On the Road Again, Chapter 12

Cabinet Room at the Clinton Library: I'm in charge! (Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp)

 A visit to Clinton Country

in search of kneepads,

then Tenn. to visit friends

Clinton Library, aquarium adventures

Back home for close to three months, and I am reminded -- several times a week -- that Chapter 12 of our Great American Road Trip is way overdue. Maybe it's just hard to wrap up so wonderful (and exhausting) an adventure as a coast-to-coast drive.

 Some folks have asked what I considered the highlight. Beyond five days in Utah -- making new friends and experiencing a very different lifestyle -- and reacquainting with old friends in several other stops, that's tough to answer.

Several places I wish we'd had more time to explore, among them Little Rock, Arkansas. We had passed through the state on an earlier road trip years ago, when we drove to New Orleans and Dallas. I barely remembered it.

Clinton Library, Little Rock

Not so this time, thanks to our first experience of visiting a presidential library -- a complex overlooking the Arkansas River in the heart of Billary Clinton Country just minutes off Interstate 40. 

We had scoped the place online, and managed to arrive minutes before the 2 p.m. closing time for lunch at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum's very pleasant basement restaurant -- with tablecloth, cloth napkins, gracious service, excellent burgers and fries, and for Bonnie a generously poured and presidentially-designed-chilled-glass of white wine. The bill came to about 30 bucks.

Admission to the library and museum, covering three upper floors of exhibit areas, was $8 each (seniors rate -- younger adults pay $10). 

Towers of books with presidential papers

If there is a centerpiece, perhaps it is the display few visitors have time to explore -- the towering shelves of blue-bound books containing millions of documents from Bill Clinton's eight-year presidency, so many volumes that even the hundreds upon hundreds visible there represent but a large portion of the entirety.

And that left us wondering what an eventual Trump library might house... would the presidency of an ineloquent man who seems barely interested in the written word generate so large a mass of records? The joke, inevitably, is that it would likely contain a porn peep show featuring the collected works of Stephanie Clifford, and a magazine collection of Karen McDougal centerfolds.

A digression on morality

I know what you're thinking now: Bubba himself was not Mr. Morality before or during his presidency.

So let's address the Donkey in the Room: There are no kneepads evident under Bill's desk in the impressive, full-size recreation of the Oval Office. And in three hours of exploring the exhibits, we found no mention of Monica (though I have since been informed of an alcove on the second floor with material on the investigation by independent counsel Ken Starr) -- only the inclusion, on a Clinton timeline running across a wall the length of the building, of the House of Representatives vote to impeach him, the subsequent acquittal by the Senate, and the president's apology to the nation for his improper conduct.

The Capitol Hill drama played out 20 years ago,  in the post-election, lame duck days of the 105th Congress and early weeks of the 106th -- in a House and Senate that both remained Republican majority.  While it takes only a majority vote in the House for impeachment, removal of the president requires two-thirds in the Senate, and those numbers illustrate the difficulty of the removal process.

Just two of the four articles of impeachment before the House received majority votes, and both failed in the subsequent trial played out in the Senate -- the party line vote of 45-55 on perjury to a grand jury, and a 50-50 vote on obstruction of justice, both substantially failing to meet the required 67 for conviction and removal of the president.

Those votes echo forward in time, as we approach the 2018 midterm elections. In the event of Democrats taking control in the House, an impeachment proceeding against Donald Trump becomes a distinct possibility. But even if Republicans also lose the Senate, it will take overwhelming evidence of criminality to persuade enough of those remaining to join Democrats in giving Trump the bum's rush out of the White House. (This, even as a Pence presidency might be deemed more appealing to conservative tastes.)

So that's the thoughts generated just by a cursory look at the Clinton Library. But there was plenty more to see, including a replica of the Cabinet meeting room (top photo), cases upon cases of gifts received by the Clintons during the presidency, all manner of political bric-a-brac,  a loop of comical Bill-and-Hillary videos (unlike Trump, they showed a sense of humor even while under political attack), and a multi-floor temporary exhibition of presidential-era and campaign music across generations.

