White Mountains, New Hampshire, where I section-hiked in 2016. I’ll soon be returning.
He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.
Forrest Tucker
Where the hell did I stash those rolling papers?
Omoo
Last August 1 at Wind Gap, Pennsylvania my Appalachian Trail thru-hike was sabotaged after three months. Thrombophlebitis in my right leg was the culprit. (You can read or re-read about my trials and tribulations here.)
According to Dr. Kuhn at the Vein Center, there are still “old clots” (whatever that means) but nothing serious, and since my knotty calf veins are now just faint shadows, I certainly look prettier. What I didn’t expect was another, more serious health scare, and it happened only a month before my scheduled A.T. re-launch at the gap this coming May 1.
I won’t go into the details. It’s a long-term issue that I don’t think will affect my hike. However, things will be different, mainly diet. No more Snickers bars for sugar, packaged Idahoan potatoes for carbs, or McDonalds for fats. I’m not sure how I will eat healthy and still maintain a decent weight, but I’m going to try.
Here’s the good news:
With “only” 911.4 miles remaining, I’m not rushed. I have a whopping five months to reach Mt. Katahdin in Maine before bad weather hits, and assuming I maintain last year’s pace, I should get there in 65 days
The June/July temperatures should be more forgiving in New England
The smaller states will get scratched off much quicker, a great psychological boost
More towns in which to find a healthy meal…at least until Maine and its ominous 100-Mile Wilderness
I expect the first few days will be rough. I’m hitting maybe the rockiest section of the rockiest state on the entire Appalachian Trail, a section called Wolf Rocks. All those foot callouses I carefully and painstakingly developed last year are gone, so there will be blisters. Due to recently being sick, I haven’t been able to train like I wanted, so there will be soreness and fatigue.
I’m also testing out a new water container. It’s a two-liter bag made of thermoplastic polyurethane—looks like a colostomy bag—and it will hang on carabiners attached to my pack. It replaces last year’s bulky, hard-plastic Nalgene bottle that I had to secure with bungee cords. I also bought some gaiters to limit the amount of wet socks I’ll have to air-dry on my pack.
Northern Great Smoky Mountains
My tent reading material is another skinny, lightweight book: John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. (Did I just say mice?)
Again, biggest challenge will be food. Our daughter Holly is almost a vegan, so she’s helping me choose the healthiest breakfast bars and dinner fare. One evening repast will be green lentils and red quinoa…healthy, packable, short boiling time, boring flavor. My lunch fare won’t change: trusty peanut butter on tortillas!
As I did last year, I will try to update my blog, but no guarantees. Those who know me know I hate writing on cellphones, and I can only do it during sporadic town breaks, when I’m pressed for time with eating, buying groceries, doing laundry, phoning loved ones, and airing out wet gear.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate connecting with you good folks who have to deal with that crippled “other” society (the not-so-real world). So I’ll do my best to keep one toe on the grid.
Even if I don’t update longitudes, I plan to continue my evening diary dribblings, and once this damn thing is finally history I’ll send a PDF of my entire journal to anyone still willing to indulge in my narcissism.
Okay, Lonewolf (A.T. thru 1997, PCT thru 2001). Okay, Queequeg (Pequod, 1851). Ready for a road trip to Stroudsburg, PA? Flutie you noisy sonofabitch, Omoo is headed your way…with a large colostomy bag and a few less varicosed veins.
New England shelter journals may never be the same.
The last photo from last year’s hike. I was on a mushroom photo kick. And I was cursing the rocks.
This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
John F. Kennedy, during a 1962 Nobel Prize dinner
The title above is a biography by John B. Boles that I just finished. Normally I’d do a book review, but the subject himself is so fascinating I’d rather just riff on Jefferson than critique the book. Buckle your seat belts.
Suffice to say, Boles’s book is a good one-volume treatment of Jefferson. It’s easy to read and well-sourced. Fairly comprehensive. Maybe a bit too adulatory, but at least honest.
