Oklahoma is a touch of the Midwest, with green rolling hills, grasslands, and humid climate, and a touch of the Southwest, with the cowboy culture, oil, and warmer climate.  I like the western flavor, but with a bit cooler climate and more greenery added.  It straddles both regions, southwest and midwest, like the Big 12 Conference, which has Iowa State to the north and Texas to the south.  There is a comfortableness about Oklahoma.  The people have carved out a nice, separate lifestyle for Oklahomans, with nice housing and low cost of living.  There is a calmness about the world, a provincial feel.  Weather is a part of your life.  You are close to it in Oklahoma.  Balmy skies and thunder storms.  Mostly, that is a nice feeling.  However, Oklahoma is also about tornado alerts and warnings breaking into television programs.  It is driving along the highways, listening to the radio to know where funnels are touching down, which counties.

I am driving east from Denver, towards Salina, Kansas, where I will turn south towards Oklahoma.  Once again, I am on the open Interstate.   Although America has been homogenized by the Walmarts, Exxons, and McDonalds, you can still find beauty and solace on the Interstate, in the scenery you drive through, as on autopilot.  You can get off the Interstates and take back roads if you wish.  There is still something to the open road.  Perhaps I am not really going anywhere, just going.  Perhaps there is a lostness in me which I disguise by creating artificial destinations.  Perhaps I have wanderlust genes, going back to my Dad, who moved the family every year from town to town, doing sales, or perhaps further back to my family which left Holland in 1848.  One of my film heroes is Kowalski, who races from Denver to San Francisco in his Dodge Challenger, chased by police all the way, in “Vanishing Point.”  I am clearly enchanted by travel, the freedom of the open road, the wide spaces, the movement, the exploration of the country, new discoveries.  I envy the motorcyclists, caught in the rain, putting on wet gear beneath underpasses, riding the roads in open weather, with no canopy around them, the air in their faces, their oneness with nature.  They really experience the countryside they travel through.

I am in somewhere in western Kansas, flat and plain.  As a child, the great plains of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were my life: Dodge City, Great Bend, Garden City, Duncan, Amarillo, and Levelland.  The towns talked about and traveled through, where Dad trained salesmen: McPherson, Pratt, Hutchinson, El Dorado, Hays, Newton, Meade, and Liberal.  Places on the Kansas Turnpike (KTA), others on the Will Rogers Turnpike, where we overnighted on the way between Roswell and Des Moines.   My thoughts go to my Uncle who was my Dad’s boss, who opened memorial parks, and who helped “all boats rise” in the family.  I remember the kitchen tables, with the old timer salesmen  sitting around it talking about  “big deals,” and the young salesmen, students at O.U.  Stories are being told of other old salesmen, one last seen driving, oblivious, down a one way street the wrong way in Hobbs, New Mexico, yelling at an oncoming car to get off the blinking road.  Each year for me was a new school in a new town.  I don’t remember much of it.

The fields I am passing now are wheat fields, golden, with farm houses in the distance, modest with modest barns, always white board.  Signs on the road point to Abilene, Ike’s birthplace, and to Russell, home to Bob Dole and Arlen Specter.  Turning south at Salina, I travel a while entering Oklahoma, then exit in the evening to Blackwell, Oklahoma.  I am looking for memories of my childhood.  We lived here for a summer after my 6th grade.  I remember my mother, my younger sister, and I walking each day to the public swimming pool, new and clean, crowded with families.  But, as I drive through town with my window down, I am taken back by the fact that many buildings are empty, with only a few older people sitting on main street, the city pool in disrepair, long closed.  Has this happened in the past 50 years, or was my memory wrong?  I got back on the freeway.

In Norman, I have lunch at Taco Bueno, one of my favorite fast food places, and drive over to Fred Jones Gallery on the University of Oklahoma campus, where I see a wonderful exhibit of Edward Curtis late period (1926) photographs of the Oklahoma plains tribes, the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Osage, Wichita, and Arapaho.  Curtis retired in 1930, but lived until 1952, suffering depression and not working, the exhibit said.  His gold toned, silver plate photographs show native Americans who still lived in the old world, even in the 1920s.   We see a traditional world, apart from modernization, except for some cowboy clothes.  It is a world of traditional societies, “sky” and “deer,” and bundled babies in wooden child carriers, and buffalo herds, and dancers, and teepees, and pumpkin carving to make bowls, and lot of native dress.  My favorite item in the museum is the painting of “Vanessa Bell,”  done in 1912, by fellow Bloomsbury Group member Duncan Grant.  The Bloomsbury is a new discovery for me.   The painting is post impressionistic, of Vanessa sitting in a chair and reading.  It consists of broad strokes in brown, purple, and green.  The colors are those of colored chalk.   Another favorite item is a painting entitled “Prune Trees in Belgium,” done in 1998 by another new discovery for me, Brad Aldridge.  Other favorites include Rousseau’s “Stark Street in the Suburbs,” of black, white, and gray geometric buildings, not his usual animal and nature themes.  There is a beautiful still life, “Study of Roses,”  by Julian Alden Weir, a wonderful watercolor, with clear glass vase to die for.  Raoul Dufy, the Fauvist, was represented by his “Beach in France,” in violet and aquamarine pastels, swirling colors.  Finally a ceramic Tan Dynasty (907-618 BCE) Chinese horse, painted gold.  There are some good Vuillard, Hassam, and Bonnards, and Taos painters Conger Irving Crouse and Leon Gaspard.  Walking out of the museum, I walk over to my car parked on the oval nearby, and start the engine, pausing a moment to remember a girl who studied art here a long time ago, when I was a student at Texas Tech.  I slowly drive away.

After Norman, I drive to Oklahoma City, to a downtown area near “Brick Town.”  I have a great steak at the stockyards before going to the Oklahoma City Art Museum.   There, i find  some good works, including Taos painters: Robert Henri’s “Tesuque Buck”  of a young native American, mainly in reds, showing the subject’s inner calm, nobility, and dignity; a Georgia O’Keefe, “Yellow Lilly,” of a light green flower with yellow bloom, very fine; John Sloan’s two black crows amid a palette of blue sky over a village; and Ernst Blumenschein’s “New Mexico,” 1922, expressionistic, in reds and tans, of a pueblo.   The museum also has American Impressionist William Merritt Chase’s “Venice” (1877) of an arch-windowed palazzo, which seems to show Whistler’s influence.  Other notable paintings includ Eugene Boudin’s “Portreaux Harbor, Brittany,” (1873) with white and blue boats in the harbor; Renoir’s “Girl in the Woods” blending the girl and garden with thick orange and gren strokes, almost post impressionistic in its vagueness; and the Fauvist, Maurice de Vlamminch, using typical Flemish dark greens and blues, creating an image of a “Village” using bold strokes and colors.   The gallery also has a nice collection of Hugenot-influenced, English 17th and 18th Century silverware, a silver mounted flintlock pistol, plus some modern art: Chihuli glass in sea shapes with translucent whites and carbon lip wraps; a Harry Bertoia sound structure, using copper rods; a John Henry Jasper large aluminum structure, painted orange and red, like a Calder, but on the ground; and a Harry Kramer wire cage with Rube Goldberg device inside which you set into motion by pressing a button.

