Category: history

School’s Out Forever

Tonight I filed my final grades for the online history course I taught this fall at Metropolitan State University, a public commuter school based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Owing to their administrative chaos and budget cuts and to my own lack of time (energy, interest…), this is probably the last course I’ll teach for them, and thus probably the last course I’ll ever teach.

I can’t say that I’ll miss teaching, really, but it’s been a good run. I started my history-teaching career in 1999 by serving as a teaching assistant while in grad school at Northwestern. Altogether, I served as a TA in three courses and taught one of my own in 1999 and 2000. No “teaching” I’ve ever done was more terrifying than that first lecture delivered as a TA to a giant auditorium full of undergrads.

After Shannon and I moved back to Minnesota for her first post-grad school job, I taught at least four classes (or was it six?) at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul in 2001-2002, while simultaneously working on my dissertation. The first meeting of my first class at St. Thomas was postponed because of 9/11. I commuted to that job from our apartment in the western suburbs – my only real experience with hard-core car commuting. (#hatedit)

When my one-year contract at St. Thomas ended, I signed on to teach history courses with Metro State – always only one per term, and always one of two or three U.S. history survey courses. I was by then working full-time in an academic support job at a different university in Minneapolis while finishing my dissertation. At first I taught “bricks and mortar” courses in the evening at Metro State’s branch campus in Minneapolis – four courses from fall 2003 to summer 2005. I remember waiting amidst the bar-hoppers on Hennepin for my bus back home – first a late express (or was it a ride from Shannon?) out to the ‘burbs, then, after we moved into the city, a local to our new house.

When I took my new job at Carleton in 2005, we saw that we (Shannon and baby Julia and I) would need to move to Northfield, so I volunteered to help launch the department’s online courses. I developed online versions of two of my courses: a global history of World War II and U.S. history since 1865 through the lens of science and technology.

These, I’ve been teaching in rotation ever since – spring, summer, and fall, year in and year out, with the occasional term off. All together, I’ve taught them 25 times: 12 editions of the World War II course (which I really liked) and 13 editions of the U.S. survey (which no). Though I never learned to love the online format, and never had the time to master it, I think I did some good teaching – as good as I could while also adjusting to and getting good at a new full-time job, starting and adding to a family, moving to and getting settled in a new community, and getting hooked on bikes.

My Metro State students were fascinating. About half of each course’s enrollees were “traditional age” undergrads – say, 18 to 25. The other half were adults who were “finishing their degrees,” often years after starting them. Once, I taught someone who had served in the Korean War, and I had numerous Baby Boomers who offered their first-hand perspectives on the historical events, people, and trends we were studying.

Though most of my students lived in the Twin Cities or at least in Minnesota, a few every term were doing the course from elsewhere in the country or the world, including a few soldiers in some very remote locations. True to Minnesota, I had a lot of Andersons, Olson, Carlsons, and Larsons as well as many Hmong and Somali students – though, interestingly, very few Latino/a students. In one course, I had three Hmong women with exactly the same names – first and last (They were unrelated.) Regardless of background, virtually all of my students were working full-time while engaged with the courses, so we had that in common.

Figuring 30 students per course, I’d estimate I’ve taught about a thousand undergrads since my first course at St. Thomas in fall 2001. Yeah, it’s been a good run. I’m not sad to be at the finish line.

 

Damn Immigrants

Even here at the windswept edge of the prairie, a patriot can find stubborn pockets of unassimilated immigrants.
Stubborn Anti-Americanism

This crude flag, seen today on an excursion southeast of my home town, speaks volumes about the recondite nature of the immigrants who dwell in the run-down compound of which this building is just one part.

Who knows what un-American spirits animate these immigrants. One can assume they’ve stubbornly retained the surnames they brought with them over the wide Atlantic – names full of ugly consonants and unlikely vowels that confound the American tongue.

Do these immigrants even know our Constitution, or recite our Pledge of Allegiance? Perhaps they – like their countrymen who never fled their rocky homeland – still follow the dictates of their king. Certainly, their farmstead suggests no interest in a Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen.

Whatever their political views, however, we can be sure that these immigrants adhere to the 16th century teachings of a raving Teutonic priest who sought to overturn the social order and who achieved decades of bloody religious warfare. As mute proof of their religiosity, a temple dedicated to this madman’s sect stands but a short distance from the compound, its minaret-like steeple looming over a think line of trees.

