Mid-West (USA) Road Trip 2008

On the Road in the Mid-West

19th Century American History to 21st Century Architecture

August – September 2008

For many years now, David gave serious thought to a Mid-West road trip, and a few years ago, it took more specific shape as major museums were adding new wings, new buildings and thoroughgoing renovations done by some of the most accomplished and famous architects in the world. The idea of a road trip started coalescing around seeing the buildings, and their contents, and comparing them, in a single trip. Then we realized there was a lot of history there, small towns, great rivers, and we realized to do this we would need some real time, time we wouldn’t realistically have until I retired, since I very much wanted to be party of this.

David patiently waited for me to retire, and then one thing after another came along, most recently, my choosing Africa as the destination to belatedly celebrate my 65th birthday, which occurred back in 2007. We made a firm commitment to clear the decks in the early fall of 2008, and took off about a week before Labor Day, not returning home until almost the very end of September.

Why in the world did we ever think that tooling around the Mid-West of the U.S. would be the basis of a great trip? We are asked that all the time, since for most people who don’t live there, the Mid-West, with the possible exception of Chicago, is an airport hub or a stop on a long train ride. For one thing, David spent some of his early childhood years in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We both knew that the Mid-West had a lot to offer, even if its treasures are unsung or unknown by many. Our travel files slowly filled up with all kinds of interesting if somewhat overlooked places. Also, we had not done a road trip in many years, and the idea of just loading up the car and taking off fulfills a kind of American fantasy of setting out for the country that goes back centuries. Although gas prices were high, a few quick computations convinced us that this would still be manageable.

What I can say is that this trip turned out to be fabulous beyond our most optimistic expectations – it was a kind of American Grand Tour, all the more impressive because before we started, what we had was a general itinerary. When we returned, we had a much deeper sense of what America is all about, its non-monetary wealth of unpublicized wonders and a people who accomplished much in a relatively short time. Our appreciation of art expanded, our sense of modern and contemporary architecture gave us a wealth of insights, and our understanding of 19th century American history – the century when America became a true presence in the wider world – multiplied many times over. This was a trip that enriched us greatly. Traveling during a financial downtown and being on the road after most family vacations had ended and the kids were back to school, but before cold weather set in meant virtually everything we wanted to see and experience was still available but completely uncrowded (if there are ever crowds at most of the places we went).

Our route was a big loop, leaving Santa Fe on August 26, and leaving New Mexico out of its northeast corner into the exceedingly narrow panhandle of Oklahoma. We headed up into Kansas and made it to 30 miles east of Wichita, where we camped that night at a state park. We camped at mostly state parks about 1/3 of the nights on the trip, and except for Labor Day weekends, had the campgrounds almost entirely to ourselves, especially since we avoided campsites with electrical hook-ups, where the RVs go.

From there we headed north continuing on to Nebraska, where after a stop at Homestead National Historic Site, we visited Lincoln and Omaha. Across Iowa with stops, then across Illinois to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and down into northern Ohio. Ann Arbor was about our furthest point north, and Cleveland our furthest east. There we headed south and slowly westward, turning the circle that would bring us eventually back to Santa Fe. From southern Ohio, we continued west across Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, down to Oklahoma, across the Texas panhandle, and ended in Taos for the weekend of September 26-28 so David could participate in his chorale’s annual retreat. We only returned to our apartment the evening of September 28.

Before synthesizing what came out of the trip, here are some of the places we stopped to see:

Important New Museum/Library Architecture:

· Joslyn Museum, Omaha – addition by Norman Foster

· Main Public Library, Des Moines – new building by David Chipperfield

· Figge Art Museum, Davenport – new building by David Chipperfield

· Detroit Institute of Art –addition by Michael Graves

· Toledo Museum of Art –separate Glass Pavilion by SANAA, Ltd. (Tokyo-based)

· Cleveland Museum of Art – major multiple additions by Rafael Viñoly

· Akron Art Museum – addition by Coop Himmelb(l)au, (Vienna)

· Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati – new building by Zaha Hadid

· Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis – new building by Tadeo Ando

· Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis – new building by Brad Cloepfil

· Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City – addition by Stephen Holl

· Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art – new building by Gunnar Birkerts

These were the specific buildings we wanted to visit, because they had gotten a lot of attention for the stunning architecture. However, we wound up seeing and exploring many other architectural treasures from many periods, and this resulted in our ability to draw some conclusions that were for us a kind of living course in architecture. Below, organized by type, style, and period, are some of the highlights of our road trip. Feel free to skip over the listing if this represents the height of boredom for you.

Other Important Contemporary Architecture:

· School of Art, Toledo – by Frank Gehry

· Peter B. Lewis School of Business, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland – by Frank Gehry

· Visitor Center, New Harmony, Indiana – by Richard Meier

· Roofless Church, New Harmony, Indiana – by Philip Johnson

· Oklahoma City National Memorial – by Butzer Design Partnership

Post-World War II (Modern) Classics of Architecture:

· John Deere Worldwide Headquarters, Moline, Illinois – by Eero Saarinen

· Gateway Arch, St. Louis – by Eero Saarinen

Late 19th Century - 20th Century Pre-World War II Classics of Architecture and Design:

· State Capitol Building (Bertram Goodhue), Lincoln, Nebraska

Doors into one of the unicameral legislative rooms

· Union Station, Omaha

· Merchant National Bank (Louis Sullivan), Grinnell, Iowa

Entrance design by Louis Sullivan - Merchant National Bank

· Union Station, Cincinnati

· Music Hall, Cincinnati

· Wise Temple, Cincinnati (Moorish-style synagogue)

· Union Station, St. Louis

· Basilica Cathedral, St. Louis

· Wainwright Building, St. Louis (by Louis Sullivan, the first modern skyscraper)

· Old Post Office, St. Louis

· Liberty Memorial, Kansas City

Great Private Residences and Hotels:

· Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, Akron

· Netherland Hotel, Cincinnati

· Lanier Mansion, Madison, Indiana

· Pierre Menard House, Kaskaskia, Illinois (French North American wealthy planter home)

Great Assemblages of 20th Century Architecture:

· University of Cincinnati Campus (contemporary)

· City of Columbus, Indiana (post-World War II modern into contemporary)

· Tulsa, Oklahoma (art deco)

Public Markets and Market Buildings:

· Farmer’s Market, Ann Arbor, Michigan

· Westside Market, Cleveland

· City Market, Kansas City

Interesting Museums:

· Oberlin College Museum of Art

· National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati (history of slavery and emancipation)

· Arabia Steamboat Museum, Kansas City (cargo of the 19th century Missouri River sunken steamboat Arabia)

Well-Preserved 19th Century Towns:

· Lindsborg, Kansas (settled by Swedish immigrants and retains much Swedish flavor)

· Lockport, Illinois

· Marshall, Michigan

· Milan, Ohio

· Oberlin, Ohio

· Hudson, Ohio

· Marietta, Ohio

· Madison, Indiana

· Rocheport, Missouri

· Quincy, Illinois

· Weston, Missouri

Historic “Museum” Towns and Sites:

· Homestead National Historic Site, near Beatrice, Nebraska (story of the Federal Homestead Act and how it affected the settlement of the American frontier)

· Amana Colonies, Iowa (settled by German pietists seeking to fulfill their mission on the frontier)

· Galena, Illinois (19th century town that became wealthy shipping ores via the Mississippi River

· Serpent Mound, Locust Grove, Ohio (largest U.S. effigy mound of pre-European native Americans)

· New Harmony, Indiana (first settled by Germans of the Harmonie Society of Separatists from the German Lutheran Church, and then by Robert Owens and his utopian community of scientists)

· St. Genevieve, Missouri (finest example of mid-Mississippi French 18th century settlement)

· Kaskaskia and Fort de Chartres, Illinois (French 18th century settlements on the mid-Mississippi River)

