most famously a certain valley. It’s also incredibly racist and sexist. Now Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is working to ban its use on all federal lands. Bill Chappell, NPR.

Everything About This is Horrible and Wrong: We were wondering what stories might lurk in the newspaper archives about Thanksgiving in Puerto Rico and the other colonies that the USA took over in 1898. We found this full-page spread from The San Francisco Call, with a graphic of “The New England Pie Belt Reaching Around the World” — and text that puts racism and colonialism on full display.

Thanksgiving Perspectives from Native Americans: Seven Indigenous people from around the USA share their thoughts on the meaning of the holiday—and what’s missing from the usual narrative. Project 562 (originally published in 2018).

To celebrate and re-tell the imagined story of Thanksgiving feels more than ironic, it feels wrong. It feels like I’m condoning the ongoing injustice in our communities, abandoning the fight to protect the sacred, encouraging indigenous erasure.

But Wait, There’s Pie

Sup-pie Chain? Is that anything? Supply chain issues, climate change, and the labor shortage are putting a crimp in the pie business. Laura Reiley, Washington Post

Beans, Beans, the Magical Pie Filling: How the navy bean pie became a symbol of revolutionary Black power. Rossi Anastopoulo, Taste

Sweet Freedom: For decades, pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving itself were seen as just another way that Northerners were telling Southerners how to live. How the pumpkin pie became an unlikely (and delicious) anti-slavery symbol. Matthew Korfhage, USA Today

Now THAT’S Fun-Sized: For a very limited time, you can get a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that’s the size of an entire pie. Kelly Hayes, KTVU

Invasion of the Tassies: This Washington Post article on Thanksgiving tassies makes a huge assumption: that you have any idea what a tassie is. Apparently we all missed that scene in Steel Magnolias, but they look like delicious mini-pies, so we’re in. G. Daniela Galarza, Washington Post

If you’d like to try your hand at the original recipe, here is the full article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, from October 6, 1954 (on the same page with a review of Brigadoon and an ad for Sweetheart Shampoo, a “Push Button Instant Shampoo with Egg“).

Sunk into the couch in a pie-induced coma? Perfect time to read through our growing collection of Statesider original stories.

The post It’s High Time for Pie Time appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
What to do when you’re snowed in (1970s edition), plus the stories that brought us joy in 2021, including Rolling Stones, lake-jumpers, possible pterodactyls, vintage roadside photos and much more.

Snowed in With a B-List Musician Outside Las Vegas, New Mexico

On Twitter the other day, we saw a guy named Tim Oliver mention his experience getting snowed in at a remote hut in New Mexico in 1970, with a hit-making songwriter, some dogs, several cases of booze, and a whole lot of weed. We needed to know more, so we called him. Read the full story here.

We would make up a bunch of food and you’d get your bacon and eggs and pancakes, drink a bunch of beer, and everybody would get kind of woozy about the same time and just kind of fall asleep. 

And then pretty soon one of these Louisiana people would wake up, roll a joint, start strumming his guitar. We’d rub our eyes and go into the other room and have a beer, you know, maybe a glass of wine or even orange juice — a little morning pick-me-up, although this might be in the middle of the afternoon. We did that for two and a half days. Just go to sleep for a while, wake up, party, go to sleep — all the while, singing and laughing and telling stories. 

The Stories We Loved

There’s enough difficult news in the world right now, so we thought we’d add a little joy to world in this issue. Here are the US travel and culture stories that made us smile over the past year:

Pam’s picks

Department of Shut Up and Take Our Money: “He wants to build Jackalope Junction, a 20-acre theme park with Western and steampunk themes based on characters he created — notably Jackalope Jim, a sheriff in the turn-of-the-century town who wields his Jules Verne-style blaster with a cybernetic arm.” Susan Gill Vardon, San Diego Union Tribune

  I’m theme park avoidant, but something about how weird this whole mash-up is made me giggle with delight. Yes, I want to go, and yes, I want the souvenir t-shirt.

Treading Water in the Dark: For some people, a free canoe on the side of the road wouldn’t warrant a second glance. Vashon Island resident Jesse Gardner hit the brakes. She needed that canoe, even if she couldn’t understand why at the time — or how on earth she was going to get it home. Jesse Gardner, The Statesider

  It’s not just that this story put us in partnership with There She Goes, a podcast of stories by women travelers. It’s that Vashon is right over there from where I live and Jesse’s descriptions of island life made it possible for you to experience what it’s like to live here.

Iowa Airwaves and the Original Social Media: “There were so many lonely women on the farms in Iowa. Every day the men would leave and the wives would be left in their homes with their cooking and cleaning and gardening and children, and nothing but the radio for company.” Lyz Lenz, Men Yell at Me

  Radio has been so important to me during this era and reading Lyz’s piece about the role of radio for women in Iowa resonated. Also, Lyz’s newsletter is great. So great, you should subscribe.

Better than Rugelach? Them’s fightin’ words. We’re baking these Russian tea biscuits and finding out. Guess what: they’re spectacular — and they’re from Cleveland. Rachel Myserson, The Nosher

  I cleaned out my fridge and found a lot of jam. Then I found this recipe for tea biscuits. Huge win.

Andy’s picks

Sub-Par Sandwiches: This story has everything we want from a golf story: a mystery, a weird obsession, lots of sandwiches, and — most importantly — absolutely no golf talk. Luke Fater, Atlas Obscura

  In a normal year, I think about golf roughly zero times unless I’m thinking about the ways we waste massive amounts of water and fertilizer. Did I mention I’m fun at parties? But this is just the golf story for me. Also, I solved the mystery: the secret missing ingredient is pimento brine. You’re welcome.

Zoo Orleans: A cryogenic zoo for endangered species. Bunkers full of poisonous snakes. Feral pigs that want your granola. Pterodactyls (unconfirmed). Just across the river from the French Quarter in New Orleans is a place that is much, much wilder. April Blevins Pejic, The Statesider 

  We ran many wonderful stories this year, but Zoo Orleans was such a joy to edit. This is one of those stories where you think you know what’s happening, and then you’re suddenly very wrong. This happens multiple times in the course of the story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

The Perfect US Destination: Writer Jon Mooallem gets offered the chance to travel anywhere he wants for the NY Times Magazine. His answer: “What if I drove to Spokane?” He did. And he went to a Minor League baseball game. More of this, please. Jon Mooallem, NY Times Magazine

  What if more people thought like this? What if instead of following the crowds to the same beaches, the same mountain lakes, you thought, “Hey, let’s drive to Spokane and watch minor league baseball?” Do it, America. Find your own Spokane baseball getaway.