And what of more quotidian interests? Judging by the state of repair of the several motor vehicles in the compound, the immigrants can only with difficulty venture to the markets in town. Do they wear our clothes? Do they read our books? Do they eat our food? A patriot might reasonably wonder whether they have ever enjoyed the truest American delicacies such as hamburgers, pizza, or tacos. Until they do, that patriot should fear for the wholeness and unity of the Republic.

Going Feral

Through the first part of the year, I read a bunch of books on buffalo, all of which inevitably included at least a brief treatment of the Great Slaughter, during which colonizing whites annihilated the North American herd of bison that had numbered at least 30 million (and possibly 50 million) as late as 1850. By 1900, only a couple dozen survived, hiding deep within the Yellowstone country in northwestern Wyoming.

By the end of the spring, I was simply tired of reading stories about this and other destructions of nature, and so I sought out some reading that offered a more hopeful, if not exactly positive, perspective on environmental history and on our current environmental situation. Gradually, I shifted my bison reading to material on the array of bison conservation and restoration efforts that are underway throughout North America – perhaps most importantly, on the American Prairie Reserve in north-central Montana, where conservationists hope to have a 12,000-head herd of wild, migratory bison by 2030.

I learned, in this reading, that these kinds of ambitious landscape-scale conservation efforts were called rewilding, and that under that rubric, many thoughtful, hard-working people all over the world are trying to reverse the arrow of human development (read: destruction) of the natural world and going back to something like the world that existed when humans were fewer, or absent.

Rewilding the Pastures of Goodhue County
Rewilding the Pastures of Goodhue County

By and by, this led me to George Monbiot’s Feral, an engrossing book on the idea and practice of rewilding. The concept could be merely romantic or misanthropically nihilistic, but Monbiot’s careful research and exceptional writing outlines a different vision. The kind of rewilding that Monbiot advocates rests on his particular perspective on nature (one learned from and shared with many others) and on his assertive, engrossing investigations of places where rewilding is already occurring, such as the nearly-lost Caledonian forest in Scotland.

More than anything else, Monbiot recommends – in a cleverly conservative way – that humans give up our drive to control nature (a drive that seems increasingly to doom us and nature) and recognize that nature is more complex, more obdurate, and more resilient than we can know. If – Monbiot argues and illustrates with powerful examples – people simply get out of the way, nature will take its course back to landscapes (and seascapes) that sustain a far wider range of non-human life than our arid cities and suburbs – and much more than even our “natural” areas such as denuded farmlands and largely un-natural parks.

Not only is this nature better for nature, but this nature would be better for humans, too – a world where we do not burden ourselves with the crime of destroying our home and where we can live in settings (forests, prairies, coasts) that look, feel, and are more like the places where we evolved. Of course, many can object – for good and bad reasons – to rewilding. It’s certainly just one scheme among many for living on Earth. But it’s one that resonates with me, and that I think makes more sense than a lot of other approaches to civilization that I see operating right now.

 

The State of Superior

I was probably in elementary school when I first heard people talking about how the area where we lived, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – a.k.a. Upper Michigan, the U.P., or now, “da Yoop,” – could or even should be a separate state.

This state – North Michigan or perhaps Superior – ought to be separate, the thinking went, due to the stark geographical and demographic differences between the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula – a.k.a. the L.P., “the Mitten,” or just “Michigan.” Anyhow, the only reason “we” were part of Michigan was the stupid compromise with Ohio over Toledo.

I didn’t know then, but was fascinated to learn later, that (as Wikipedia says in its article on Superior) Yoopers had agitated for the area’s statehood in the years just before I was born in the U.P.’s southermost city. This agitation in fact reached a high point just after I was born, with an unsuccessful effort to pull the U.P. and the northerly parts of Wisconsin out of their respective states and combine them into a new state, something like this, which I saw recently on the amazing Lost States blog:

Possible new state of "Superior"

I loved the idea then and I love the idea now, even as I recognize that a state of Superior would probably be unfeasible, if not terrible, as a political or economic entity. (Recent-ish news coverage of the idea says as much here in the Detroit Free Press  and here in the New Republic.)

One of the reasons that Superior would not be a great state is it’s big and empty – Wyoming, but all forests; Alaska, but no tundra. Wikipedia says in its entry on the U.P. (the actual place, not the imaginary state) that “the Upper Peninsula remains a predominantly rural region. As of the 2010 census, the region had a population of 311,361,” of whom only a third live in one of the twelve towns that have populations greater than 4,000 people.