· Fort Scott National Historic Site, Fort Scott, Kansas (historic fort on the frontier and superb displays of fort life in the mid-19th century)

Natural Areas:

· Pioneer Park, Lincoln, Nebraska

· Great River Road and bluffs over the Mississippi near Dubuque, Iowa

· Michigan & Illinois Canal, Lockport, Illinois

· Indiana Dunes National Seashore, Michigan City, Indiana

· Kelley Island in Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio

· Bluffs and nature preserves near the Mississippi River in central west Illinois

· Katy Trail across most of Missouri (longest hiking/biking trail in the U.S.)

· Tallgrass Prairie Preserve (The Nature Conservancy), near Pawhuska, Oklahoma

· Palo Duro Canyon State Park, near Amarillo, Texas (2nd largest canyon in the U.S.)

One of the things that became apparent well before the end of the trip is the colossal wealth of fine buildings and architectural treasures throughout the Mid-West. We all know that Chicago is the birthplace of modern architecture in the U.S., and has many famous buildings from the late 19th century through the 20th century. What surprises is that so many other Mid-Western cities had tremendous building sprees, hiring the best architects of the day and being able to afford elaborate decorative programs. It is not just the buildings that are magnificent in and of themselves, but the eye-popping decorative programs that informed the exteriors and interiors throughout.

Just to cite a few memorable examples. The Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis is enormous in size and that entire interior is covered with mosaics created following the traditions of Constantinople and Ravenna, of the marble inlay of the Cosmati Family (numerous churches in Rome give testimony to their artistry) and fine stained glass. We had never heard of this building but once we stepped inside, we were dazzled by the artistry, including two chapels done by Tiffany & Company.

Union Station in Cincinnati has been restored to its Art Deco glory (it was dedicated one day before FDR’s first inauguration in 1933). You walk up a formal driveway at least a quarter-mile long, and before the station is probably the most stupendous Art Deco fountain (and it functions!) I have ever seen. The interior has been restored and painted with the original colors – it has a high dome of concentric circles that look like a series of suns shining over you.

The Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, designed by the New York architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, is a 20th century masterpiece, undoubtedly the finest state capitol I have ever seen. The interior decorations – murals, mosaics, carved doors - testifies to the exuberance and pride of America feeling its power, confidence, and strength. The decorative elements are a beautiful synthesis of farming and prairie elements combined with acknowledged of the plains Indians who were displaced. I grew up thinking states like Nebraska were beyond boring, and then I step into the State Capitol and I walk out in sheer, breathless amazement.

This road trip represented a veritable living laboratory of an opportunity to compare the post-war modern architecture of the 1960’s and 1970’s with that of the last 20 years. Overall, it became very clear to us that most work, even of the best architects of the 60’s, did not hold up well, with a few exceptions. But in recent years, with the availability of computer-aided design, new materials, and new technologies, combined with a greatly enhanced environmental awareness, buildings seems far more exciting and at the same time, more humane.

Columbus, Indiana is a superb place to get an education in post-war architecture. J. Irwin Miller, founder of the Cummins Engine Company created the Cummins Foundation to support a civic-minded program of hiring the best (usually U.S.) architects to design a variety of public and commercial buildings – churches, schools, banks, post office, newspaper headquarters, bridges. The city publishes an architectural map so you can do your own walking (downtown) and driving (elsewhere) tour. This architectural program began in the 1940’s and has continued to the present, but the preponderance of buildings went up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and while most are “good” to very good, only a relatively small number are truly topnotch – an in-depth visit to these buildings is far better than taking a course in mid-century U.S. architecture.