New Jersey is Perfect: Obviously. But why? How? Here’s the whole story. Sara Benincasa

  I probably know less about New Jersey than I do about golf, but I adore an impassioned “my place is better than yours” essay — and, really, I just love Sara Benincasa writing about anything, but especially when she turns her unique voice to US travel.

What I’m saying is the people of New Jersey are made of Boardwalk zeppoli and asphalt, and New York only exists because we say it does.

Doug’s picks

What happened when Mick Jagger walked into the Thirsty Beaver? No, this isn’t a dirty joke. Or maybe it is. Anyway, Mick went for a beer at a low-key Charlotte saloon and not a single person recognized him. One intrepid journalist dug deep into the story of what happened that night. Jeremy Markovich, North Carolina Rabbit Hole.

  I’m a sucker for “famous people go to a regular-ass bar/restaurant and enjoy themselves” stories (Adele once went to my local diner, true fact!) and I especially love the way the reporter approached this one as a deep-dive investigation with just the right amount of dry humor.

Ruh-Roh, It’s the American Uncanny: Unpacking Scooby-Doo’s cultural legacy of … documenting vernacular architecture around the USA in the 1970s?? Feargus O’Sullivan, Bloomberg.

  Old-school cartoons and historic buildings are both fascinating subjects, so it follows that the intersection of the two subjects would be a true delight. I wish this story had been 10,000 words.

Letters from Wisconsin: In Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, mail is delivered by boat. More precisely, it’s delivered by an elite group of “mail-jumpers” who leap from a moving (and tourist-filled) boat to the docks around the lake. Sometimes they miss and fall into the water. Rebecca Deurlein, Atlas Obscura

  I’ve been looking at the map of Lake Geneva, and it sure seems like there are roads that access all of the giant houses along the waterfront, which means there’s no real practical reason to continue delivering the mail using agile young “mail-jumpers.” But it’s tradition and it’s ridiculous and, honestly, that’s enough (in this case) to make me smile.

Pudding Heaven: Persian rice pudding meets Mexican rice pudding at this Texas taqueria. It’s “warm and smoky with spices, slightly sour with strawberry powder and suffused with grains of rice that reveal the slightest chew” and we could go for a bowl right now. Meet us there? Priya Krishna, New York Times

  We feature a lot of “X meets Y” food stories in the newsletter, because, well, they all sound so damn good. But this is the one that has stuck in my brain for months and made me want to book a plane ticket to Texas.

See You on the Roadside

One of the most-clicked stories in our newsletter over the past year was “A Photographer’s Mission to Capture America’s Last, Great Rest Stops” by Ryan Ford in Outside. There’s just no getting around it: people love roadside Americana. We’ll end the year with a little detour through some of our favorite photos in the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive at the Library of Congress:

Putting off holiday prep or year-end planning or anything else on your mind? Our archive of Statesider original stories is here for your enjoyment and procrastination assistance.

The post Let it Snow appeared first on The Statesider.

A few weeks ago, a news item from England caught our eye: a blizzard in Yorkshire had stranded sixty-one people at a remote pub for three days. Among the stuck were members of an Oasis tribute band that had been booked to perform and whose gig was … extended. On Twitter, there were many joking responses to the affair, along with some stories of similar snowbound experiences, including this one from a Twitter user named Tim Oliver: 

Snowed in two nights in Northern NM in 1970. Also, a bunch of Cajun pickers and a Nashville semistar. Add dogs, ten cases of Lone Star, four of Annie Greensprings, 6 jugs of Jack Daniels & a couple lbs refer. We perfected Neil Young’s The Losing End.

Obviously, we needed to know more, so the Statesider’s Doug Mack called Tim Oliver for all the details. Spoiler: it’s an even better yarn than you’d expect from that tweet. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Let’s start with some background. What were you doing in this place and how did you get snowed in? 

Okay. I have to paint the setting for you a little bit. And if you have a map handy, try to find Las Vegas, New Mexico. It’s in Northern New Mexico, about 50 miles east of Santa Fe. They’re separated by the Sangre de Cristo mountains and it’s quite a juxtaposition. I even bought a map in Costco, of all places, that called Las Vegas the wildest of the Wild West. 

Las Vegas was on the railroad and it was divided into two parts. West Las Vegas was almost entirely Hispanic and East Las Vegas was all Anglo when I went there as a student in 1969. I had just graduated from high school and I was 17 years old. And I show up at New Mexico Highlands University. I picked that because I had to go to college somewhere — it was either that or get drafted to go to Vietnam. The school was a compromise with my father. It was cheap enough for him and it was far enough away from home for me. 

It was a blast. This place had no law. I mean, it was wide open — the amount of drug use and just crazy partying. And the rents were extraordinarily low. You could get an apartment for $15, $20 a month, so there was no point in living in the dorm. In fact, I had a dorm room, but then I went into an apartment, too. As soon as I got my lottery number for the draft, which was a pretty high number, I knew the draft was not hanging over my head anymore, so I kind of quit going to college and was just hanging out and partying and having fun. And in this crazy place, one of the things that seemed to collect there were fugitives “on the lam,” if you will. This one particular group we called the Louisiana people. We don’t know what they were wanted for. I’d heard different things, mostly drug charges and draft dodging. They were all friends from someplace deep in the bayou and they all had weird names — one guy was named Box and another guy was named Frog. 

There was another guy that hung with them named Bobby Charles. He was a noted songwriter — he wrote “See You Later, Alligator” and “Walking to New Orleans,” which was a big hit for Fats Domino. We were friends at the time. I mean, we didn’t keep in touch after I had moved away and stuff, but we used to hang out. We’d go get some drinks and some dope and smoke some dope together, try to find some chicks, whatever you do, you know, out in the middle of nowhere. NPR had a little story about Bobby Charles, and it didn’t say a thing about him going to New Mexico. According to that story, he got busted in Tennessee and moved to Woodstock, New York — and eventually went there, I’m sure, but before he got there, he was out west. 