From Oklahoma City, I drive to Bartlesville, about forty miles from Tulsa, a company town and financial center for Phillips Petroleum and its pipeline subsidiary under Harold Price.  It is a nice small town with some very interesting architecture, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, 19 stories tall, made of concrete and lots of glass, with copper trim, and with each floor cantilevered off a central core.   This is Wright’s only skyscraper, originally designed in 1929 for New York, but finally built in 1952, standing alone on the rolling prairie.  Wright, with his usual genius, called it “a tree escaped the (skyscraper) forest.”  The great thing is that Price Tower is a hotel, one of the few Wright buildings you can actually stay in.  My wife and I stayed there once.  It was beautiful inside as well, very 1950ish, with pastel colors, and rooms built on a diamond module, everything angular inside, and steel framed windows which open outward.  Our room was chartreuse, and the furniture pine.  On that night, It was stormy outside, and there was the possibility of tornadoes.   High winds whistled around the tower, and rolling thunder passed over us that night, growling and rumbling, low, close above.  It is my favorite hotel anywhere.  In addition to Price Tower, there is a Clifford May ranch house in Bartlesville, built for the Phillips family, plus eight or nine Bruce Goff houses, and a civic center designed by Wright’s son-in-law Wesley Peters, which resembles Wright’s Grady Gammage Auditorium in Phoenix.  There are also a number of beautiful WPA style masonry buildings built in the 1930s.

The Philbrook Museum

From Bartlesville, it is an easy jump to Tulsa, where, in one day, I visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1929 concrete and glass home for his cousin, s modernist masterpiece named “Westhope,” drive by the Art Deco Boston Street United Methodist Church, and end up at the Philbrook Museum of Art, located on Waite and Genevieve Phillips’ estate with Italianate mansion and 70 acres of gardens.  Waite was the younger brother of Franklin Phillips, and he and his wife collected only the finest works of art from a wide range of interests: Roman, Egyptian, Italian Renaissance, Impressionist, 19th Century French, African, native American, etc.  Walking through the quiet Italianate mansion is like walking though a Tuscan villa, with views  from the windows of Renaissance pools, trellises, and statuary on the grounds.  As I left, I tell the curator that this is one of the finest collections I have ever been to.  I am not being generous.  It joins the Freer, Chicago Art Institute, and Seattle Art Museum, among my favorite galleries anywhere.

Among my favorite works at the Philbrook are first, Raoul Dufy’s “View of Nice” (1927), with its broad expanse of light blue and aquamarine water, the Cote d’Azure, covering the canvas, and coral-and white coastal town crammed at the edge of the bay, on the right edge of the canvas.  Two palm trees stand up in front in a painting which is all curves.  This painting, which joins my “very favorites list,” I read, is from Duffy’s late period, when one color would dominate the surface in a single area.  It reminds me of the Duffy at the Fred Jones, with a curving bay, but in that case, a bit more variety, not all water.  Another favorite at the Philbrook is John Singleton Copley’s “Portrait of a Lady,” 1771,  with such great clarity of the lit face, the oil on canvas so clear and pure.  Then I come upon another painting to go on my top list:  a spectacular Corot, “Pleasures of the Evening,” a large canvas, almost a  center piece for the Museum, it is pre-impressionistic, like Millet, displaying a sunset in the country.  A rather dark canvas, in browns, the description says it is from Corot’s late, gauzy, period, evoking mood more than subject.  It is very elegant and moving, like Millet’s gleaners and harvesters in the evening.   Next in order cames four beautiful still lifes: George Braque’s painting of black flowers in a black pot; Julian Alden Weir’s roses in crystal, reminding me again of the Fred Jones Weir still life; William Hannett’s “Still Life and Music Items” 1885, very austere and New England; and Picasso’s “Less Pommes,” blue potatoes, great quality.   Other favorites this day include Andrew Wyeth’s charcoal colored painting of three large millstones on a New England farm; Vuillard’s “post-impressionistic “Madame des Jardins-Fontaine, of the lady in her sitting room, done in browns rather than the usual Vuillard maroons and dark blues, a touch of his Japanese influence, without use of kimonos; and Childe Hassam’s “The Surf,” in blues with broad brush strokes, of the tide coming in.  There is a nice collection of Taos painters: Nicoli Fechin’s “Albedia,” between realistic and expressionistic, of a native American woman wearing a white robe made up of white squares; Robert Henri’s “Mary Patton” (1927) in reds, simplified but with the sitters’ character coming through, Leon Gaspard’s “1918 Taos,” with adobe shapes and colors dominating, and others by Bert Phillips, Ken Miller Adams, and Oscar Berninghaus, the latter of a native American couple in a Northern New Mexico village.

The Philbrook has the best collection I’ve seen of Pueblo indian jewelry, especially the Santo Domingo and Zia silver, turquoise, and coral; a wonderful Egyptian bas relief of the god, Amun Ra, on white slate; a beautiful wood and enamel Egyptian middle dynasty falcon; and African works from the best artistic groups in Africa, including masks and musical instruments. These include the Dogon (Mali)  carved wood “Chirousos,” or antelopes, with horns sweeping  back over the body, a triangular arrangement; a  rather small Guro (Ivory Coast) elephant mask with white ivory tusks; a Sinufo (Mali) “Bird Standard”  consisting of two black birds, like crows, with wings extended and connected at the tips; a white Dogon elongated antelope mask; a white Gabon mask;  An Ashanti (Ghana) fertility goddess and large kettle shaped drum with carved cornice around the exterior  brim; a Dan (Liberia) finger harp with metal strips; and a Mali harp with one string.  The Philbrook also had for sale beautiful Robert Held vases , blue glass and hand painted flowers; a good collection of Italian Quatrocentro religious paintings, one by a Mategna Follower, of “Madonna and Child,” lighter colors than usual, with beautiful, clear female features, dated 1431; and wonderful sculptures by Giaocometti, a bronze statue entitled “Annette VI” ( 1962), in rough metal state, thin and elegant, and by Archipenko, “Standing Concave,” (1925) a symbolized standing female in bronze.

The Gilcrease Museum

The following day, I visit another wonderful art museum in Tulsa, “The Gilcrease,” dedicated to the American West.  The Museum is located on the western outskirts of town, a beautiful landscape.  I visited in the pouring rain.  The Museum is elegant, quiet and refined, the staff is very personable, and there is a wonderful attached restaurant overlooking the grounds.  I love the native American artifacts, especially the beaded clothing, such as a black beaded skirt of the Ka Poltawotamie, dated 1900, with blue patterns on it, the best individual piece I’ve seen anywhere, including the Denver Art Museum.  Also, a Cheyenne buckskin shirt, with blue strips of attached cloth running down the chest from over the shoulders, and a Cheyenne blue beaded large occasional bag, dated 1890.  Finally, there is a Brule Sioux beaded long dress, medium blue, dyed buckskin and a smaller Sioux beaded short dress, lighter blue, looking more like a man’s shirt.  In addition to crafts, the gallery has some fine native American artists (all new discoveries for me) like Virginia Stroud’s “Ledger of Indians Stealing Military Horses,” done on ledger paper with drawings of angular shaped horses; Walter Tutsi Wai Bigbee’s contemporary black and white photographs of native American life and lands, of tee-pees and animals as they were; and Cherokee Renaissance artist Jeanne Rorex Bridges’ water colors done on board of Choctaw stories from Mississippi and Florida before the “Trail of Tears,” one a haunting piece entitled “Journey to Freedom” showing moonlight nights with African Americans clad in white sheets crossing a river, escaping slavery in the night.