One of the masterpieces of the post-war era that we sought out is the John Deere World Headquarters Building on the outskirts of Moline, Illinois is a masterpiece by Eero Saarinen, completed in 1964. It sits on spectacularly landscaped, extensive grounds, and it is spectacular because the landscaping and buildings work so well together – it has a very Japanese spirit in that sense. It reflects the kind of confidence, pride, and self-assurance that those of us who remember the early post-war period know was a kind of Golden Age, when America was king of the heap. Architects and their sponsors thought big. Perhaps one of the true masterpieces of any period and any place is the Gateway Arch on the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis, completed around the same time (1966) by the same architect, Eero Saarinen. In its scale and simplicity it brilliantly sums up everything it memorializes and commemorates. The more we stared at it, walked around it, and gazed at it from a distance, the more perfect in every way did it seem – in its placement at the river’s edge, in its shape, and most importantly, in what it symbolizes and embodies and communicates.

A quite special experience of architecture from the Modernist post-War period was to see two beautiful buildings done by an architect who trained under Mies van de Rohe in Chicago over half a century ago. We know the architect because he and his wife live at El Castillo and we have become friendly with them. So when in Tulsa, we went out to the house he designed for his family – now on the National Register of Historic Places. It had the kind of clean minimalist lines we associate with Mies’ finest work. Then in Oklahoma City we went to the neighborhood where he designed St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, a structure which has won an American Institute of Architects’ award for buildings that hold up well after 25 years of use. It is again a minimalist work with serenely lovely bell tower separate from but just in front of the church, and two concentric boxes so that it functions as a large outdoor or small totally enclosed church. (As an aside, it is having the opportunity to get to know such exciting individuals that has made living at El Castillo a far more stimulating experience than most anticipate when thinking about a “old folks home.”)

In contrast, the University of Cincinnati (who would have thought?) is a living classroom of the best in contemporary architecture. The university has been supporting some of the most exciting contemporary architecture. We walked around both the East Campus (Medical School) and West Campus (rest of the university) to see mind-bending buildings by Bernard Tschumi; Frank Gehry; Peter Eisenman; Gwathmey Siegel & Associates; Pei Freed Cobb; Morphosis (Thom Mayne); Michael Graves, to name some of the best known. Probably most exciting of all was walking into the Crawley Building, a huge medical research center which was having its grand opening later on the day we visited. It was designed by Studios Architecture (San Francisco), with Erik Sueberkrop as lead architect. We had a chance to see it from the outside and then walk around the inside, all 6 floors. This building seems to represent the best of where contemporary architecture is going with its strange combination of vast, soaring spaces and intimate rooms, along with the use of beautiful and diverse materials. Again, it is a reminder of the riches to be found in the most (to us) unlikely places.

A few of the new museum structures – the original germinal idea of the trip – were amongst the finest buildings we have ever seen. Tadeo Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (St. Louis) is relatively small but brings on the sense of perfection and serenity I experienced at the Taj Mahal. The mind and body slow down and one almost floats through its elegant tranquility and gently beautiful spaces. Stephen Holl’s enormous new wing, the Bloch Building, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City) is unlike anything we’ve seen before, a series of all opaque glass modules, like a series of giant boxcars, extended down the hillside of the Kansas City Sculpture Park in the Country Club Plaza neighborhood. All its finishings are of the utmost simplicity and elegance. The perfect lawns come right up to where the walls meet the ground surface, and it seems to float. We went back at night when lit is lit up from the inside and it had the dreamlike quality of the ocean liner passing by from Fellini’s “Amarcord.”

City layouts, in and of themselves, are fascinating to experience. Most of the cities we visited had their great days in the 2nd half of the 19th century through the mid-20th century. They are “rust belt” cities but it is obvious that they went through a period of exuberance and optimism that gave us the marvelous buildings we discovered. They are on the great rivers (Ohio, Mississippi) or the Great Lakes (Detroit, Cleveland). The steam engine, the steamboat, canals, and the railroads made them the great engines of commerce and progress they once were. A contrasting vision is Kansas City, one of the best examples of the “garden city” movement that began towards the end of the 19th century. Kansas City is laid out as a series of greenways and occupies an enormous area. Everywhere there are parks, parkways, bikeways and greenswards. Moving west, Tulsa and following it, Oklahoma City, represents the rambunctious energy of the oil boom – Tulsa in the first half of the 20th century, Oklahoma City in the 2nd half. Tulsa has so many wonderful Art Deco buildings because the oil millionaires of the time wanted an architecture that represented a real break from the urban centers further East.