There was another guy — I won’t mention his name because he’s still around him and he’s back in legitimate business — but he was a pot dealer and he had money and he had this little house. It was an adobe hut, three rooms. The bedroom was his and then he just let his friends stay in the rest of it. The house was in this little town — get out your map again — called Montezuma, New Mexico. They had a Fred Harvey Hotel there. 

Have you heard of Fred Harvey?

I haven’t!

You better look up Fred Harvey! [I later looked it up and it is indeed a fascinating story!] 

Fred Harvey felt built very nice hotels along the Santa Fe Railroad, including the Grand Canyon and Albuquerque. There was one in Las Vegas. There was a movie back, I think in the 1930s, called “The Harvey Girls.” [Looks like it was released in 1946 and starred Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury.] It’s all about how, in these remote hotels, they would have housing for their help, and the girls all had little dorms and they would all live together and work for Fred Harvey for, like, a summer. The Harvey place up there in Montezuma was a castle. And the reason it was up there is there’s a pretty big pond that was always in a shadow. You’re getting up about 8,500 feet in elevation, so there’s always ice in this pond and they could load it onto the train for whatever kinds of perishables there might be; that’s how they had the refrigerated cars back then, ice packed in sawdust. So there’s this huge castle as a backdrop to this little adobe hut where we were staying. 

The Louisiana people, Bobby Charles, and some other miscellaneous folks, including me, were there on a winter’s night, and I’m pretty sure it was 1970. We were just doing our normal thing, but we were pretty well supplied. We had Boone’s Farm apple wine — I think it was that and not Annie Greensprings [as listed in the tweet] — but we also had something like five pounds of pancake batter, six or more dozen eggs, several rashers of bacon, and some other stuff to eat. So we were just in the house, partying it up, and it started to snow and snow and snow, and you couldn’t get anywhere. 

Whatever car we might’ve had was parked outside was a heap. And it was, you know, up in the mountains and there wasn’t a lot of reason to go anywhere and we just loved it. We would make up a bunch of food and you’d get your bacon and eggs and pancakes, drink a bunch of beer, and everybody would get kind of woozy about the same time and just kind of fall asleep. And then pretty soon one of these Louisiana people would wake up, roll a joint, start strumming his guitar. We’d rub our eyes and go into the other room and have a beer, you know, maybe a glass of wine or even orange juice — a little morning pick-me-up, although this might be in the middle of the afternoon. We did that for two and a half days. Just go to sleep for a while, wake up, party, go to sleep — all the while, singing and laughing and telling stories. 

The Louisiana people were outstanding musicians. They just grew up that way, it’s in their blood. They had a bunch of guitars and I had a harmonica and Bobby Charles was there. One of our favorite records was Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” which was pretty new at the time. The song that stands out to me, because I still remember every word, is “The Losing End,” which is still one of my favorite songs today because of that memory associated with it. We got really good at it, but we never performed it for anyone else, just for each other and our own enjoyment. We would, you know, do harmony and these guys were great on guitar. I put a few harmonica licks in there and it was just a blast. 

It sounds like there was no sense of peril. It was just, “We’re stuck. Let’s just make the most of it.”

Yeah, it wasn’t a whole lot different than what we do ordinarily, except it had an extra frisson about it because we were snowed in. It was beautiful outside. We were stuck together. I mean, otherwise, in Las Vegas, it would be people coming and going. But we were all kind of just stuck together. I think anybody that was there remembers it as just a unique two days where we were kind of forced to do what we love to do anyway, but nobody had to leave to go to jobs and stuff like that. So no, there was no peril. Just fun. 

So then you just kind of waited it out? How did you get out eventually? 

In New Mexico, the snow does not last a long time. The sun is so potent when it comes out and it doesn’t get that cold there. So you get these big dumps, snow storms, but the ground wasn’t frozen when the snow fell and then the sun came out and it warmed up. 

I did look up those pictures of the Fred Harvey hotels, by the way. These are really spectacular buildings. 

Yeah. Now at the time, maybe half a mile away was a hot spring. The Harvey people had built it into a series of baths. They were just kind of concrete squares that would fill up with water and then one would fill up and it would overflow into the next, and then that would overflow into the next. If you wanted to do it, you’d have to go find Brother Carmona and he’d be kind of patrolling around, and you’d have to pay him a half-dollar each. I call him brother because at the time, the Catholic Church owned the Harvey Castle. They were training Mexican priests there. And, you know, nobody wears a bathing suit in the hot springs, of course. So it would be us and girls and we’d be running around naked in there, and you’d look at the windows and there would be these priests looking in with hands cupped around their faces. 

Do you still keep in touch with anyone who was snowed in with you?

Yes, we all keep in touch. I was just on the phone for 45 minutes yesterday with an old friend from Vegas, and we all realized that it was an experience that we just fell into out of the blue. I mean, I’m just a white, suburban, middle-class kid that ended up at this college in the same town. And just because I am who I am, I gravitated towards the most fun happening. We just had a blast. We were pretty pretty taken with one another.

Do you have any advice for people who are snowed in at a party house or a bar or anywhere? 

I would say, pee outside, because if the pipes break, you’re not going to have a toilet anyway, so you don’t want to overburden it. Or if there’s a lot of people stuck, often the septic tank will fill up. 

Find somebody that you like and cuddle up next to them and just forget it. You’re not getting out of there. You have an opportunity for 10 hours to just relax, feed your head and make an event that you’ll remember. Now, this one in England, they had that Oasis cover band. That was probably a blast. If you can find some good music, that’s always going to make it good. 

Dogs are always necessary. Let ‘em in. If you’re snowed in, let the damn dogs in. Your house is going to be a mess anyway — and forget about that, you clean the house. Don’t worry about it. Get the fragile stuff out of the way, because people are gonna get drunk. 

We didn’t have any board games, we just told stories. I would suggest against board games. Tell stories. Get somebody started — there’s always some, a storyteller in every crowd, who will draw other people out. So that’s what I’d suggest. 

We end every interview with the same question. It’s a tough one: Cake or pie?