There are other excellent paintings and sculpture by renown artists.  Foremost are four George Catlin oil paintings, panoramas, of beautiful landscapes from a distance, first of buffalo herds on the salt meadows of the Upper Missouri river, then snowy white fields with buffalo, and a pale green landscape and prairie dog villages on rolling hills that look Oklahoma, and finally, all in tans, “Catching the Wild Horse,” in hill country.  These are simple paintings, almost with a touch of Rousseau or Thomas Hart Benton,  giving a real insight into prairie life.  For me, they are even better than his famous reddish portraits on board of native American chiefs hanging in the Renwick Gallery in D.C.  There is also a George de Forest Brush, “Crossing the Prairie,” 1888, showing a native American on horseback at the riverbank, a winter scene with snow covered sage, memorable.  The Gilcrease had a special exhibit on display when I visited called “The Road to Freedom,” depicting the U.S. march through history, and including a 19th Century embroidered waistcoat (vest), a St. Gaudens sculpture in bronze, “The Puritan,” with cape bellowing out in the wind behind the figure, and a painting of the “Battle of Buena Vista,” in the Mexican War, showing Zachary Taylor’s vastly outnumbered troops holding off a mass charge of Mexican Army regulars.  The caption said Taylor was lucky, the Mexican force ran out of ammunition, but that Taylor was cool in battle, telling a messenger only he would decide if things were going badly or not.  There was also a painting of Winfield Scott’s troops at the Mexican War Battle of Moliano del Rey.   The museum also has a number of Frederick Remington paintings on permanent display: “The Stampede” 1908, in blue, a night scene, of a man on horseback watching his cattle, illuminated by a yellow, jagged lighting flash; “The Escort” of a cavalry officer in dress uniform with his girl friend riding together near the fort; “The Bell Mare” of a white horse leading a file of men on a mountain trail; “Coming and Going of the Pony Express,” 1900, with the wonderful Remington yellows; and “Missing,” 1899, of a captive blue coated cavalry man being led between two files of native American fighters.   The Pony Express and Escort pieces were comparable to the Remingtons at the Carter Gallery in Ft. Worth, with large yellow scenes and light blue skies.   You can almost taste the desert dust in these.  With distance, I remember “The Escort” and “Missing” best, due perhaps to the subject matter.

I leave Oklahoma with a bit of regret.  I will probably make it back as far as Western Kansas tonight, maybe even jog over to Great Bend, to my 3rd Grade town.  Maybe I’ll capture some memories on the way home. (2009)

The High Line

I am riding Amtrak’s “Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago,” listening on my headphones to “Bob’s Song” from the “Assassination of Jesse James” movie soundtrack, its sharp high piano keys drowned out by heavy, melancholy violin chords, the bow scraping slowly over the strings, evoking frontier America.  It seems so appropriate to the setting.  Looking out the club car window, I can see mist and rain, and low clouds.  When the rain lets up, stretched before me is a palette of medium blue skies over gently rolling medium green fields.  No trees.  We are on the “High Line,” the northern area of Montana, near the Canadian border, isolated, paralleling the two laned Highway 2 with the occasional pick ups and sedans trudging along, their amber headlights on at 3 p.m..  It is June, but cool.   We are speeding through beautiful, empty country.

As we approach North Dakota, the land acquires more definition, has more mounds and ravines, more rivers with short trees lining them.  The clouds are whiter and more stretched out; the sky is lighter blue, thinner.  Soon we are passing through flooded landscape.  Later, we pass into Minnesota, which is more Mid-Western, with its Holstein dairy cattle, evergreens and clover, and elegant two lane asphalt roads and Volvo station wagons going off into the country over gently rolling lands.  It could be Sweden.  We pass occasional farm houses, white with enclosed porches, creating a certain aesthetic.  Minnesota, like Utah and Wisconsin, gives the impression of a state where everything has been done well, where all has been well planned and crafted.   There are yellow fields near Little Falls, and ahead in the distance, towards the northern horizon, I can see a silver slice of sky beneath dark, low clouds, giving the impression of a wide, shining river.  It is but a slice of low sky, illuminated, as night pours in and evening disappears.  Later, we are paralleling the Mississippi River.

I feel like a zephyr in the night.  The coach is dark, the lights off, and I lie with my head against the window, which is spotted by raindrops.  The window pane acts as a mirror, reflecting the interior of the car–gray leather seats, overhead reading lights, and blue floor lights–  all mixing with the outside world as I look though the window.  It is as if I am sitting outside the train on the gray seat, moving along fast, meeting oncoming cars on a frontage road next to the tracks.  There are distant red lights outside atop radio towers in the cobalt night, and we speed past dark patches, which are woods, broken by an occasional yellow house light emerging between the black patches.  There is the solid backdrop of dark trees and dark gray Minnesota night sky, then a few individual houses with single porch lights, then another black patch of trees, then, as if a miracle, a small town emerges, carved out of the forest with streets and cars going all directions, and empty parking lots with black asphalt surfaces wet from rain, lamp poles spaced evenly.  These are towns which have mainly gone to sleep, families snug in their unlit northern houses.  As we move along the tracks, the lights of the village fade behind, leaving a necklace of white dots spread through the night in the distance.  The horn blows a quick farewell.  The small town was a miracle, symbolizing life, saying you are not alone in the night.  People and nature can exist together as in the stone age.  All is as it should be.  Ahead, in the distance lie the high buildings of St. Paul, the elegant city of Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Cass Gilbert, Elmslie and Purcell, and Summit Avenue.

I am left with an appreciation of the north, Minnesota to Montana, beautiful lands, nostaligic under balmy skies with heavy, moist air, lush and green with cool blue evenings, wild birds, lakes, rivers, and nature, empty space, small farm towns, red brick buildings, blond girls straight out of Scott Fitzgerald standing at the railroad crossing in Fargo, men wearing light jackets on June evenings, white wood-framed houses with porches and gardens, plus the feeling of  being north.   The passengers on the train add to the aura:  Montana and Dakota small town people, sons and daughters of Scandinavian immigrants like my Uncle, strong people who survive in a tough area.

Chicago

I enjoy my first morning in Chicago, walking the downtown streets between Union Station and the Art Institute, and riding the “El,” the elevated subway, over the streets and between great early modernist buildings like Daniel Burnham’s steel framed Reliance Building and Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott and Auditorium buildings.  The second morning, I take the Red Line to the suburb of Oak Park, a combination of Prairie architecture, gilded age Victorians, and bungaloes.   I walk to the World War I memorial, a bronze statue of a “Doughboy” with Springfield rifle, long bayonet, leggings, and British tin saucer helmet.  The base includesa list of boys from Oak Park who fell in the Great War, reminding me that given the number years involved, World War I was costlier than World War II.  I walk on to the Hemingway Museum, formerly a Christian Science church, which is a bit run down but has great content.  The museum divides Hemingway’s life into phases, early Michigan, 1920s Paris, 1930s Key West, 1940s Cuba, 1950s Idaho, etc.  There are, glass panels hanging from the ceiling, with passages from his novels etched on them.  From Islands in the Stream aboard the Pilar: “he was happy again to be on the flying bridge…”  From For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan telling Maria she can’t stay with him to block the fascist patrol when he is gravely wounded: “Nay Rabbit, listen…”  From A Farewell to Arms, the hospital scene with Catherine in the Swiss hospital where she is in labor: “she can not die, but what if she does.”  And, the last paragraphs from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” where the white hunter with gangrene is in the plane going to Nairobi, and looks out at the peak of Kilimanjaro, and knows that is where he is really going.  He won’t make it to Nairobi.  There is also a wonderful film documentary of Hemingway’s life, with interviews of dos Passos, Hadley, Pauline, and even Agnes von Kurowski, his nurse/love in Milan in World War I.  You can’t get the film anywhere else.  It was grandfathered in over objections of Hemingway’s family.  The bookstore sells photos of Hem with his favorite cat, Boise, one of which now sits in my study.  Glass cases in the museum contain his original typed manuscripts, edited in pencil.  He didn’t need to do a lot of editing, despite what he said.