Although so often we think the whole country has been paved over with strip malls, chain big box stores, and fast food outlets (and I suppose it largely has), it is amazing how many beautiful, well-preserved 19th century small towns we found that transported us back to an earlier era. These were places that usually had kept sprawl at bay and made an obvious effort to keep the town fabric intact. In almost all these towns, all kinds of historic signs and plaques helped us understand bits and pieces of 19th century American history, and gradually the smidgens of knowledge we picked up became part of a larger picture that conveyed the excitement of a young nation bursting at the seams.

We basically got in no political discussions, but I was surprised and pleased that if folks aren’t pushed into a corner, they often are doing the kind of positive things us “right-thinking liberals” think we have a monopoly on. Historic preservation, environmental conversation (in small local ways), love of history allied with an interest in the diversity of our world. I have no idea what the politics of the small towns were that we visited, but I know that in lots of ways, the residents shared many of my values.

While we take our fair share of interstate highways, we also discovered many beautiful two-lane highways, everything from state highways to small county and local roads, and by taking them, got a sense of how beautiful the landscape was, even if not spectacular. Forests, small farms, quiet towns. Part of the fun of a road trip is sitting down with the maps, and trying to figure out what looks promising in the way of an interesting route. Often, looking at a good map, you can almost sniff out what is a promising way to go – a route that will give you the sense of the specificity of place. And it is reassuring, for all the sprawl and homogenization that make the outskirts of every mid-size and large city look similar, there are still so many delightful and interesting back road routes still around for the taking.

Although architecture was the original rationale for the trip, history figured quite prominently as well. In fact, this turned out to be one of our great adventures in American history writ large. The eastern Mid-West exemplified the surging power of the adolescent American nation in the first half of the 19th century, and the western Mid-West continued those trends into unsettled areas in the mid- and early part of the 2nd half of the 19th century. As we followed our itinerary, I was stunned at the wealth of places that conveyed a living sense of how the country was taking off.

I kept thinking of two underserved groups who, in my mind, would have benefitted greatly from the kind of direct history lessons we got to have. The first group is youngsters who mostly find the history classes they are exposed to hopelessly boring and think there is nothing relevant to them in it. The second group are foreign visitors who flock to big East and West Coast cities, plus Chicago occasionally, but have little idea how much the fascinating story of what America really is can be discovered in the Mid-West.

There were several aspects to our history that came front and center for me. First and foremost is the role of slavery as part of the essential story of the U.S. I don’t think that most citizens put what slavery represents as the ying of our core story, inextricably bound with the yang of the struggle for freedom and rights. The American example of freeing the country from the British yoke, of the Constitution and creating “a more perfect union” gets great attention, but slavery is usually treated as an unfortunate addendum to that stirring story. This allows us to think of ourselves as part of an unalloyed “shining city on a hill.” In my view, until we face up to our very complex heritage, where the horror of slavery figures as prominently as the struggle for (white) freedom, we will have missed the fundamental truth of our country.

This conviction, long-brewing in me, became even firmer on this trip. Perhaps the most stirring single element in that was the time we spent at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. This recently opened, large museum, sits right on the Ohio River, directly across from Kentucky, which was a slave state, while Ohio was a free state, though in Cincinnati there was a significant pro-slavery sensibility. So Cincinnati, along with many other “border” towns figured prominently in the Underground Railroad system.