Pie. Especially if you have some ice cream. That cannot be beat — that’s not even a question if there’s ice cream.

The post Snowbound in 1970 appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
2022 travel: still complicated. Trees from outer space, bad architecture, cinnamon rolls, weird Disney, more fun with fonts, tunnels that united a nation, and piñatas you won’t want to break, no matter what’s inside.

How to Think About Travel in 2022

The annual “where to go in 2022” lists are out. Yeah, we want to go to the Cook Islands as much as the next cabin-fevered traveler, but “where” is the wrong question if you can’t (or shouldn’t) get there. We’re much more interested in “how” to travel — or even “if.” Read our take in this Statesider editorial

Stories Across the US

The Lost National Park: Years of drought in the West are revealing the glory of Glen Canyon, America’s “lost national park.” Don’t miss the visuals on this one. Nathan Rott, NPR

Where to Find a Moon Tree: In 1971, the Apollo 14 mission brought a variety of tree seeds into space to see if they would germinate when they returned to Earth. They did, and there are still “Moon Trees” growing all across the US, some probably not far from where you are right now. Twitter thread, Kat Long. Google Map by Heather Archuletta.

Goodbye, Mansplaining: Six days exploring the Alaskan wilderness. What adventure travel could look like with no men involved. Maggie Shipstead, Outside

Sure, lots of women are terrible, and men contain multitudes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say that women, left to their own devices, tend to be more cooperative and supportive than all-male or mixed groups.

How Kansas City Rolls: So you like cinnamon rolls. Do you like them the way Kansas City likes them? Baked, fried, round, square, iced, plain, even served with chili? Gina Kaufmann, KCUR

Lemon Pepper City: The story of Atlanta’s love of lemon pepper chicken wings, and how some of the city’s best-known versions come from an unlikely culinary destination: strip clubs. Eric Kim, New York Times

The peach is famously the state’s fruit, but lemon pepper is the city’s soul.

A Time for Change: Poet Maya Angelou will become the first Black woman to appear on a US quarter, one of five new designs coming out this year. The coins will be in circulation early this year. Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine

Can’t Improve This Headline: “Lee surrenders again as New Orleans renames boulevard for Allen Toussaint.” Sarah Ravits, Gambit

Cat Island: The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has received a lot of attention, and stirred up a lot of passions, in recent years. Cumberland Island, a barrier isle off the Georgia coast, is home to a different and reintroduction experiment: bobcats. Ben Goldfarb, National Parks Conservation Association

Tunnels to the Past: The tunnels cut through Donner Summit built by Chinese immigrants in the 1860s helped unite our country. Today, with no active protection, the tunnels are a magnet for adventure seekers and graffiti artists. Shoshi Parks, Smithsonian

Atchafalaya Mud: One thing is clear: the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States, needs help. But in a place where change is constant, no one can agree on what it is supposed to look like. Boyce Upholt with photos by Rory Doyle, Bitter Southerner

Early European settlers saw the Atchafalaya Basin as a nearly impossible landscape, a place where “the inexperienced traveler would require the thread of Ariadne in order not to wander forever,” as one 1803 visitor suggested.

Outdoor Access: Blair Braverman developed multiple tick-borne illnesses and her body has not been the same since. “Disabled” can mean many different things to different people, but if the goal is to enjoy the outdoors, these tips can improve your experience. Blair Braverman, Outside

Tasty Tucson: The headline “Is Tucson the best city for Mexican food in the US?” is designed to provoke a strong reaction. Here’s ours: We need to eat our way through Tucson to test the hypothesis. It’s the least we can do. Abbie Kozolchyk, National Geographic

Dallas Arts: Meet the piñata master whose creations are so beautiful that you won’t want to smash them open with a stick. José R. Ralat, Texas Monthly

Build Back Weirder

Have Fun Buying the Castle! This castle in Connecticut that looks straight out of a Disney movie is hunting for a buyer with $35,000,000 and very specific tastes. This might take a while. Rebecca Makkai has the backstory in this remarkable Twitter thread. Here’s the Zillow listing.

New Deal Disney: The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland was supposed to capture a New Orleans aesthetic, but was instead modeled after a real house in Baltimore — all thanks to the Index of American Design, a New Deal effort to catalog the art and design of America. Jason Schultz, Disneyland Nomenclature

Fun With American Fonts

The Statesider’s own Doug Mack accidentally blew up on Twitter after buying a font based on National Forest and National Park signs and then creating his own versions (there are many more, touching on everything from bears to Pop-Tarts to anxiety, if you click through to the thread):

bought some park service fonts and pic.twitter.com/h2jsuZCSWq

— Doug Mack (@douglasmack) January 20, 2022

What We’re Listening To

Way Too Interested, by Gavin Purcell. Are you weirdly interested in a specific topic? Maybe even a little too interested? Yeah, us too. Gavin Purcell’s recently started podcast pairs a person with specific passion with an expert in that field, and it makes for some fascinating listening. The most recent episode is tailor-made for Statesider readers: it’s all about the interstate highways of America. Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and highway superfan, talks with Dan McNichol, former White House appointee and author of The Roads That Built America: The Incredible Story of the U.S. Interstate System about the past and future of America’s road system and bold infrastructure projects. (Also, don’t miss food writer Helen Rosner talking about her obsession with moss.)

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or learn more here.

If you enjoy The Statesider newsletter, please forward to a friend or two. Word of mouth is our favorite way to grow, which means we depend on your mouth and the words emerging from it. There was probably a better way to say that.

The post January Travel Jones appeared first on The Statesider.

The annual barrage of destination lists filled with tips on where to go in 2022 is here. We’re travelers, so we love those things. When we’re not inspired by them, we love to argue with their picks and ogle the pretty pictures. 

But we are where we are: in a pandemic in the midst of a wave of infections from a dangerously transmissible variant. We’re all tired of Covid’s looming presence and effect on every aspect of life, but it’s no good pretending things are back to normal. A destination list is of no use if you can’t get there — or if you’re being irresponsible in doing so.

Instead of creating our own list, or giving advice on what to do to get past the various and shifting COVID requirements of different destinations, we offer our thoughts on how to approach travel in a year of deep uncertainty.

Obviously, we’re going to tell you to take a domestic trip, so yeah, do that.