From the Hemingway Museum, I make my way afoot on my own Frank Lloyd Wright tour.  I pass street after street of beautiful Victorian Queen Annes with carved filagree, towers, bay windows, and wrap around porches.  I finally begin my Wright tour with Unity Temple, on the corner of Kenilworth and Lake, built in 1905.   Modernist and the first major building made of concrete, it stands clearly apart from the nearby Victorians.  What a statement it must have made in the era of horse and buggy, being geometric, cubist, and unpainted, a church no less.   Plain on the outside,  just a few carvings on the concrete walls for decoration.  Derided at the time as a “Mayan Handball Court,”  it, nonetheless, had great effect on the European modernists, Oud, Mies, LeCorbusier, and Gropius.  Inside, it is a typical Wright jewel, with Arts and Crafts designs, colors of nature, a coffered ceiling which lets light in, plus amber and green clerestory windows high up, everything geometrically connected, combining art and craft.

Leaving Unity Temple, I walk down Lake and take a right onto Forest Avenue, encountering the first Wright “Prairie House,” the 1901 Frank Thomas House, known as “the Harem,” low and horizontal, with hipped roof, Sullivanesque arched doorway, and smooth stucco finish.  Its green wooden trim and  banks of art glass windows run the length of the house and separate the levels.  I stand there on the street admiring it, knowing its significance and that it is still being lived in.  A couple of blocks further down Forest, and I take right turn on a cul de sac, Elizabeth Court, to see the 1904 Laura Gale House, a bit smaller and with squares rather than rectangles thrown together in a more complex pattern than with other Prairie Houses, and with cantilevered balconies extending out, the model for the larger “Fallingwater” to come years later.  Just beyond, on Forest, is Wright’s house and studio, and museum.  I backtrack two houses to my favorite Prairie house, the 1902 Heurtley House, made of alternating horizontal layers of contrasting bricks, which blend together at a distance, giving the house a rusty sandstone quality.  It, too, has the Sullivan arched brick door, which Wright would later abandon, and the usual bands of stained art glass windows, low pitched roofs, and concrete capings.  I have been inside, on a Wright Plus tour, but it is the outside which I love the most.  Next, I turn left onto Chicago Avenue for deep dish pizza, then back onto Kenilworth going past Hemingway’s boyhood home, where he lived from age 7 to 18, when he left home to become a reporter in Kansas City.  On East Avenue, I stop to view  the 1901 Fricke and 1903 William Martin houses, tan and white stucco, respectively, with wood trim, a combination of intersecting, sliding horizontal planes, with a few vertical planes thrown in, and with wooden mullioned banks of art glass windows.  I finish with the 1902 square patterned, brick, almost hidden, Cheney House.  I  then take a taxi to the neighboring suburb, River Forest, to see the prototype of the Prairie House, the 1893 William Winslow House, a beautiful golden brick jewel, with stone facade surrounding the front door and stone bands surrounding the windows, and with a brown terra cotta band with floral shapes for the entire second story above the brick, underneath a tall, overhanging, hipped roof.  How appropriate that Warren Winslow should have such a dream house, since he was Wright’s collaborator, constructing iron gratings and other artistic items designed for Wright.

The following day, I take the El downtown to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, taking my time, going slowly through the halls.  I particularly enjoy the artifacts from Chicago architecture of the late 1800s, the iron work screens and elevator doors with cast iron foliage patterns from Louis Sullivan’s buildings, plus Sullivan’s Arch preserved in the courtyard.  I enjoy seeing the craft of Wright’s assistants:  Marion Mahoney’s art glass windows, Ionelli’s angular sculptures of spirits, or “sprites,” reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” characters, Elmslie and Purcell’s wooden furniture, horizontal in design and of light polished oak.  I drift into the Asian Collection, and am overwhelmed by the Chinese works, the blue undercoated Ming porcelain, the thin jade burial ovals, and the Buddhist stone votive, of gray marble, twelve feet long, eight feet high, and two feet in width, with stories carved onto it in rows, Egyptian style, dated about 551 A.D., the highlight of the Art Institute for me.  There is the T.T. Tsoi Gallery of Ming dynasty silk screens, with their drawings of brightly colored birds, leaves, and people dressed in long purple robes.  Such screens were used outdoors by the gentry to block the wind, the exhibit says.

I make a few new personal discoveries.  These include Richard Berthe’s sculpture, particularly his glossy black bronze work entitled “The Boxer,” thin and elongated, dated 1942.  The second is George Hitchcock, who did a painting called “The Annunciation,” 1887, of a girl in a field of lillies.  It had a pre-Raphaelite quality, even with a thin halo above the girl’s head.  He also did a painting of a Dutch girl on a canal, with cream and cheese pots balanced over her shoulders.  He was one of those American artists who benefitted from post Civil War prosperity and traveled for inspiration, living most of his life in Amsterdam.   The classical Dutch period (1600-50) painter, Jan van Goyen, was another discovery for me.  He did a beautiful seascape, “Fishing Boats off an Estuary” with low horizon, monochromatic palette showing smoke, a tan sail, birds, and sky and sea almost blurred in their grayness.  Saw a Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who I had encountered before, “Lady in Green and Gray,” 1911, again monochromatic.

Among my favorites in the Museum were Gustave Caillebote’s “Paris in the Rain,” 1877, the centerpiece of the Impressionist gallery, and Rembrandt’s “Man with a Golden Chain,” 1631, the finest Rembrandt I have seen anywhere, with his craggy partially illuminated face, black gown, gray neck armor and gold necklace, and dignified background going from light to dark gray.  In the same area was a Rembrandt School painting of a young Dutch country girl with brown dress and red necklace standing behind an open half door.  The inscription says of the painting: “otherwise the same as Rembrandt, but lacks the grandeur.” That is how they determined it was not done by Rembrandt, but one of his Leiden students.  Next in my order of favorites was Alfred Sisley’s “View of the Seine,” with sand hills in the background and light blue river; Renoir’s “Two Sisters,” with the same sisters, one a child, in Manet’s “Gare St. Lazare,” (with puppy) that I have always loved; Monet’s “Women on the Seine,” with Camille and her baby in a basinette, her in broad striped blue and white dress and with buildings across the river reflected on the surface; Berthe Morrisot’s “Woman at her Toilette,” seated in front of a mirror, applying makeup, her back to us, all in white; Winslow Homer’s “Peach Blossoms; Whistler’s large serene portrait of his friend, Arthur Jerome Eddy, in grays and his “Nocturne in Blue and Gold,” with the shapes of ships barely visible in he mist of the Southampton Canal, clouds and smoke mixed, and a small gold disc of a hazy moon; John Singer Sergeant’s impressionistic portraits in white, in the tropics, informal setings, with light and shadows, one of Charles Deering, 1917.  There are good Georgia O’Keefe’s, Abiquiu sand hills before green mesas, bold greens; and Daniel Chester French’s small, but wonderful statue of Abraham Lincoln, standing and thinking with head down.

For the trip back home, I rent a car, driving west to Delevan, Wisconsin, a midwestern version of a New England small town.  From there I make it to Owatonna, Minnesota, where I visit Louis Sullivan’s Farmers and Merchants Bank, 1908, beautiful interior with terra cotta murals, cast iron vegetation decoration, sky lights above, and a large green art glass windows all around, high up, casting a green glow out onto the street at night.  From the street, the bank is a palette of green glass, terra cota, burgundy brick, and bronze trim.