Even if Superior included both all of the current U.P. and the Wisconsin counties that (or almost) border da Yoop*, you’d only get a total population (if you believe those lying liars at the U.S. Census) of 410,340. This scattering of humans over almost 22,000 square miles would make Superior – as of the 2010 census – the state with the smallest population, well behind Wyoming’s throng of 563,626. (The numbers would rise a little, but not much, if you included the several other Wisconsin counties that the Lost States map above include within Superior.)

For comparison’s sake, Wyoming’s capital, Cheyenne, had a population of 92,000 in 2010 – a third bigger than Marquette County, the most populous county in Superior, and 425% bigger than Marquette city, which, with a population of 21,355 in 2010, is the most populous city in the U.P. Superior. Marquette – as the putative capital of Superior – would be the fourth-smallest state capital, bigger only than teeny-tiny Montpelier (just 7,855 people lived there in 2010!), Pierre, and Augusta.

And like many a rural, underpopulated state full of white people and public lands and almost wholly dependent on tourism and natural resources (in the U.P., lumbering and mining), Superior would probably be a blood-red state. In 2012, all but two U.P.’s counties went for Romney in 2012, and all but one supported the (horrifyingly bad) Republican governor. The U.P.’s fifteen counties – grouped in Michigan’s first congressional district – have elected Republican and Tea Partier Dan Benishek to the House of Representatives in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

So yes, Superior is a terrible idea.

But still, we can have some fun with the idea, right? A few facts, ideas, and guesses about what Superior would be like:

  • Capital: Marquette (see above)
  • Electoral votes: 3
  • Industries: lumber, mining (maybe), tourism (including lots of outdoor sports in all four seasons)
  • Coastline: about 2,000 miles on three Great Lakes (more than any other state – even post-Superior Michigan, which would only have about 1,500 miles)
  • Flag: a white pine tree, green against a blue background
  • Metal: Iron! Copper! Iron! Copper! How about cunife, the little-known alloy of iron and copper (and that non-U.P. metal, nickel)? Nah, let’s go with iron, since there are dozens of places whose names include “iron” (e.g., Ironwood) but only a few named for copper. (Copper Harbor is pretty awesome, though.)
  • Animal: moose or wolf
  • Bird: Canada goose or maybe the chickadee
  • Good: the pasty!
  • Drink: coffee, eh, and maybe som’dat beer (the U.P. has fifteen breweries and brewpubs!)
  • Mystery: the Paulding Light (which isn’t much of a mystery anymore)
  • Interstate highways: one, the stretch of I-75 running from St. Ignace to the Soo
  • National parks: one, Isle Royale, though the U.P. also contains other amazing spots such as
  • State university: Northern Michigan University, or rather, Superior State U. (hell yes to that name, amirite?)
  • Rivals: Trolls – those who live “below the bridge” in the Lower Peninsula (the bridge being the mighty Mackinac – five miles long, the fifth longest suspension bridge in the world.
  • Holidays: St. Urho’s Day and the first day of deer season
  • Sports teams:
    • baseball: Milwaukee Brewers or Detroit Tigers, though leaning toward Detroit
    • hockey: Detroit Red Wings
    • basketball: Detroit Pistons
    • football: Green Bay Packers
      • Titletown is only about 175 miles from Marquette, versus about 400 miles to Minneapolis and 450 to Detroit, so it’s definitely not even a question don’t get me started. GO PACK GO!

 

 

* Running west to east, Ashland, Iron, Vilas, Forest, Florence, and Marinette. The latter is the most populous in the group, and would be the second-most populous county in the state, after Marquette County in Michigan Superior.

Origins of the Buffalo (the Bike, not the Animal)

I dunno if that many bike riders name their bikes, but I know a few who do, and I have named my last three bikes. My first gravel bike, a Surly CrossCheck, never earned a name, but my blue Salsa Mukluk fatbike was "the Beast," because it was a beastly machine that could go anywhere and looked (I think) a little scary, with those big tires seeming to be giant black paws. My Salsa Vaya gravel bike is "Giddyup," because it’s got a lot of get up and go – which is true even if I don’t ride it enough.

My favorite bike, my silver Salsa Mukluk, is "the Buffalo," a name that took me a long time to choose – or which took a long time to choose the bike. Quite a few people have asked me about the name – including several strangers at the Almanzo last weekend who rode up next me and asked, "Is that the Buffalo? Are you Chris Tassava?"

Despite or because of the weirdness of having strangers recognize me and my bike, I thought maybe I should explain the name.