Try somewhere within a day’s drive, somewhere self-contained and self-catered. There will be moments for long-distance flights to other parts of the world, but today is not that day. Plus, it’s our raison d’être to remind people how fascinating the US is for travelers. Whether you’re looking for food, history, nature, adventure, sports, or the International Banana Museum, we’ve got it all. Don’t think of this travel as a substitute for the trip you actually want to take — one place can never be a perfect stand-in for another — but as a chance to see something genuinely cool and journey-worthy that you might not have seen otherwise. 

Put a trip on the calendar, but not the big dream trip. 

Maybe things will look great for travel in the Summer! Or maybe they won’t! It’s probably not the year to put all of your hopes and dreams into one big trip. Getting a trip on the calendar is still a good plan. Having something to look forward to is a great way to lift your pandemic-sagged spirits. And short trips — in distance or duration — can be as satisfying as the biggies. Research backs us up on this: the main effects of a vacation on your health and wellness come from experiences, not from the length of your trip.

Finally take the time to explore that town you always drive through on the way to somewhere else.

A lot of those towns you blow by on the freeway today were more bustling back when transportation was different, in the days when cars got fewer miles per gallon and more people traveled by train. Those little one-time hotspots continue to be interesting in their own right if you give them a chance. The lodging is cheaper, the demand is lower, and if you’re trying to minimize your exposure to crowds, well, why go where the crowds are? Plus, you get to learn about a new place.

Risk tolerances will vary. Take other people into consideration.

As the LA Times’ Matt Pearce recently tweeted: “Everyone taking masking less serious than me is a maniac putting us all at risk and everyone taking masking more serious than me is a threat to our proud social fabric.” Point being, your risk tolerance is just that: yours. Keep in mind that some people are very concerned for their own safety and the safety of their kids and loved ones, while others are ready to jump aboard a maskless Bikram yoga cruise. Wherever you are on that spectrum, don’t forget that others around you might see things differently.

Check before you book and before you travel to see if locals really want you to come. 

In 2021, Hawai‘i experienced a spike in infections, an overwhelming crush of mainland tourists, and a labor shortage all at once. The Governor asked people to stay home. Travelers, by and large, did not. If you’re still thinking, “But I really want to go there!!” we’d suggest getting a bit more context by reading this Afar story on Hawaii by Chris Colin. Headline: “Hawai‘i Is Not Our Playground.” This isn’t just a Hawaii issue. Wherever you’re wanting to go, if the locals say no, make new plans.

Expect labor shortages, and understand that might affect you. Tip service workers generously. 

It might take longer for your food to arrive or for your vacation rental to be ready. Everyone is doing the best they can under less-than-ideal circumstances. 

Speaking of service workers, order takeout.

New Yorkers had this dialed in well before the pandemic, with that pile of menus on top of the microwave. That new place you’ve been wanting to try will pack your food to go, and some places have the reheating instructions right there in the bag. Tip delivery folks well, too, if you go that route.

Step away from the savior complex. It’s just a trip.

If your goal is to help the local people of a destination thrive, find an organization that supports those in need — including when you’re not there in person. Yes, travel is a huge industry and it supports a lot of people, but don’t fool yourself that you’re saving a place by visiting, or that tourism is necessarily a net good even in non-Covid times. Travel economies are complex, and your presence as a traveler can both benefit and endanger the people and the place. You already know this. 

Staying home is always an option.

Look, we’re a travel-focused site, but we’re not travel promoters. Exploring America is a wonderful thing to do, but not at the expense of your safety or the safety of others. If travel is going to ratchet up your anxiety, or if it just doesn’t seem advisable to do, that’s okay! Now’s a great time to catch up on your movie-watching, your book-reading, or, if you really need to see the world, your Google Street View explorations (if you need inspiration, try finding a random city using Earth Roulette). And if you’re struggling to find an excuse to say no to travel, The Onion has you covered: What To Say If You’re Not Comfortable Traveling During Covid-19.

This too shall pass. We’ll meet you for breakfast tacos when it does.

– Andy, Pam & Doug

The post How To Think About Travel in 2022 appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
America’s best food city (maybe), Olympic history, disrupted travel plans, clammers gone wild, visiting JFK’s secret island bomb shelter, America’s Switzerland, North Carolina’s disappearing coast, breakfast pizza and Chinatown gowns.

Statesider Takes

We have a Statesider editor double-header for this issue. First up: Pam Mandel, who, like most of us, had travel plans that got disrupted by a highly inconvenient global pandemic. Plans are good! But plans are also hard when they keep changing and getting canceled. Travel plans today are an exercise in learning to accept that some things in our lives are not in our control.
Read “I Had Plans” on Nerd’s Eye View

I’m supposed to fly out in just over a week. I’ll believe it when the wheels touch the tarmac at my destination.

Doug Mack, on a very different topic, got some foodies riled up in advance of the Super Bowl by claiming that Cincinnati is America’s best food city. He was mostly joking, but people took this claim seriously. What are we doing when we try to compare one city’s food scene with another? And why is the Midwest is so often misunderstood?
Read “Cincinnati is the best food city in the USA. Maybe.” on Snack Stack

Too often, the same people who rightly celebrate large cities’ culinary diversity and complexity forget that diversity and complexity exist in other places, too.

Stories Across the US

Vaccination Destination: Thinking of heading back out there? Here are the most vaccinated places in the United States. Nathan Diller, Washington Post

Vanishing North Carolina: North Carolina’s coastal Highway 12 is disappearing. Megan Mayhew Bergman went on a road trip to see what has changed from her childhood — and what may never be there again. Megan Mayhew Bergman, The Guardian

Dressed to Thrill: For 40 years, the Tams have sold traditional attire to San Francisco residents, visitors, and beauty pageant royalty at their Chinatown custom dress shop. A beautiful photo essay. Carolyn Fong, SF Chronicle

Gas Station Nation: The 2,000 word explainer on Midwestern culture, gas stations, and breakfast pizza we’ve all been waiting for. Lyz Lenz, Men Yell at Me

Bomb Shelter: A bunker built for JFK on Peanut Island will offer public tours once the restoration is complete. We hope there’s a bar. Danielle Seat, WPTV

Bivalve Bonanza: A productive clam flat in Maine is at risk from overharvesting because of (checks notes) poor meeting attendance? Turns out if the flat isn’t managed locally, its administration will go back to the state and the state is a lot more generous with its licensing requirements. Ethan Genter, Bangor Daily News

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean: Living in Miami is a constant reminder that sea-level rise is changing everything — and that “resilience” may be the wrong word. Mario Alejandro Arizo, Believer (and a reading on This American Life)

You might not think, at first, that my constantly getting the crap kicked out of me has anything to do with climate change or sea-level rise or the death of my city at the hands of an angry, swollen ocean. Yet when state and federal governments ignore the greater structural issues at play, the prevailing doctrine of adaptation starts to closely resemble the national discourse of “toughen up” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and it’s worth taking a moment to check in with the folks who don’t have any boots.