On the freeway, I listen to an audio tape of “Anna Karenina,” as I enjoy the flat landscape.  A red sky dusk is replaced by a full moon peeking through an overcast night.  I love driving the interstate at night.  White headlights, with orange lights above them, outline the silhouettes of 16 wheelers coming from the opposite direction.  Green and white road signs pop up at intervals, on overpasses.  There are occasional lights off to the sides in the distance.  Radio towers, red lit. Even in the dark and overcast, you can see a glimmer of light to the south, a light gray haze.  Perhaps Iowa is not overcast.  As I drive into South Dakota night, I switch to the 1960s music station.  Each song brings back memories of places and time.  Bobby Vinton reminds me of El Paso in the early 1960s, the Dave Clark Five of Ft. Ord in California, the Righteous Brothers of Roswell High School.  The night reception is crystal clear, like KOMA of my college years, driving nights like this between Lubbock and Roswell.

The next day I am between Sioux Falls and Rapid City, on I-90.  I pull over atop an overpass on the interstate, and turn off the car engine to enjoy the view.  The wind is whipping the car.  You can hear it pounding against the side.  I am watching billowy pipelines of clouds in rows, moving fast, in formation, to the southeast.  This is wild country, sparsely populated.  A red Dodge pickup passes me up on the overpass.  Other pick ups with trailers and 16 wheelers are running on the interstate below, working trucks, but new.  You hear the tires first.  The gray clouds above are now turning lavender gray, and I am reminded what a beautiful orb the Earth is.  As I pull out, the sun is shining through the clouds, the wind is blowing through the grasses, the trucks are rumbling below, the wind is rushing, and high above is a blue sky, above the layers of clouds.

As I pass through South Dakota Badlands, there are beautiful black mounds all around, like Rwandan coffee hills, often a darker greenish-khaki color like Indian Army uniforms. Ahead, in Wyoming, new land is emerging, with fewer clouds, more mesas, shorter grass, and silver-domed mountains in the background.  Fourteen miles south of Sheridan, Wyoming, where my maternal grandparents were married in 1919,I can see teal-colored pine forests running to the West, towards Montana.  The land is more undulating and the hills more conical, like foothills, as I head north towards Custer Country, the Little Big Horn, and Billings.  The evening sun creates pink skies under a light blue dome.  At a small farm, painted horses are running to feed in their corrals.  The other horses in the corral turn their backs to a cold wind that has come up.  The highway is distinctive Wyoming, red clay, like French Open tennis courts.  Ahead, a gray cloud covers the sky like a large blanket, but off to the west, the sky is blue.  I realize I have been under a canopy of big sky all day, through South Dakota and Wyoming, desolate, a lone traveler on the sphere from Chicago to Sheridan, crossing the northern plains for two great days.   It is dark as I cross the Montana boundary.  I look forward to the drive: Billings and great trout and river country, passing Big Timber, Livingston, Bozeman, all magical, with roads leading south to Red Lodge, the Beartooth and Absoroka Mountains,  and Paradise Valley, also magical.

I am listening to the audio tape of Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy understands human emotions so well.  His description of Anna when she is first introduced, meeting Vronsky on the train at the provincial station stop is masterly, her warmth coming from her face, her nature overcoming her reserve, her ability to resolve the broken marriage of her brother, knowing what to say, her inner thoughts right on the mark.  And, Tolstoy’s animals are great.  His Laska, Levin’s faithful dog in Karenina, is a joy, lying down with his head on Stephan’s shoe when he visits getting his gums rearranged around his teeth, then settling in and falling asleep.   When setting out bird hunting, pulling everything together, Laska was so excited that he ran around licking everyone, even the guns.  Levin and Stephan take a pause after shooting and talk, but Laska looks up at the sky and perks his ears, as if to reproach them for not paying attention to the hunt. And there is Fru Fru, Vronsky’s gray mare, who ran the steeple chase.  You feel the nervousness of the horse, flaring her nostrils and poking her lead foot on the straw, and the “blood” which is important in breeding and racing,  Tolstoy has a total understanding of horses, describing the way Fru Fru tries to get up after breaking her back, falling  back and burying her nose in the ground and looking knowingly at Vronsky with her eyes.  She tried to rise, but could get only her two front legs up.  Anna Karenina is interesting for its romance and its Nineteenth Century Russian history lesson, showing Russian peasantry becoming more disgruntled.  Levin in a 19th Century liberal, and dislikes “speculators,” who are not merchants.  There are other lessons from Tolstoy.   Kitty, the youngest daughter, jilted by Vronsky, realizes while recuperating in Germany that it is better to think only of others, not of one’s self, to devote yourself to helping others.  And Anna offers some insights, too, telling her brother that “it is never too late to mend, an English saying.”  Things can, she says, usually be reversed for the better.   These are good lessons for anyone driving along life’s highway.   I am thinking of home and the macaroon cookies at the Wheat Bakery near Three Forks on the way. (2011)

On the way down, I listen to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Abraham Lincoln, Band of Rivals, and am impressed with several things.  First, Lincoln was ware of his emotional side, and therefore would calm himself down for a  half hour of so if he were agitated by someone or something, before reacting.  He knew his own nature and compensated for it.  Second, Lincoln would compose by first jotting down his ideas in sketch form, just sketching a few notes in broad terms, then come back and flesh it out.  He would get the ideas down first, like he did on the Gettysburg Address, then add the ornament.  His main point, which he got down, was that the war and battle were really not about keeping the union together or abolishing slavery, but broader, whether popular government, of the people, can survive.  Can people govern themselves, can such a state survive.  The northern soldiers would end up fighting to preserve a noble experiment, whether they knew it or not.  That is why he was generous at the end, able to forget the 400,000 Union dead, to preserve the union and an even greater idea which started with Locke and The Enlightenment.  He had to reestablish a popular government as it had been before the south started leaving the union, to restore it, not to create a confederation or monarchy.

I wake up in Santa Barbara Wednesday morning, lying in bed, thinking about Art Nouveau, of floral patterns and leaded glass, images which came to me from the Art Nouveau coffee table book I purchased after I arrived in town the day before, at the Lost Horizon used bookstore on Anacapa Street.  The book showed me the connection between Art Nouveau, a decorative style, and modern architecture, the connection being that Art Nouveau had an architectural variant, in Paris, Glasgow, Chicago, and Vienna, which was not curvilinear and florid, but geometric, using smooth rectilinear planes and rectilinear representations of nature for ornament.  This geometric school led to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Otto Wagner, Joseph Hoffmann, and Adolph Loos, forerunners to Bauhaus, LeCorbusier, and Mies.

I get around, and start my ritual, driving up Shoreline Drive to Cliff Drive, passing Arroyo Burro beach and Hedry’s Boathouse, then going north and uphill along the coast towards Hope Ranch.   I park at the pull off on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, always empty for some reason, and look out at the wide expanse of Pacific.   There is haze over the tops of the Channel Islands in the distance.  The sky above is medium blue, not light blue, with occasional vapor trails visible from Vandenberg Air Force Base.  There are no clouds.  The ocean below is also medium blue, shaded in places where there are shoals or deeper water.  The waves are visible and rippling, the ocean surface undulating, but without whitecaps.  You have just a wavy surface.