However, the name of the museum hardly represents its coverage and scope adequately, as it takes in Western slavery from its beginnings in the New World to emancipation and post-Civil War Reconstruction. This is a museum that presents a picture so vital to understanding ourselves as a people that it is a shame it is not right on the Mall in Washington, DC. All the same, to have spent half a day there (an inadequate amount of time, nevertheless) was to emotionally whipsawed from the depths to the heights and back. I am convinced that it is pointless to argue whether the Nazis represented the worst barbarity the human race is capable of. The 400-year story of Western enslavement of Africans is an example of brutality and depravity on such a scale of time and space and numbers, that it suffices to find every extreme of human behavior within it. And while we can feel horror for what Nazism and Communism did in Europe and Asia, it is harder to face up to the horrors that took place within our very borders. No matter how much one reads and becomes immersed in the history of slavery in the U.S., the visceral confrontation with it that this museum offered packs a punch that is hard to surpass.

David and I consider ourselves pretty well-versed in U.S. history but neither of us had any appreciation for the “internal slave trade” in the U.S. which by itself is a horror story beyond imagination. Until the early 19th century, slavery prospered most in the mid-Atlantic region. But with the coming of the cotton gin, it became possible to develop huge plantations in the Deep South. Throughout the 19th century (until the Civil War, of course) slaves were sold from the mid-Atlantic to plantations in the South to work the cotton plantations, along with sugar cane and rice – but cotton was predominant. The value of the cotton trade in the U.S. was greater than all other trade in the world combined, at that time – a statistic that is difficult to accept. This meant a force migration of African-Americans under the most hideous conditions. Slave pens – one of which was found and brought to the museum – were just one of nightmares of what the internal slave trade brought onto the scene.

We also learned much more about the extremes slaves went to to escape – stories that defy all imagining. And of course our understanding of how the Underground Railroad functioned deepened greatly. One begins to realize that every inspiring story in U.S. history is inextricably tied into the horror of slavery, one way or another. The inescapability of it makes it no longer possible, for me at least, to dwell on the heights of our struggle for freedom without taking the flip side immediately into account

The Old Court House in downtown St. Louis is another part of the tale. It is where the Dred Scott case began, which was ultimately decided in the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost all of the exhibits at the Old Court House (a magnificent 19th century domed building, a small-scale U.S. Capitol) relate to Dred Scott. By the Supreme Court deciding that African slaves were not “persons” and that owners could hunt them down anywhere in the U.S., the path to Civil War was greatly accelerated. If anyone thinks that Supreme Court decisions, and the justices who make them don’t matter, a little attention to the Dred Scott decision, and how it precipitated the Civil War is quite instructive.

Homestead National Historic Site is a National Park Service property in southeastern Nebraska, a little south of the capitol, Lincoln, which focuses is on the role of the Homestead Act in the settling of the plains and the West. I had not realized that the Act was in effect until 1974, when it expired, and enabled homesteading in Alaska well after that territory became a state in 1959! But the main story was the extraordinary difficulty of people with little trying to create a life for themselves on the harsh prairies, arriving with nothing, facing bitter cold winters and broiling summers, plagues of locusts, drought, and blizzards. Some original buildings from other places have been moved here and there is a gorgeous swatch of undisturbed prairie to take a short walk through.

We learned a great deal about other byways of American history. One was the French settlement of the Mid-West, up and down the Mississippi River, in particular. We visited French towns, which retain fascinating remnants of that period, fortified settlements, and traditions that have survived to this day. One topic that I would like to know more about was the Code Noir or Black Code – the French, in North America at least, while slave owners, had a much more enlightened (if that is the right word) code of how slaves were to be treated, and it represented a vast improvement other American slave-owners of Anglo-Saxon descent. From what we learned, the Code Noir was not simply an ideal but was enforced by the French colonial powers.