Hard Pass: A 600+ acre plot of undeveloped land is earmarked to become a Disney-themed residential community. There will be cast members, a 20-acre lagoon for swimming, and supposedly, a plan to mitigate the substantial impact the community will have on the groundwater supply. Our take? Themed living or not, stop building projects with huge water features in drought-impacted regions. Sherry Barkas, Desert Sun

Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana. If you’d like to have a logical explanation how we happened on this elegant syncopation, we will say without a moment of hesitation: Here’s a locals’ guide to Gary, Indiana. Belt Magazine

Tuning Bork: On a PNW road trip? A subset of Seattle area drivers complain that their car radios are completely stuck on the local NPR affiliate. [Seattle editor’s note: F*x N*ws did call us a Socialist Hellhole some time back so this seems…on brand.] Casey Martin, KUOW

The History Department

Olympic History: Nearly all of the historic landmarks are gone, upgraded or demolished, but Pallisades Tahoe (the name was finally changed in 2021 from Squaw Valley) played an essential role in turning this California mountain town into a winter sports destination. Chloe Veltman, KQED

But what tends to get lost in accounts of the 1960 Olympic Games is the fact that they took place on unceded Indigenous lands — stolen land that had belonged to Native people for thousands of years.

Almost Heaven: But not quite Switzerland. A historic marketing campaign claimed West Virginia to be “the Switzerland of America.” Um, no. John W. Miller, Moundsville

Earthbound Issues: Not everyone in America backed the space race. “Black publications like the New York Amsterdam News and civil rights activists like Ralph Abernathy argued that such funds—$25.4 billion, in 1973 dollars— would be better spent alleviating the poverty facing millions of African Americans.” Bryan Greene, Smithsonian

Band on the Run: A group of seven outlaw Koreans found refuge — and an audience for their singing — at Howard University. In 1896. What? Karis Lee, Boundary Stones

Family Photos: A collection of old pictures ties a Texas immigrant mercantile owner to a Mexican revolutionary. Maybe. Stacey Ravel Abarbanel, Zocalo Public Square

Who was Sam? And how did this Jewish immigrant from Lithuania land in a dusty border town and get tangled up with Villa, one of Mexico’s most notorious figures?

What We’re Reading

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry. Perry’s book is a classic American road trip memoir in many familiar ways: the oddball characters, the road food, the feeling of displacement. But Perry never skims over our history, she does not let us forget who built this country and who profited from that work. It’s from South to America that I learned of the protests against American spending in the space race (link above). I am continually surprised in how much we Americans are denied in the retelling of our history; Perry’s book fills in some of those stories. Buy Now from The Statesider Bookshop

Looking for more great armchair travel reading? Browse The Statesider book selections on Bookshop.org. Looking to create your own development inspired by an entertainment company? Can’t help you there.

The post Going for Gold appeared first on The Statesider.

In this Issue of the Statesider
In the footsteps of TJ, American pizza tales, Atlanta biscuits, Moe’s Tavern goes global, how to identify a Texas taqueria, the North Carolina sound, the immigrant experience in National Parks, whole-hog traditions, and the deeper meaning of cheap cake.

On the Road with Thomas Jefferson

The new history-rich travelogue In Pursuit of Jefferson follows in Thomas Jefferson’s footsteps around Europe (as well as Monticello and other areas of the USA), learning how the founding father’s journeys abroad connected to his life and leadership back home. We talked to author Derek Baxter about his book and his journeys, which were at times quite humorous and at other times decidedly somber. (Also we learn if Thomas Jefferson was a cake guy or a pie guy. Place your bets now.) Read The Statesider interview with Derek Baxter

I really did come to understand that slavery was intertwined with everything he did. I mean, it’s how he’s paying for his travels and for just about everything — it came mostly came from his tobacco, which was grown and picked and packed by enslaved workers on his plantations.

Stories Across the US

The Midwest, but Realistic: Why do TV and film struggle to accurately depict the Midwest? HBO’s new show, Somebody Somewhere somehow gets Kansas right. Sara Smarsh, The Guardian

Taco Spotting: News you can use — The 12 types of Texas taquerias and how to spot them. José R. Ralat, Texas Monthly

Follow Your Moe’s: Bootleg Moe’s Taverns from The Simpsons have popped up all over Latin America. Tamlin Magee, Eater

Multinational Parks: A group of first-generation Indian migrant workers visit Yosemite, and it’s not quite a rapturous John Muir experience. Who is really welcome in America’s parks? Torsa Ghosal, Catapult

When I visit the outdoors with other migrants, I feel connected. It takes only an encounter with white aggression to overturn that feeling.