Unfortunately, the only photography allowed inside the Oval Office is done by a museum staffer -- so if you want your picture taken there, it will cost at least 15 bucks. But that seemed to be the only extra cost for visitors, other than a splurge in the souvenir and book shop where Bonnie bought an autographed copy of presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton's children's book, "She Persisted Around the World / 13 Women Who Changed History," and another titled "Photos That Changed the World."

Politics rocks!

Much of the material in the library and its exhibits are property of the National Archives. But the temporary show,  "Louder Than Words – Rock, Power, and Politics," which ended in early August was created by the Newseum in Washington.

And there are still opportunities to see it elsewhere: at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, March 12 to Sept. 4, 1919; at the Durham Museum in Omaha, Neb., Oct. 13, 2019, to Feb. 3, 2020; and at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, March 2, 2020, to Jan. 4, 2021.

A public affairs officer at the National Archives and Records Administration noted that presidential "libraries" may be different in the future -- starting with Barack Obama's, which will be a museum. Reference material will be available digitally.

She said such institutions can be an "uneasy" marriage of museum and library -- and  that Richard Nixon's in Yorba Linda, Calif., was at first just a museum, out of concern at  how the Watergate scandal would be presented. Notably, its collection now includes some 3,700 hours of recordings known as "the White House Tapes."

Homeward through Tennessee

Interstate 40 took us toward Nashville, and a turn south on I-24 to Chattanooga -- areas we had visited before, but this time intended for catching up with friends.

In 2012, we flew to the West Coast for three weeks of exploration and a wedding. The latter was Bonnie's first as an officiant, in her capacity as an ordained minister of the online Universal Life Church. The happy couple Tara and Christian, happy to say, still are.

The couple have since moved to a suburb of Chattanooga, where Christian -- after getting his bachelor's degree in the field and waiting several years for a job opening -- has become an air-traffic controller, and Tara is an entrepreneur in the field of online marketing.

Bonnie, Me, Christian and Tara (Expensive souvenir photo)

They had not yet seen a highlight of their new city -- the Tennessee Aquarium. So that became our main adventure there, exploring its two buildings on opposite corners of an open-air (and in early June, very hot) bustling center of tourism. The aquarium opened in 1992, with similarities to, and designed by the same company as, Baltimore's National Aquarium a decade earlier. Admission is 30 bucks -- cheaper than Baltimore's, but the Imax movie at an extra eight dollars makes up most of the difference.

We bought aquarium hats!

The overall layout seemed easier to navigate, and less congested, indicating its designers had rethought and improved upon the Baltimore project. And there is a focusing concept in its tracking of the path of water from Appalachian mountains to the sea.

Quirky art in Nashville

After two nights with Tara and Christian, we retraced our route up I-24 to the town of Columbia, 40 minutes from Nashville, where our photographer friend Brycia and her son Andrew had recently moved. We explored a little of the big city in search of quirky art we had missed on a shorter road trip months earlier, when we moved a carload of odds and ends to Brycia's new house. (On that trip, I left behind my new iPad -- which was subsequently found sitting plugged in on the floor, amusingly visible to an interior security camera.)

And then, in a final burst of stamina, we drove straight from Tennessee back home to Maryland -- the last 740 miles of the journey (stopping only for food, fuel and rest stops) in about 12 hours.

Andrew and Brycia, and a silvery bird

 From its beginning about 10 a.m. on May 8 to the ending of the journey late on June 6, our trusty 2012 Toyota Camry's trip-o-meter tally: 7,528 miles. We drove through portions of 20 states, including an odd corner of Georgia that cuts across about a mile of Interstate 24.

The next big trip we're planning is Hawaii, the only state we have not visited among the 50. Fortunately, perhaps, we won't drive to get there. The road just doesn't go that far.

Our route across America

Road report, Part 10 (Amazing Turns)

Detours can turn up

some crazy encounters

That bastard Lincoln!