After a while of sitting there with my car door open to the ocean, I drive back, down to Shoreline Drive, a street lined on one side by a park which runs along the cliffs, with picnic tables and benches overlooking the ocean, and on the other side by pastel colored 1950 and 60s ranch style and bungalow homes.  Shoreline Park has a walking path, a windy sidewalk, running through it, and picnic tables.  Seagulls share the park with families, with kids and dogs.  I sit on one of the picnic tables, looking at the ocean down below the craggy coastline, the white foam of the leading edges of waves coming ashore.  The water seems a bit darker blue here, except for a few ribbons of lighter blue water streaking out to sea, like channels in the ocean. The tall palm trees lining the park cast long shadows.  The wind is blowing their fronds outward, towards the sea.  It is not the lighter blue, turquoise sea of San Diego.  My eye follows the coastline towards the east and south, jutting out at East Beach, then curving south, paralleling the the mountains of the Santa Ynez range, down to the San Gabriels, Ventura and Los Angeles.  The  mountains are granite and blue, and tan where there are barren spots.  You can see gullies on the sides, and ravines, and occasional barren patches where there is no foliage, where there have been landslides.

As I sit there, people walking together pass by on the sidewalk.  Two young Hispanic men with backpacks are riding bicycles and talking as they pedal. They are speaking Spanish.  A hippie woman in her 60s wearing Tibetan clothes walks by with her blue healer dog behind her obediently.   He seems old and loyal, not noticing anyone but her.  She is talking on her cell phone to someone about her daughter who won’t listen to her advice about something or other, and about her boss, who told her that if she leaves the office, she needn’t come back.  Several tall and thin young women, looking affluent, from the neighborhood, jog by individually.  A couple are wearing I pods.  Two women walk by, one the mother in her 80s, and the other a daughter in her 60s, both wearing straw hats.  The daughter is supporting the mother.  Two college age guys are playing a guitar, sitting on the grass across the park.  An older man wearing a golf jacket a size too small and a straw fedora hat, is wandering along the wire fence at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the shoreline.  He is probably in his 80s.  He walks slowly and carefully and is stooped.  A young couple push a baby stroller together, her wearing capri pants and her pony tail sticking out the back of her baseball hat.  A young fellow on a cell phone is talking, explaining to someone that “Cleveland was playing Boston.” Another baseball fan, I think to myself, a member of my fraternity.  My White Sox hat sits on my car dashboard in the parking lot.   Several elderly couples walk by slowly, not taking much.  The walkers also have a variety of dogs, mainly large dogs like labradors and retrievers, but also a chow, a collie shepherd mix, and a dauchhound.  Some of the women wear sweaters tied around their waists.

I am looking out at the Channel Islands, sipping my Kona blend coffee which I got at the shopping center nearby, at ‘A Good Cup.”   Usually, I purchase a slice of their spinach quiche as well.   I should walk the path up the coast a ways for exercise, as my friend Herb in Helena recommends.  He knows this area.  He is right, quoting Dr.  Nuland, who says it all adds up, like points, adding longevity and a healthier older life, if you avoid smoking, eat properly, diet, and exercise thirty minutes a day.

An overweight labrador retriever, white colored, wagging his tail, follows with its master, a Hispanic woman in her 50s, and two other non-Hispanic women. They talk about skiing, “cross country I can do, not that down hill.”   That is all I catch.  Two women pushing baby strollers pass.  A young man in his 30s,  dressed like a Yuppie, like me, is a bit off the path, on the grass, talking on his cell phone, walking to the area near the wire fence.  It is lunch time.  Two women pass talking about pizza. The conversations are generally about domestic things, diets, jobs, kid problems, favorite breakfasts of their kids.  People passing by are active and seem younger, jogging and dressing sportily and tanned and driving stylish vehicles.  They smile a lot.

A Piper Cub drones overhead, flying low and slow and following the shore.  The sky is, as always,  cloudless.  A friendly middle aged Hispanic woman walks by, and says hello to me, “you need a sun visor,” she says, laughing.   She is jolly.  That is the first person I have had any personal contact with, outside the hotel manager, Anton, since I arrived.  You can go for days, and only have human contact in ordering meals at restaurants and paying for books at bookstore cash registers.  The guy on the cell phone across the grass is saying “I’ll be pissed, I’ll be pissed.”   Another woman walks by, saying something about a child with a problem at school, counseling her daughter or a friend, “they must have a resource person there.”  Women, I notice, are getting support from other women.  Two women in their late 50s walk by, saying something about the sister’s grandchildren, a boy and girl, then fade into the distance.  Behind me, on the street, a large dump truck is passing, changing gears, drowning out the drone of cars.  The truck motor is a loud grumble.

I return to the Pacific Crest Inn on East Beach.   An Irish-Japanese couple runs the motel, and the Bulgarian, Anton, helps out on the desk.  They all play fetch with the black lab, “Shadow,” a bit aging and stiff and gray at the mouth, but real sweet, as he runs for the yellow tennis ball.   He doesn’t always bring it back to  the person who throws it.   He may choose a girl by the pool.  I sit on the balcony outside, with my room door open next to me.  There is a palm tree that gives me some shade.  I am reading James Salter and searching different authors for a style or voice.  I am trying Hemingway, Didion, Babel, Fitzgerald, Anne Morrow Lindberg, and St. Exupery.  These seem most likely to mesh with me.  They are writers I admire.  I must also reread Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin since they are memoirs.  I must find a theme to write about and a style of my own.

Later, that  afternoon, I walk a block to the Ocean, following the park and bicycle path which leads from the Cabrillo Bath House to Stearns Wharf.  Along the way were the usual individuals and couples walking the path, skating, or bicycling.  One young girl is learning to ride a bike that has training wheels and wire saddle bags on the back to carry things.  As I walk past, I hear the father say “trash cans,” joking about the saddle bags, and the girl reply, laughing, “Oh, Dad, they’re not trash cans.”  You can hear the steady drone of traffic on US 101, about a mile away during the afternoon rush hour.  There are homeless men and women camped near the public restrooms.

The sky is turning pink later, in the evening.  The sea is pink on the surface as a result, and also placid. The last vestige of light is reflecting from amber window panes of houses on the hillsides.  The mountains are lavender and purple.  It is only 5:30 in the afternoon.  By 6:15, the sun is down.  On the dark hillsides inland, now you can see scattered lights of individual houses. The ocean is dark purple and you can barely make out the sailboats bobbing in the bay, one white light coming from each.  A water taxi with a sold red light is moving out there between the boats.  Further out are the oil derricks on platforms, lit up with orange, white, and red lights, and beyond are the Channel Islands, no longer visible on this dark, almost moonless night.  Traffic rolls along Cabrillo Boulevard which runs along the water front.  Looking straight up, you can see that the sky is indigo, but slightly illuminated by city lights, creating a lighter indigo layer over the populated area.  Higher up, are the stars, bright and white, above the darker indigo.  Constellations are visible.

I walk back to my motel, located on the side street, and sit on the balcony looking towards the Ocean a block away.  The side streets are dark, but you can still make out the palms that line them.  The area is one of apartments and small hotels whose white outside lights illuminate stucco walls.  Cars occasionally come down the street, their headlights breaking the night, their tail lights illuminating things red as they brake or back up.  The sound of traffic on 101 is more apparent, since the night closes out other sounds.  You can hear the distant rumble of a motorcycle on Highway 101. There is the passing of the Amtrak “Coast Starlight” train, running from Seattle to San Diego, at first mild, then a blasting air horn, then the rumble of wheels on the track with a bit of metallic jangle thrown in, then gone, and the distant car noise again faintly apparent but not bothersome.