Bonnie and Clyde…and Grandpa Chuck? Lauren Hough travels to the old family hometown in the Texas Panhandle to investigate a family legend. Did Grandpa Chuck really help Bonnie and Clyde evade the law? Lauren Hough, Texas Highways

American Tune: North Carolina’s experimental folk scene is creating a new American sound. Harris Wheless, NPR Music

Vegan Trigger Warning: The South Carolina farm that is maintaining the ritual of hog slaughters, a disappearing tradition of Black agrarian life. Kayla Stewart, New York Times

Biscuit Jedi: Atlanta’s biscuit master Erika Council is on a mission to spotlight the contributions of the Black women bakers who came before her. And also to make anyone who reads this want to book the next flight to Atlanta. Jasmin Pittman Morrell, Bitter Southerner

Bukharian Queens: Meet the Bukharian women of Rego Park. “In addition to speaking Russian, they have their own language, Bukhari, a Judeo-Tajik dialect of Tajik and Persian with some Hebrew.” Liana Satenstein, Vogue – no really, Vogue

Butter Emails: After 50 years of carving butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair, you’d probably have a lot of stories to tell. Enough to fill a whole book. That’s precisely what butter-carving legend Linda Christensen did: filled a book with butter carving stories. Richard Chin, Star Tribune

A Slice of Long Island: On the passing of Charles E. Entenmann, the patron saint of American supermarket pastries, and what his products meant to so many. Dan Barry, New York Times

Long Island working-class families like mine believed that a box of Entenmann’s conveyed class. It would be on proud display in the kitchen, prominent on the refrigerator or displacing plastic flowers as the table centerpiece.

Following the Water Masters: Since the 1800s, zanjeros have been responsible for managing the flow of irrigation water to where it’s needed. Times and technology have changed, but zanjeros still ply their trade along the canals and borderlands of southern California. Marcela Davison Avilés, Alta California

That’s So Arvin: Arvin Temkar had never been a fan of his first name, Arvin, but a trip to the most Arvin place of all, Arvin, California, gave him a new perspective on Arvin-hood. Arvin Temkar, Zócalo Public Square

It was like seeing your name on Broadway, if Broadway was in the middle of nowhere and you’d never heard of it.

March Murkiness: Where did the tradition of betting on the NCAA basketball tournament bracket come from? This unassuming Staten Island bar. Maybe. Not sure we’d bet on it. Sara Kugel, CBS Sunday Morning

These Are Not the Hotel Rooms You’re Looking For: For some unknown reason, Disney World is having trouble booking $5000 hotel rooms at the new Star Wars hotel. Katie Dowd, SFGATE

La Grange Legacy: Rumors spreadin’ ’round, in that Texas town, about that bakery in La Grange. (And you know what I’m talkin’ about.) Just let them know, if you wanna go, to bake kolaches at 2 am. They got a lot of nice rolls. Have mercy, did we stretch this joke out too long. La Grange bakery seeks an apprentice to continue its 75-year legacy. Lisa Bubert, Texas Monthly

Tales from the Pizza Parlor

It’s Hip to Be Square-Cut: The Statesider’s own Doug Mack traces the roots of square-cut pizza in America. It somehow ends up involving pipe organs. Doug Mack, Snack Stack

Pulling Out All the Stops: No, really, pipe organs and pizza were once a joint attraction. Here’s the history of the “pizza and pipes” craze that gripped America. Heather Arndt Anderson, Taste

Maine’s Maineiest Pizza: Brian Kevin drove 450 miles to eat a pizza you will only find in Maine. Yes, this is click bait. No, we won’t judge you if you’d actually eat one. Brian Kevin, Down East Magazine

Never-Ending Story: Peter Reinhart is one of the world’s leading authorities on bread baking, but he’s also totally obsessed with pizza. Since 2010, he’s been exploring the US in search of the best pizzerias — you can follow his explorations on his Pizza Quest website, or grab his new book “Pizza Quest: My Never-Ending Search for the Perfect Pizza.”

Call for Pitches

We know a lot of you out there aren’t just readers — you’re writers, artists, photographers and creators of all stripes. Perhaps you would like to apply those talents to The Statesider?

Spring 2022 Call for Pitches: We’re looking for new creative pitches on US travel and culture for The Statesider, and while we still want written stories, we’re also interested in maps, infographics, graphic stories/comics/illustrations, and photo essays. If you read us regularly, you’ll have a sense already about what we like, but we spelled out the full details here.

We’ll be collecting pitches until April 30, 2022 (or until our inbox explodes).

Looking for more great armchair travel reading? Browse The Statesider book selections on Bookshop.org. Looking for the perfect biscuit? Join the club.

The post Pizza & Presidents appeared first on The Statesider.

Thomas Jefferson is famous for many things, but writing a travel guidebook to Europe doesn’t usually make the list. In 1788, though, he did just that, in the form of a 5,000-word letter to two young acquaintances who wanted his recommendations. Jefferson’s Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe drew on the future president’s experiences on the continent. More than 200 years later, it also helped inspire a new travelogue, In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling Through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father, which is just out from Sourcebooks. The Statesider‘s Doug Mack talked to the author, Derek Baxter, about the book and his journeys in the footsteps of one of the nation’s most famous historical figures. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I know every interviewer asks this of every author, but I think it’s a useful starting point, so … Where did your interest in Thomas Jefferson begin, and how did it lead to this book?

Thomas Jefferson is very present here in Virginia. I played him in the fourth-grade class play. I went to the school he founded, the University of Virginia. I saw him as my favorite founder because he seemed like he could do everything. He could write brilliantly in the Declaration of Independence and invent things and play the violin. He just seemed like the kind of person I wanted to be.

When I reached my late thirties, I felt that maybe my life was, in a way, getting a little quiet. It wasn’t quite what I had envisioned it or, you know, maybe I was missing out on some things that I had really enjoyed, especially travel—I had previously done some backpacking through Europe, but now I was set in a career that didn’t really involve travel and it like part of me was missing and, and maybe some of the creative side of me was missing. I was kind of looking for a challenge when I came across this guide that Thomas Jefferson had written. And it just seems to speak to me like, well, here is something I could do. And so, over a few years, mostly with my family but occasionally solo, I took these trips and actually followed this guy just to see what would happen.

It sounds like you had a lot of fun. I mean, especially at the beginning of the book, you’re running in costume through vineyards or you’re talking about Jefferson smuggling rice back into the USA.

Right. It was mostly fun throughout. The first trip that you mentioned was, was maybe the craziest one. It was this marathon that they run in Bordeaux, where people run in costume and you actually get to drink wine along the way. That was one of the things in Jefferson’s guide: go to Bordeaux and try the wine there. It seemed like this was kind of like a great way to get in there and see it. This was 2012 and the theme that year was history, which also seemed to me like a bit of a sign in a way because I think that’s the only time they’ve had that particular theme. So I thought, okay, they’re not going to give me any side-eye if I’m dressed as Jefferson. My wife and I went and we ran and it was amazing — it was a fun time, but it also gave me the sense, like, okay, this is a good idea. I think we should, we should continue.