Often for us, the best moments on a road trip are unplanned – and so it was yesterday when we turned a corner in Bryson City, North Carolina, and discovered 72-year-old sexologist Richard Allison pedaling an exercise bike in the bed of a red pickup truck.

Bet that got your attention, too.

It was, in fact, a crazy day from start to finish – also featuring the formerly drug-addicted counter woman at a two-bit Chinese restaurant grappling with religious concerns, and a vision of beauty in a sunless sunset at the top of the Smokies.

And who would have guessed that Abraham Lincoln might have been a real bastard?

We’ll take it from the start, as we changed direction leaving Cherokee after a night in a Sleep Inn (a chain that moves well south on our list of future choices), and headed away from Great Smoky Mountains National Park so Bonnie could check out photographic possibilities in the town of Murphy for a travel magazine.

The route took us through Bryson City, where Dr. Allison (doctorate in psychology, specializing in sexology, earned at age 70) was pedaling away at a strategically well-traveled intersection while reading a copy of the Smoky Mountain Times in his Dodge Ram 4X4 pickup displaying campaign placards for three local Republican candidates.

We did a double-take passing by, and turned around 100 yards down the road to check him out. And we found that Allison is a Democrat and can’t even vote in North Carolina because of his registration at his other home in Vero Beach, Fla. He just happens to like the folks he was promoting – John Odom for insurance commissioner, Susan Pons for state Senate and Dodie Allen for the House.

“We need more estrogen in the legislature,” Allison said of the women.

And he knows a bit about estrogen. A former elementary school teacher who developed a business in Florida called the Reading Skills and Counseling Center, Allison said his psychologist wife’s work in sexology got him to exploring the field and pursue his doctorate – and enjoying the opportunity to “go to class and talk about sex for six hours.”

“We’re made up of a lot of hormones – men and women hormones,” Allison said.

Well, enough about sex already. I wanted to know about his politics – particularly his leanings in the presidential race. He managed a delicate strip-tease of a dance in avoiding a full-frontal answer, allowing only that he had cast a write-in vote in the Florida primary for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“Obama would be good – if he turned out to be like Kennedy - in bringing people black and white together. I really believe he could be part of a healing process.... I just hope that this will be a healing process for the United States.”

Somebody call Oprah – gotta turn this Allison fella into the Dr. Phil of politics.

First intermission (rest stop)

We stopped at a roadside rest area, where I did a double-take at a car with a Texas license tag and an Obama sticker in the window. I confronted the 60-something driver as he stepped out, pointed out the contradiction of tag and sticker and asked: “Fleeing Republican country?”

“I’m from Alaska,” he replied. “It’s a rental.”

Palin country, huh? And this guy wearing an Obama T-shirt on a cool, barely 60-degree day.

“It’s winter up there,” he said.

Yeah, I thought, and if Palin wins it’ll be a very long night for the liberal soul.

Second intermission (restaurant stop)

Arriving about 1:50 p.m. in Murphy, we saw a $4.95 Chinese buffet sign near the end of a declining strip of retail stores and decided it would make for a quick lunch stop.

As we sat in a window booth in the tiny restaurant, the young lady behind the counter spoke up, telling us about the two preachers who had been in for lunch shortly before us, and how one of them wanted to cast out a couple from the church because “they were not saved.”

She was greatly bothered by this, questioning how a preacher would want to ban people from the church rather than offer them his religious help and counsel, and rambled on about what happens after you die, and whether there is a heaven and a hell, and what they say heaven is like, and how there’s a room for you and a better place.

She told us she was a mother of five, had come to the area from Texas 10 years ago to help her parents, and how she got into trouble with drugs and only recently managed to overcome addiction with the help of her church and religious beliefs, how she had been hired by the restaurant owner just three weeks earlier (“There are no jobs in this town!”), and how it was her 31st birthday, and she loved watching horror movies.

“You’re from Maryland? Do you know where that movie was filmed?” she asked.

“You mean ‘The Blair Witch Project?”

“Yes, I just love watching that movie.”