The next day, I visit the Santa Barbara Museum of Fine Arts. There are wonderful Roman sculptures in the gallery, originals, and a few Greek and Etruscan statues. The Etruscan are interesting, their bronze horses are more stylized than the Roman, not as realistic.  It must have been a beautiful culture.  I am most impressed by the British Impressionist Alfred Sisley’s painting of the Seine in the countryside.  The brush strokes are of medium size, a bit larger than Monet’s whose Westminster Cathedral paintings are adjacent to the Sisley.   The Sisley greens, medium, like sun bleached grass, are soft, as are his blues, better than the Monet and Renoir colors, I think.   The Silver Medal goes to Frederick Remington’s painting, “Battle for a Waterhole,” with two cavalry troopers fending off Indians in the distance, their horses killed, by themselves, as barricades to hide behind.  The painting is mainly grays and tans.  It is astounding.  I also like the Gauguin, “View of a Castle,” a street scene, women wearing white Breton hats and collars over dark blue dresses, and gray smoke, almost surreal in the swirls of the winding street and smoke.  Berthe Morisot’s “View from the Trocadero” has beautiful royal blues.  I am impressed by the Cycladic stone ware, almost translucent; the Chinese silks used in the Manchu dynasty dresses for women; the tortoise shell and amber straight hairpins for women; the Chinese stone ware, black and dark brown; the Han and Tang Dynasty reddish horse heads, square; the Egyptian relief, on white stone, of Ramses II’s son; the wonderful Chagall painting of a young girl fleeing, with her long thick brown hair flowing behind her, and a small girl in the hair, also fleeing.   There was also a Rodin, a Matisse (green and orange chalks), a Kandinsky, a Van Gogh, a Saint-Gaudens, a Roman bust of Michelangelo and also of Alexander the Great.  I loved the carved Ibex, the good of education and mathematics, in bronze and wood.

Go to lunch on State Street at the Zia Cafe, not far from Habit Hamburgers.  The cafe is run by a woman from New Mexico, and the food is distinctly northern New Mexican, blue corn tortillas and red and green sauces. The huevos rancheros have pinto beans and pasole, hominy, on the side.  Not as good as the “heuvos” at Tia Sophia in Santa Fe, Flying Star in Albuquerque, Garcia’s in Albuquerque, Capitol Cafe in Roswell, Jalisco in Silver City, or the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque.  But, good.

After a nap and reading back at the room, I go to my favorite eatery, Shoreline Restaurant near the harbor for dinner.  It doesn’t look like much, a white stucco drive-in on the beach, with attached dining room that is a bit open air, with clear plexiglass walls looking out on the sea, wooden plank floors, and a canvass roof tied down with ropes connected to post and beams.  The slight wind comes through the place.  The tables and chairs are plastic lawn furniture.  The color motif is aquamarine and white, the pillars being white and the wood trim green.   I am drinking a Stella Artois beer and having grilled Ahi Tuna steak, medium rare, with salad and sticky rice, and a slice of mango for the tuna.  I notice that people near the window are standing up, staring and craning their necks to see the shore outside.  There is a dolphin swimming about forty yards offshore, rising his back as he comes up for an instant, before diving back down.   Others in the restaurant are also standing up and going to the window.  A friend from the animal planet.  A benevolent feeling comes with him.  It is getting darker, the light is fading into night, and the water surface is the most beautiful I have seen.  It is iridescent, and set against the pinkish sky and the purple mountains that are the Channel Islands, in the distance.

The water is a silvery blue, but darker, and the lights of the cafe are on, reflecting off the plexiglass, and the overall atmosphere inside the beach front cafe is French, or so  it seems to me.  I find my self thinking about a trip I made several years ago to the American battlefields of France in World War I.  I remember clearly the Gar du Nord train station in Paris, eating a Croque Monsieur at a metal table on the concourse, then riding for a bit over one hour, arriving at Chateau Thierry.   It was Sunday and the train station was totally empty.  There were schedules posted on a kiosk outside on the platform, but no taxis.  I walked from the station into the small village and came to an Inn where men were sitting and drinking in the bar.  I was thinking of Doughboys in their brown uniforms with Sam Browne belts or suspenders, and leggings, and saucer helmets, at the Argonne Forest, St. Michel, and the Marne, the songs like “Mademoiselle from Armiterres.”   The locals in the bar called a taxi driver, who was at home on his day off, but he came and drove me around the battlefield monuments and cemeteries.   At the American cemetery, I picked up large chestnut leaves lying on the graves and gardens, and put them between the pages of a book I carried.  I will still have them twenty years later, transferred to a large photo book on Africa, preserved, stiff and delicate.  I visited a nearby site, where Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Quentin, an aviator, was shot down and crashed to his death in 1918.  The German cemetery down the road from the American cemetery was surrounded by a wrought iron black fence and the markers were not white crosses, like that of the Americans, but black short Iron Crosses, Teutonic Looking.  It seemed a bit unfair, that these dead were not really honored properly.

Now, my mind switches back to the present, uncertain why France had interjected itself into the cafe.  Maybe the sound of a bird, or the sight earlier that day of a British Roundel on a local pub in Santa Barbara.  You never know what sound or word or noise or feeling can bring up old memories clearly.   Perhaps it was the casualness of the Shoreline Restaurant that suddenly reminded me of France.  Families dining together, the fathers and mothers and well behaved, quiet children eating and enjoying the meal together, an active meal, like you see in the small French towns, even in Paris.  Perhaps it is the young waitresses, courteous and attentive, serious about the family business.  Part of it could be the lighting and the colors, like the rich, but soft, evening blues, as in a Paris quartz bar near the Opera that I remember, like Hemingway wrote about in “ A Good Cafe on the Place St. Michel,” in A Moveable Feast.  The sky and sea are now both medium gray blue, blending together, the sky only slightly lighter, with a bit of green thrown in.  The blending makes me think that earth, air, and sea, are all just differences in specific gravity, different densities of matter.  Perhaps the smell of the Shoreline is French.  Maybe it is the children’s tiny voices, the easy conversation with the children, genteel, and the father spooning out food to the children’s plates.  The cropped bangs of the small boys, the Belgian beer, the particular blues of the Cote d’Azure like night, the mountainous shore encircling the bay, the lighting, the colors inside the restaurant with a touch of night inside despite the light bulbs.

I remember more details of the Chateau Thierry stopover and smile to myself.  It was an overnight stopover, coming back to Washington after being in East Africa on business.  I was supposed to get back to Washington and quickly write up the report on my trip.  I had done my Paris consultations, but instead of hurrying back to Washington on the afternoon flight, I had called in to plead illness and say I would be a couple days late getting back.  There was an unwritten rule in the State Department that you not spend more than a day layover in Europe, despite the temptations.  No one would believe I was really sick, in Paris.  There would be raised eyebrows and knowing looks, but what could they say.

I think I realized then, that my heart was in the arts rather than diplomacy and foreign policy.  I would spend time at the Louvre, at Chateau Thierry, enjoying my hotel in Montmartre, walking the Tuilleries.  I would see the Monets at the Musee d’ Orsay.  I would save the Somme battlefields, the Boulevard des Cappucines and other Montparnasse hangouts of the Impressionists, as well as the Left Bank hangouts of the Expatriates for another trip.  Something to look forward to.  Now, I was working not to become an Ambassador, but to support my intellectual pursuits and travel, my more important non-work life.