I bought the Mukluk from my friend Ben, who’d built it up for himself a few years before but hadn’t had time to really put it to use. He gave me a great deal on the bike, so I snapped it up. Riding the nameless bike for months after I bought it, I thought about its many wonderful qualities and waited for the right moniker to emerge. My daughters lobbied for "Beauty," partly as a complement to the Beast (though I no longer owned the Beast) and partly because they’re girls. Honestly, the bike is pretty. Dressed in its blue and gray frame bags for winter racing or bikepacking, the bike looks, I think, like it’s wearing a comfortable, functional uniform.
Fat Pursuit Setup

Without the bags, the bike shows off all of its unpainted silvery titanium – definitely the bike material that’s easiest on the eyes.
Before the Almanzo

Despite all that, "Beauty" didn’t fit. Not that one can’t define beauty in many ways, but to me, the bike was too burly and too aggressive-looking to be "Beauty." Then, on a long training ride last fall, with the bike dressed in its all bags and laden with most of my winter-racing gear, as I ground my way up a long, messy gravel climb, it hit me: "the Buffalo."

My mind was primed for this revelation. I’d just read an article somewhere about bison. Most people know about the bison’s near-eradication in the 19th century, and also know the bit about how Indians used "every part" of the bison, but the animal itself is as fascinating as its history. It’s the largest North American mammal, the only survivor of the megafauna that thrived tens of thousands of years ago but that were almost all killed off by humans when they migrated out of Asia.

The bison survived because of their unique physical characteristics. They’re massive, but their physiology enables them to thrive in a wide range of conditions – hot southwestern deserts, temperate grasslands, lowland forests, mountain valleys, Alaskan swamps – and of course, the dry, windy grasslands that run up the center of the continent, which was where I live and where I would largely be riding the bike. A bison is fast – able to run up to up to 25 miles an hour. A bison is nimble – able to jump over fences that are six feet high or ditches and holes longer than their body length. A bison is tough – able to move dozens of miles a day in the right conditions (not to mention to survive the white mans’ guns). And a bison is very pleasing to look at, in a wild way.

Buffalo, by Larry Smith (from Flickr)

My fatbike, too, is fast, nimble, tough, and above all adaptable – good on pavement, great on gravel, excellent on dirt, and of course phenomenal on snow. With those rationalizations in place, I just had to make sure the name was right "Buffalo" is a laden term, with pedants loving to point out that the American bison isn’t a "buffalo" like the water buffalo of Africa. (This is true, but also dumb, since the French explorers didn’t give the name to the weird humpbacked cattle they saw on the plains because they looked like water buffalo.)

But "the Bison" didn’t sound right, and "Tatanka" (the Lakota word for "bison") didn’t seem right coming from a white guy. Growing up, I’d always used the label "buffalo" for bison, which mattered to me because riding bikes – especially fatbikes – can be a pure, childlike pleasure. And "the Buffalo" just sounded right when I said it. The name fit all the more because I’d installed some weird curved handlebars that looked – from above and behind, which was my view of them – a little like a horned bovine head. Within a few hundred yards of gravel road, the nameless fatbike became the Buffalo, and the Buffalo has taken me to some cool places.

Descending into Montana

At the Almanzo 2015 (photo by Marty Larson)

American History Wax Museum

Today was the long-awaited, much-anticipated American History Wax Museum, the culminating event of a big historical project that third graders at my girls’ school work on for weeks each spring. (When Julia was in third grade, she was Abigail Adams.)

Vivi, who has a scientific rather than a historical bent, chose Albert Einstein for as her figure. She did some great research on Einstein (who was, it turns out, not that nice a guy), wrote up a great speech in his voice (and memorized most of it), did the requisite almost-life-sized drawing (over about a week of evenings and weekends), and today dressed up as him (or as a third-grader’s vision of him) for the Museum. She did a great job!
Albert Einstein

Great Plains: Americas Lingering Wild

I just finished reading this amazing book – Great Plains: Americas Lingering Wild.
Forsberg, Great Plans

The Nebraska-based photographer Michael Forsberg thought up the idea for the book and filled it with dozens and dozens of exceptional shots of prairies from Minnesota to Montana, North Dakota to New Mexico – plants, animals, people, and especially the land itself.