“Burkittsville. We’ve been there. It’s a pretty little town.”

Then her husband and a friend stopped by, and the boss arrived so she could leave – her lunch shift ended. I offered her a little advice, to try her best to make herself happy and how that would spill over and help others find happiness. A nice thought, given her relatively bleak life and worries pitting the here-and-now against the hereafter.

She was gone before we got her name.

“You know,” I told Bonnie, “we just met the most ordinary woman on the planet.”

As we were leaving, I told the owner that she was a very nice employee and doubtless would work very hard there. And I thanked him for her presence.

It just wasn’t the kind of place where such things are commonly said. But maybe tomorrow, he’ll see her, remember the words and give her a warm smile.

Memorable Murphy and the Lincoln Myth

The town of Bonnie’s photographic endeavor has a lovely courthouse, with a decorative eagle mounted above the blowing U.S. and North Carolina flags on its soaring rooftop. (The eagle blew off during a deadly 1974 tornado, and was found bent and with bullet holes long after and miles away. This year, the restored bird and the flags were restored to the lofty perch.)

In history, Murphy was a way station for the region’s native Cherokee Indians on their deadly “Trail of Tears” forced march into Oklahoma exile. Some of that unfortunate history is told in the town’s county historical society building just down from the courthouse. It also had some excellent displays including a log cabin constructed of logs from a dismantled early 19th century cabin, an old-fashioned classroom with authentic old desks and other furnishngs, and huge cases with hundreds of children’s dolls dating from more than a century ago to the more modern likes of Princess Di and Dolly Parton.

Across the street was a cemetery chapel donated to a local church well over a century ago by a chap named Harshaw, for whom it is named – and whose walled family plot outside was badly in need of some yard work.

A typed sheet of paper taped inside a window listed a few of the notables resting in the graves, including Abram Enloe – by one account the father of Abraham Lincoln.

Seems that Nancy Hanks was a house servant to the Enloe family and managed to get pregnant. This very much annoyed Mrs. Enloe, who wanted poor Nancy gone. And the story continues that Abram Enloe may have paid Thomas Lincoln to marry her.

The newlyweds then moved away, presumably to Kentucky where Abraham Lincoln was born.

And this is all recounted in the window of a chapel, the narrative concluding: “This has been disputed by many but proven false by none.”

So we bought half a pound of fudge at a corner candy shop and fled.

Smoky Mountain Memories

The side trip to Murphy delayed our planning crossing of the parkway through Great Smoky Mountains National Park until very late afternoon, as clouds began to take over the sky. We had to drive all the way back to Cherokee, and stopped at a few overlook sites along the parkway before turning onto a seven-mile dead-end road up to Clingmans Dome.

“At 6,643 feet, Clingmans Dome is the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is the highest point in Tennessee, and the third highest mountain east of the Mississippi,” says the National Park Service’s Web page on the site.

It was also likely the coldest spot in Tennessee or North Carolina at the moment of our arrival – a breezy 41 degrees that was being braved by a good dozen other photographers including a trio who mostly spoke Chinese. (One of them has been in the U.S. for a decade, having had jobs as a sushi chef and delivery man, and lives in Atlanta – and brought his visiting son and a friend to a spot he visits every year to see the autumn spectacle).

They were shooting pictures, as were Bonnie and a line of other photographers waiting on an appearance by a reluctant sun whose presence was only hinted at by brighter patches behind the clouds.

Still, it was beautiful there – the hazy mountain peaks stretched out in panorama, the colors muted by the waning light. And just as Bonnie began packing away the camera and tripod, and my new Chinese friend was walking toward his car, the clouds exploded into a brilliant pink.

It was a stunning sunless sunset.

I wish we could have shared it with our restaurant lass. It was just heavenly.

Road Report, Part 9 (Stories to Tell)

Linda Poland begins her ghost tale in the Tuesday evening storytelling program at The Cranberry Thistle. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Jonesborough has tales to tell,
and storytellers eager to oblige

Jonesborough is Tennessee’s oldest town, and for all its many charms must be a well-kept secret. True, we visited at mid-week, but this is the middle of the Southern Appalachians with trees still showing the glorious colors of autumn – and you’d think it would be hard to find a room for the night, much less a parking spot here on Main Street.