At any rate, that was thirteen years ago, and it is a beautiful, sweater-weather, night in Santa Barbara, as I leave the Shoreline Restaurant and walk to my car, the crescent moon hanging low in the sky above, its visible white arc lying at the bottom, and the rest of the sphere a faint outline above it.  The evening sky, with a couple of stars peeking out, is illuminated somewhat by the sun setting far in the west, out to sea beyond the horizon no longer visible.  Japan is out there.  The hills across the street from the cafe, leading up to the city college, are becoming a dark silhouette, with the twilight sky as a backdrop.  This is a night to remember, one of those that suddenly comes back to you, clearly, years later, when thinking of Santa Barbara.  You may forget the museums and cafes, but the image of the silhouetted hills, and white stucco buildings, and twilight, periwinkle turning to indigo, remain.  i get into my car, and turn on the CD. It is Dave Brubeck’s soft jazz, “Take Five.”  The combination of clarinet, whisk drums, and soft piano keys from the middle of the register is almost Arabic in tone, or more Samba, a tune from 1960, the ideal era.

I get back to my room at the Pacific Crest, where I always stay.  The walls are cream colored plaster and the door frames and trims are white, with flowery orange colored nylon curtains.  The beamed ceiling slopes down to the windows.   It is like an attic room, except larger, and has plastic louvers which crank open for windows.  Next door, I can see down onto the porch of the neighboring bed and breakfast, and I can see down the street, Corona del Mar, lined with bungalow style houses and apartment buildings.  I hear pigeons cooing next door, and see three gray ones strutting back on forth on the rafters next door.  They are pacing purposefully.  Guarding their nest.  There is a nice warble in their throats.

On the next day, I wake to the sound of a vacuum hitting the wall next door.  I hear two Hispanic maids chattering as they make up the room, the occasional whirring sound of a vacuum, like a jet.   I can’t make out the words, only hear the la la la sound and fast mumbling Spanish language, almost lilting, with vowels at the ends.  A propeller plane drones over head, and is gone.  A door shuts in the distance.  The maids knock on my door, “No Service Today,” they repeat my phrase in a lilt and go one.  I hear an occasional train going by on the tracks nearby, going to San Diego or up the coast to San Francisco, this time I think south.  You can hear the tires on the concrete of Hwy.101, also nearby, and the always occasional motorcycle, the high winding Japanese ones, again the drone of a small prop plane.  Pilots call them piston planes.

I go to the Santa Barbara Zoo, a modest area of 55 acres which you are able to see entirely in one morning without difficulty.  I see some wonderful animals.  My lasting impressions are of the two leopards, an Amur Leopard and a Snow Leopard, in separate areas, both large cats and beautiful.  They are both larger than expected, the size of mountain lions, and with padded feet.  The snow leopard is white with soft brown spots and has a huge, thick tail.  The Amur Leopard has beautiful jade eyes and is eating grass he can find, like a house cat.  The ring tailed lemur watches me closely with his orange eyes, reminding me of Fiji, my Siamese cat, for some reason.  The male  and the female Lemurs are hugging each other.  It is great to be able to have real communication which I feel with the Lemur, eye to eye.  I also have contact with one of the the giraffes, which we are allowed to feed at 2:00.   At the sound of the dinner bell, they start walking to the feeding place where children (and me) pay a dollar to buy a biscuit and feed it to them with your palm.  I am lingering, and one of the giraffes pauses on the way, staring at me, as if to say, “get going, buy me a biscuit, see you there.”  I think he is a very intelligent animal.  But, the most spectacular animal is the white gibbon, who hangs from high branches, a hundred feet up, by one arm and lets out loud high-pitched “caw” s that bring spectators from all over the zoo.  He is doing effortless acrobatics, like a circus performer.  He is like a small person in his proportions, but furry, and is overall very human like in his behavior.

The other spectacular animals are the male lion, with his massive head and mane, but otherwise medium sized body.  The head is massive and square.  But, the paw he licks is something to behold.  It is huge and by weight alone could hold a person down.  The silverback lowland gorilla is massive and human in his behavior, rather shy, sitting alone in the shade below the viewing window, and averting his eyes whenever I look at him directly.  He appears benevolent.  He is, despite his shyness, curious about people.  The black-beaked swan with her whistle noise is rather personable.   I leave the zoo with a few concerns.   The silverback seems lonely to me.  The Amur and snow leopards are also alone, unlike the lemurs, lions, elephants, gibbons, etc.   Zoos, to me, are a bit sad.  As I leave, in my mind I bring up the image of Kokoshka’s “The Hunt,” with two Chinese hunters wearing conical hats and armed with spears chasing a beautiful deer, which is in mid-jump.  The humans have skeleton faces.  The humans clearly lack the elegance of the animals.  They are on a higher order.

I have coffee at The Habit hamburger stand, a sidewalk stand with wire metal chairs, on the main street, State Street.  Across the street are the typical boutiques, Urban Outfitters, Starbucks, a bicycle shop, mountain climbing store, and women’s boutique called “Gossip.”   Further down are the main stores, Nordstroms, Macys and Saks, in arcades.   An electric trolley goes by quietly.   Buildings across the street are all connected by a common cornice of red tile.   They are of the same motif, by ordinance, Spanish Colonial, of tan stucco, with wrought iron railings on balconies and arched porticos, “arcos” in Spanish.   The architecture is California in 1925.  The palms lining the street don’t hurt.  I am looking forward to evening, walking the beach, listening to the waves rolling softly ashore, going out on the pier and looking out at the stars and city lights on the mountainside.

I realize after a few days that it is not just the beach and ocean I am coming for, it is also the California culture, the Asian and Hispanic presence, the relaxing and healthy atmosphere, the tropical vegetation, the string of green hills which run along the coast, Highway One skirting the ocean, the cloudless blue skies and warm weather, and seagulls, and fresco colors, and good Mexican and sea food, and manicured gardens and immaculate, clean streets.  Everything, even the freeways, are done right, thought out in advance with an eye for the aesthetic.  There is the easy happiness of the people and the palms and lushness of orchards.  Wine country is just up the road.

But, after a few days, and missing my wife, I find myself back on I-15, my ribbon of asphalt running north, direct from Los Angeles to Helena, 1,200 miles, passing through Vegas and an In and Out Burger, and then through Southern Utah in the night, the big dipper hanging outside to the west in the dark night, bright and clear, then overnight in Salt Lake, and on to Pocatello, and Montana the next morning, into the beautiful snow topped lavender and purple mountain landscape.  I honk the horn at Monida Pass as I enter Montana.

I am listening to Grant’s Memoirs on tape,  a perfect bookend for the Civil War tape on Lincoln on the way down.   Grant said the Civil War, rebellion he called it, was perhaps punishment for having pursued an unjust war with Mexico, which we provoked.  He originally felt that war could have been avoided through diplomacy, to assuage Southern feelings and dampen emotions over the slavery issue.  He came to realize, however, that the adage that a “nation can not exist half slave and half free” had value to it.  America, without union and the abolition of slavery, would have remained weak and divided, more a loose federation without a real central core, like Mexico at the time, which became prey to Britain, France, and Spain after independence (Maximilian’s imposition).  Grant came to feel that the original contract, whereby the south would join the union against Britain if slavey was not made an issue, was naturally abrogated by the passage of time and by change.  The Union was no longer thirteen states.  The old contract was no longer realistic, with the midwest, Florida, Texas, etc. all added to the Union.  But, he agreed with Lincoln that it was important to put the war behind them after Appamatox and build for a future with the South included.  He had only two conditions for Lee’s surrender, lay down arms and an end to slavey.  Grant knew what had to be done.  He always though ahead.  He lost 40,000 killed and wounded between May and June, 1864 (Wilderness to Cold Harbor), but he had a system in place for automatic replacements.  He had the big picture in mind at all times.