Buffalo at the Buffalo Gap

Forsberg’s photographs are complemented by short essays by geographer Davis Wishart and natural historian Dan O’Brien, whose eloquence and erudition complement Forsberg’s artistry. Loss is an explicit theme in O’Brien’s writing, an implicit one in Wishart’s – the decline and death of countless plant and animal species, the near-extermination of the grassland’s original Native inhabitants, the continuing erosion (literal and figurative) of all three kinds of prairie…

Yet as O’Brien comes to realize through his work with Forsberg, denizens of the plains do have some reasons for optimism. Arguably, we are now experiencing a moment when more people than ever before are interested in "saving" the prairies as ecosystems, as homes for myriad living creatures, and as colossally beautiful places. Reading this book makes me – an immigrant to the prairie – want to do more to save it and expand it and love it.

Imbolc and Cailleach

A tardy note on the Gaelic holiday of Imbolc, traditionally held on February 1 and associated with the onset of spring – or a prolonged winter.

From Wikipedia:

Imbolc was believed to be when the Cailleach—the divine hag of Gaelic tradition—gathers her firewood for the rest of the winter. Legend has it that if she wishes to make the winter last a good while longer, she will make sure the weather on Imbolc is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood. Therefore, people would be relieved if Imbolc is a day of foul weather, as it means the Cailleach is asleep and winter is almost over. At Imbolc on the Isle of Man, where she is known as Caillagh ny Groamagh, the Cailleach is said to take the form of a gigantic bird carrying sticks in her beak.

Cailleach would be a great name.

Going West like Lewis and Clark

I finished Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage today, after years of meaning to read the book and months of work at actually reading it. The book is now a classic piece of American history, the best popular look at the Lewis & Clark expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast in 1803-1806.

Though I could quibble with various aspects of Ambrose’s treatment of the history of the expedition*, overall I found the book to be a superb piece of history. Ambrose’s writing is clear and occasionally beautiful, he does a great job of mining the explorers’ journals and other primary sources, and above all he effectively conveys the terror and wonder of the expedition into lands that were unknown to Americans.

A few aspects of the expedition really stood out to me:
+ The colossal scale and reach of the Missouri River, which dwarfs the Mississippi in every way. (Why do we even care about the Mississippi again?)
+ The variety and number of the Natives along the expedition’s route. "Tribes" is such a misnomer. If the Native peoples were not nation states, they were at least nations.
+ The incredible, already diminishing complexity of natural life on the plains and in the mountains.
+ The difficulty of getting anywhere when the fastest mode of transportation was a horse or a sailing boat.
+ The naïveté of Americans’ views about their influence on the European colonial powers and Native nations. The reach of American foreign policy has exceeded its grasp at least since Jefferson.
+ The majesty and obduracy of the western mountains.

I pushed to finish the book now because some of my drive later this week will follow the explorers’ route west and see some of the mountains they saw. It’ll be cool to see things they saw, more than 200 years ago.

Making Hay

Late-summer rides often pass by fields where farmers are haying. I wish I remembered more about haying on my grandpa’s farm in the U.P. I didn’t participate in the haying very often – maybe five times – but I remember driving the big old truck up and down the rows. I was in elementary school, so I could barely see over the dashboard. I remember how we’d freeze water in washed-out milk jugs so we’d have cold water to drink in the fields. I remember how the hay got into everything – clothes, shoes, hair… The warm, dry smell stayed with you for days.

Hay Field

Taking No Shining to the Shining

Every so often, I decide to plug one of the many holes in my pop-culture awareness. This week, I decided to finally watch the classic Stanley Kubrick horror movie The Shining, after I encountered more than a few mentions of it in conversation and reading over the course of a few days.

My horror-movie watching résumé is not much longer than my classic-movie watching résumé: I’ve seen a few of the mainstays (The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho), but almost no horror of any recency (The Blair Witch Project being the exception). And I didn’t find any of these flicks very scary – with the partial exception of The Exorcist. I watched that just as I was abandoning Catholicism, which somehow made me more receptive to the whole head-spinning thing.

And but so, I wasn’t sure what to expect in watching The Shining. I kinda wanted to be scared by it, both because it’s a classic and because a number of people warned me that I’d be terrified.

Unfortunately or not, I didn’t find the movie scary in any way. It was absorbing, for sure, and I did enjoy watching it. Kubrick’s direction and John Alcott’s cinematography were both astounding. The opening shot of Jack Torrance driving up to the hotel was incredible (despite a couple seconds when the shadow of the helicopter was visible at lower right!), the scenes in the main reception area were gorgeous (especially when the movie turned dark), and the famous tracking shots of Danny riding his trike through the deserted halls turned out to deserve all of their influence.