Another fascinating set of byways was the various utopian and religious minority communities that were founded in the Mid-West by small sects persecuted in the Old World. Most of these groups came from Germany – there apparently was an explosion of such outlier groups in the late 18th century. So there were the Pietists who founded the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa, and the Harmonie Society, which founded New Harmony in Indiana on the Wabash River. Because the Harmonists forbid reproduction, they became a dwindling society, and the community was in time sold to Robert Owen, who attempted to create a wholly new community led by leading scientists of the day and focusing on scientific research. It did not last, either, because no one wanted to do the tedious day-to-day work it took to keep the town going. Oberlin, Ohio was founded as a freethinking town where from the beginning there was no discrimination against blacks. These towns sprang up in the old Mid-West (originally called the Northwest Territories) because they represented the frontier in the early 19th century, and thus people were left in relative peace to pursue their unconventional ideas. The Mormons originally settled here, and while one branch was driven out with violence from Nauvoo, Illinois, to found Salt Lake City and the State of Utah, another branch, which still exists, remains in the Mid-West with headquarters in Nauvoo! To me the richness of America relates to its countless strands, such as the ones we discovered and learned more about. There was any number of other examples.

Although this was not a road trip focused on the outdoors, we did have our share of such experiences. The Great River Road that goes up the Mississippi river’s banks takes you up magnificent bluffs in Iowa a little south of Dubuque. From there you see, out of glorious hardwood forest, the mighty river wending north and south. Illinois, which I don’t usually think of as a scenic wonderland had Starvation Rock State Park with some high rock outcrops and a small canyon, a bit of tallgrass prairie preserved by a land trust on the edge of Lockport, and south of St. Louis, a set of limestone cliffs a few miles east of the Mississippi that I hiked up into and found perhaps the most spectacular hike I’ve ever taken in the Great Lakes states. It was a fragment of prairie mixed in with woods sitting atop of the cliffs that was as dramatic and wild in feel as anywhere I’ve been in the eastern U.S. Along Lake Michigan we swam in the clear, cold waters of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which also includes some beautiful behind-the-dunes trails. And for the third time, I visited The Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma. Since visiting last, there is a new 3-mile prairie hiking loop, and the re-introduced buffalos that now number approximately 2,500 – we saw numerous herds as we drove the unpaved roads of the Preserve. September is a beautiful time to visit – there are still a number of wildflowers blooming, and the tall grasses are really tall!

We also experienced the outdoors by camping about a third of the time, fixing dinner and breakfast at our campsite. Camping was virtually always at state parks, since there are not many national parks and national forests in the mid-section of the country. Since we were usually camping during the week, and for most of the trip, after Labor Day, the campgrounds were almost deserted. The state parks were generally well developed, well maintained, and neatly laid out, with “luxurious” features such as hot showers – they were very different from Western campgrounds. For one thing, individual campsites were cheek by jowl with the next one. We had privacy only because no one else was there, especially in the sections that were tent only, but I would hate to be there in mid-summer when campgrounds typically are full. Furthermore, we thought September would feel cooler, but with rare exception, weather remained hot (mid to upper 80’s) and humid. It made us really appreciate how great we have it when we camp in the Intermountain West.

It was fascinating to observe how quickly the landscape changed from mid-western farms and then grasslands to a look that became distinctly southwestern. It began about 20 miles inside the Texas panhandle, and by 15 miles before crossing into New Mexico, the landscape was quintessentially southwestern. Our last camping night was spent in Palo Duro Canyon, a Texas state park a little south of Amarillo that contains the second largest canyon in the continental U.S. after the Grand Canyon. It was our welcome home. The next day we drove directly to Taos, rather than home, for David’s annual Sangre de Cristo Chorale retreat. As we approached the Rockies, the vast vistas, the dark, bluish-green mountains, the aspens turning color, truly made us feel good to be home. Even in September the Mid-West was hot, humid, and buggy, and while we totally loved our “grand tour” we also knew that coming back to brilliant skies, mesmerizing light, mountains and fresh, dry, cool air was where we belonged once again. The sense of coming back to where we now feel we belong was palpable.

At the same time, the trip immeasurably enriched us. I suspect many would wonder how the Mid-West could be so interesting, but I can state categorically that it contains great treasures of many kinds, and much to provide insight on the real America. To me that kind of understanding is very much a part of the highest kind of patriotism.

As always,

Ken