Yeah, it’s a great scene of you lining up with some Romans and Napoleon. It just gets you right into the mood. At that point, were you thinking book or were you just thinking this would be a fun activity to do?

Not necessarily a book. I did take notes and I was trying to record my impressions and I wanted this to be a transformative experience, but I wasn’t thinking about it as a big, elaborate book—but that grew on me as I did more trips. I was learning things and I wanted to share them.

The book is fairly light at the beginning, but it does get into some more serious themes later. There’s a poignant line about being at Monticello and seeing “a brick with a handprint left in it: the marker of an enslaved artisan’s humanity, fingers splayed in the read clay, frozen in time.” This chapter is clearly a tonal shift in the book, and you handled it beautifully. Can you talk a little bit about how you were experiencing that shift in perspective yourself sort of in that moment or in this accumulation of moments?

Jefferson’s guide talks about many subjects — you know, architecture, agriculture, food and wine, gardens, all these interesting themes that I was learning about and experiencing. But the one thing it doesn’t talk about that was massively important to Jefferson was slavery. Obviously, everybody knows Jefferson was a slave owner and I knew some about that as I started off; I kind of thought at the beginning, well, this is the unfortunate part of Jefferson. But at that point, I didn’t think, “This is going to be a real focus of my journey and of this book,” because this was about his travels and the wine and the architecture. But as I went on, I really did come to understand that slavery was intertwined with everything he did. I mean, this is how he’s paying for his travels and for just about everything — it came mostly came from his tobacco, which was grown and picked and packed by enslaved workers on his plantations.

Jefferson had a government salary as well, but it was really tobacco that paid the bills. And he sold 31 enslaved people while he was in France, because he was in debt. When I learned that, it just really bothered me. When I was traveling in Europe, I kind of spaced these trips out roughly once a year, and the rest of the time I was here in Virginia, and I would take some trips to Monticello, and I would learn more about how he put his ideas into practice. And when you’re there and you learn about architecture and landscaping and all the rest, it was always enslaved people, obviously, who did the work. He was completely reliant on enslaved people for everything.

I started to start to kind of veer off. I start to, first of all, wonder whether this whole project was worth doing and whether it was really worth adding more attention to Jefferson. I had put him on this pedestal, but should he be there? It led to some introspection and eventually I wound up spending a lot more time kind of off the regular itinerary and looking more into the lives of some of the enslaved people who lived at Monticello.

I really appreciate books that balance the serious and the fun. I think the lighter parts help show the depth of humanity, but then they make the really awful things all the clearer and more stark.

Right. There is such a deeper story about how enslaved people weren’t going on the trips with him in Europe, back at the plantations, wondering if Jefferson was ever going to come back from France. If he hadn’t — if he died in some accident over there or something like that — they might have been sold, with mothers separated from children. That happened quite a bit. So, yes, there are lots of moments of joy, but it’s always tempered by this deeper story. And it’s the story that’s kind of been… not hidden, but not fully emphasized in the past.

Throughout the book in these chapters in USA, but also in Europe, you try to capture the sense of place and get into the small details. Can you talk a little bit about how Jefferson brought the ideas of landscape and architecture that he saw in Europe back to the USA and how those travels affected the built environment around him?

Jefferson had read books about landscape garden and about architecture back home, but I think it was very different when he actually got on the road and saw things with his own eyes. So for landscaping, he went to England. Obviously, wasn’t a big fan of the king, but the one thing he loved about England was the gardens, which are very different from the more formal gardens they had at Versailles and other places in France. And that was absolutely what he wanted to do. He visited 19 of these gardens and took very practical notes because he was already thinking about how he could landscape back home.

And at Monticello, he developed this series of roundabout roads, which kind of encircle his mountain through the woods. So there was actually a road that could go just very directly through the farms, straight up to the house, but instead he would prefer to take visitors who were going there for the first time on these, on these roads that would kind of spiral up the mountain through these, these very wild woods. You would emerge and you’d see Monticello at the top of the hill, which is beautiful, of course. And you’d see all these pastures. It was kind of this bucolic vision. And I think he was trying to tell the story about, you know, how he had mastered the mountain and you could look out to the west and see this American land landscape that was out there.

As for the architecture, that was even more influential. The house was half built by both enslaved and free workers. Before Jefferson went to France, Monticello looked totally different than the current Monticello. It didn’t have a dome for one thing, and the design was copied from books, kind of like a paint-by-numbers thing. But then he traveled to Europe and he came back with these French neoclassical ideals. He saw a building in Paris, which you can still see, and he got the idea for the dome. He loved the trend in Paris to make mansions look like they were only one story, even though they were really, say, three stories. So there were little tricks he picked up.

Are there places or things that you wanted to include in the book, but you weren’t able to?

Yeah, I could keep writing this book forever. We had one final trip planned for, it was for the summer of 2020, so you can kind of guess what happened to that one. I traveled to a lot of places that Jefferson went to here in the US, just for background and context for the book.

There were some less obvious ones like the Peaks of Otter, which are these mountain peaks in central Virginia, which Jefferson visited, I think when he was 71. He surveyed the peaks, which kind of just showed that he never gave up on traveling. There are so many other places as well that my family and I went to — Williamsburg, Philadelphia. You can see some historical traces of Jefferson in New York City and throughout new England.

What are the traces in New York City?

So in New York City, he lived on Maiden Lane, which is down in the Wall Street area. And there’s Fraunces Tavern, which is still open as a tavern. I also just like walking around lower Manhattan and seeing Trinity Church and some of the other historic places as you go further uptown.

There’s always one question that we end with at The Statesider: Cake or pie? For you and also for Thomas Jefferson.

I would definitely answer pie for myself. I think Jefferson would’ve gone pie, too. There were a lot of desserts at Monticello. I think they did serve something like an apple custard pie. He loved apples. I think he’d go for some kind of fruit pie.

In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling Through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father, by Derek Baxter is available now from Sourcebooks. Pick up a copy now through the Statesider bookshop, which supports local independent booksellers.

The post On the Road with Thomas Jefferson appeared first on The Statesider.