But those scenes, and others like them – Danny conversing with "Tony," the reappearances of the dead sisters, the torrents (Torrance?) of blood in the hallway, Nicholson’s ad-libbed "Heeeeere’s Johnny!" – lost a lot of their terrifying punch for having turned, in the 33 years since the movie came out, into clichés. It’s hard to be frightened by the girls inviting Danny to play with them "forever" when I’ve seen that same scenario played for laughs.

The movie’s passage into a collection of clichés only accounts for part of why I didn’t find it scary, though. Much of the rest of the explanation comes from not thinking that there are any supernatural forces at work in the world. I don’t think there are ghosts (much less gods), so I found it hard to be frightened by the ghosts (if they were ghosts) of the ballroom revelers, the enabling bartender, or the caretaker/waiter who encourages Jack to solve the problem of his family.

I suppose you don’t need to believe in ghosts (or God) to find the movie scary in another way – as an allegory of human evil, with Jack inventing stories (his day job, after all!) to explain why he needs to kill his wife and child. But Danny’s seeming paranormal powers have to be stripped out of the story, then, too, which removes a major part of the plot…

In short, The Shining left me shrugging. I could appreciate it as a cinematic achievement, but I couldn’t get into the idea of the film enough to get scared by that idea.

Lance Armstrong Made Me Cry

By 1995, I had followed the Tour de France semi-seriously – or about as seriously as you could from rural Michigan before the Internet – for about a decade, going back to 1986, when Greg LeMond won the first of his three Tour titles and established the United States as a force in international cycling.

In July 1995, I had just finished college and moved to Chicago to live with Shannon, who was then in grad school. We were going to get married the next month, but in July I was unemployed, so I had plenty of time to follow the Tour and plenty of interest in the race, which focused on whether Spain’s Miguel Indurain would be able to win a fifth consecutive Tour title.

Indurain did win the Tour that year, but the Tour’s defining moment came during Stage 15, a long race over several peaks in the Pyrenees. On the descent of the arduous Col de Portet d’Aspet, the young Motorola rider Fabio Casartelli died after a high-speed crash in which he smashed his head into a roadside barrier.

I think I’d already read about the crash and Casartelli’s bloody death in the paper, but when I watched the grainy snippets of video, I burst into tears. The tears didn’t stop when the recap detailed how the Motorola team had been allowed to finish en masse at the head of the peloton on the next stage. And I cried even harder when I saw Casartelli’s American teammate Lance Armstrong win Stage 18 to Limoges. Armstrong pointed at the sky as he took the win.

It was all almost too much: the young cyclist – a husband and father – dying in the sport’s greatest race, his team riding in memorial to him a day later, and then his teammate – America’s great cycling hope – racing his heart out to take a win in his honor.

Back then, doping was a whisper, at least in the cycling media I consumed. I knew about how a doped-up Tom Simpson had literally raced himself to death in 1968 on the climb up the Ventoux, but beyond that, I didn’t know that many racers, if not most, were dirty, much less that the golden age of doping was about to dawn – an age, of course, which we know now was dominated by the greatest doper of them all, Armstong himself.

I didn’t shed any tears over Armstrong’s slow, sad fall from grace. I hope he’s unable to enjoy a second act in American life. He certainly doesn’t deserve one.

But at the same time, I can’t forget that moment in July 1995 when Lance won for Fabio – the young living American recognizing the bravery and skill of the young dead Italian in the only best way he could. I wish that moment of tragic triumph was all I knew of Armstrong.

Third Grade Takes on French History, or I Don’t Even

Julia: “Is France a very poor country?”
Me: “No, France is very rich. A lot like the U.S.”
J: “Who’s their king?”
M: “They don’t have a king. They got rid of him.”
J: “Oh, yeah. The guy that they chopped off his head.”
M: “Right. Louis the Sixteenth.”
J: “Was he a bad king?”
M: “No, but he wasn’t a very good king, either.”
J: “He should have tried out for the basketball team.”
M: “What?”
J: “You know, in case he was better at basketball than being a king.”

Crunching Gravel (a memoir)

I came across this when browsing the Carleton library stacks a while ago.
_Crunching Gravel_ by Robert Peters

The title grabbed me (I’m a sucker for anything gravel related), but the book turned out to be a wonderful memoir of life growing up in northern Wisconsin during the Great Depression, not far away from the locales where I grew up fifty years later. Robert Peters – apparently a poet of some regional note – arranged the book by season, and did a splendid job of describing how the year proceeds in the Northwoods, especially for a semi-impoverished family like his. Peters is especially good at relating the indelible incidents of his youth, from everyday farm work to strange and even disturbing incidents. Anyone who’s been up north will like this book.