We came because of a brochure picked up from a rack at our last hotel stop, promoting its claim as the world storytelling capital. Well, I’m a storyteller (you can hear me telling a couple through the links below), and since it was just half an hour or so up the road from our last stop in Greeneville, Tenn., it was awarded a big yellow Sharpie smear on our map.

We found a parking space on Main Street, right outside the International Storytelling Center (http://www.storytellingcenter.com/), which from June through October presents matinee shows by an ever-changing lineup of guest tellers-in-residence and in the first week of October hosts the annual National Storytelling Festival.

We missed the matinee, but caught some of the action a few hours later and a few doors away at The Cranberry Thistle coffee house and cafe (http://www.thecranberrythistle.com/) – where an evening program included a local ghost story by Jonesborough’s “resident storyteller” Linda Poland (explaining why a bony woman in a muddy wedding dress tends to float out of the mist up the road at Rotherwood Mansion in Kingsport).

Also featured was this week’s international center resident teller, Jennifer Armstrong of Belfast, Maine, who wove a spinoff Cinderella tale about a boy who magically learned to play the bagpipes. (The multi-talented Armstrong(http://www.jenniferarmstrong.com/) accompanied her own story by playing the boy’s tunes on her own bagpipes.)

Close to two dozen people sat around the cafe’s informal performance room for the evening show, sipping 50-cent-a-cup coffee, slightly costlier latte or soft drinks, or maybe heavier fare like the $4 combo of beans, greens and a hoecake (make up a story about that – I dare you!) The establishment presents storytelling on Tuesdays, and live music on weekends.

The Cranberry Thistle is operated by sisters Nancy Colburn and Jo Storie, who came home after living for several years in – of all places –my ancestral homeland of Baltimore! (Nancy’s husband Joe does the baking.)

Jonesborough has lots of other reasons to visit – what with buildings dating back as far as 1797, some fascinating antique and retail businesses, a county courthouse with The Ten Commandments on a big metal plaque alongside the entrance (attention ACLU), 10 area bed-and-breakfast choices, and one chain hotel, the more modestly priced AmericInn Lodge.

Tough choice, you know – with tax, maybe $140 for the B&B, or the tad-less-than-$90 AAA/AARP rate of the hotel. (All right, sometimes I splurge – but not this time.) I called ahead from a quarter-mile away to check on availability of a king-bed double, nonsmoking, and arrived two minutes later to claim it.

I love room upgrades. Turned out all three regular king-bed rooms had been left uncleaned by the housekeeping staff, so the clerk apologetically offered the king room with the double Jacuzzi tub “if that would be OK.”

Sure.

Reminds of that master storyteller Shakespeare, something like “Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble, sit back, relax, enjoy the tubble.

Anyway, after you’ve checked out Jennifer Armstrong and maybe sampled some of her recordings, you can hook up to my tales at Baltimore’s Stoop Storytelling series at: http://www.stoopstorytelling.com/shows/16/storytellers/198 (as a featured teller last December at the annual Holidays from Hell show) and http://www.stoopstorytelling.com/audio/21207 (chosen for an impromptu audience cameo slot six months earlier).

Bonnie also had a crack at storytelling, having been chosen (names are picked out of a hat or more comical container) to follow me for a cameo tale: http://www.stoopstorytelling.com/audio/21208.

The difference between our tales and those we heard this week in Jonesborough is that our stories were absolutely true. Linda Poland allowed as how her ghost story was not entirely factual – just 90 percent.

She didn’t say which 90 percent, however. So maybe next trip we’ll check out Rotherwood Mansion. There’s plenty about it online, including this link which basically presents the tale spun so dramatically by Poland Tuesday evening: http://www.johnnorrisbrown.com/paranormal-tn/rotherwood/index.htm.

Tomorrow: Crossing the Mountains