Before discussing Jefferson, I have to say I was somewhat surprised by what I learned about several other “Founders,” or sub-Founders. Although popular today because of that Broadway play, I had no idea that Federalist and Jefferson nemesis Alexander Hamilton was such an outright bastard. His poisonous lies and relentless invective make Trump look like a Cub Scout. (Okay, maybe not.)
I also had no idea that the man who killed Hamilton in a duel, Aaron Burr (Jefferson’s first-term vice-president), was such a self-centered, scheming treasonist.
And I especially didn’t know that Jefferson hated fellow Virginian Patrick Henry. Although a great orator (“Give me Liberty or give me Death!”), Henry evidently didn’t read books and wasn’t very smart. He actually proposed imposing a dictatorship when the American Revolution began going badly. For years, Jefferson ridiculed him mercilessly at the dinner table.
Aaron Burr (left) and Alexander Hamilton (right)
But back to the dinner topic at hand…there are some things most of us know, or should know, about Thomas Jefferson. He was the third American president and a Founding Father chosen to author the United StatesDeclaration of Independence, the iconic written diatribe against King George III detailing why American colonists chose to break from England to form their own country, and which was signed by 55 other congressional delegates from the 13 colonies.
More than any other Founder, Jefferson exalted the ideas of democracy and individual conscience. Along with fellow Democrat-Republican and protégé James Madison, he conceived the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and which separates religion from all levels of government. (Government-imposed religion was an absolute given in the Old Country.) He modeled it after the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he’d also authored three years earlier as Governor of that colony.
As for his own religion, although considering himself a Christian, Jefferson was a deist who felt the Christian faith had become corrupted by disciples after Jesus’s death. Jefferson was a leading light of the Age of Enlightenment, an admirer of philosophers John Locke and Thomas Paine (Common Sense, The Age of Reason). Throughout his life he was fascinated by science and adhered to reason and rationality over superstition. He considered Jesus the most moral philosopher the world has known, but did not believe in his divinity. He created his own Jefferson Bible by excising everything supernatural from the New Testament. (Printings of his bible are available at a bookstore near you.)
Jefferson lived at a plantation he called Monticello, which he carved out of a mountain outside Charlottesville, Virginia using slave labor. He developed it over a period of 40 years. (Monticello is pictured on the U.S. nickel, the flip side of Jefferson’s profile.) Here, he established a 1,000-foot-long terraced vegetable garden that grew 330 varieties of vegetables and 170 varieties of fruits. As a politician he championed the small farmer, was a pioneer of sustainable agriculture, and was one of the country’s great epicures.
As president, Jefferson doubled the size of America by overseeing the purchase of the western Louisiana territory from Napoleon Bonaparte of France. It cost the U.S. all of four cents an acre. He then organized a successful exploration of the unknown lands by his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, exponentially increasing America’s knowledge of Western geography, archaeology, flora, fauna, and Indian tribes.
Meriwether Lewis
After the Library of Congress was burnt by invading British during the War of 1812, Jefferson sold his personal collection of 6,487 volumes to restart the library. They replaced the collection that Jefferson had earlier recommended the library acquire.
Just before his death in 1826, Jefferson conceived, founded, was principal architect for, and chose the curriculum and faculty for one of America’s most respected public universities, the University of Virginia. He was “convinced that the people (white males) are the sole depositories of their own liberty, & that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree.” (I tried to gain entrance to UVA in 1977 but was rejected. In 2005 I visited Monticello, and revisited the campus while our daughter was touring colleges. Everyone at both places politely referred to him as “Mister Jefferson,” as if he was still alive.)
Along with designing the university, Jefferson also oversaw the layout for the nation’s new capitol grounds at Washington D.C., and his neoclassical architectural designs set the precedent for future U.S. federal structures.
Jefferson was probably the most intelligent and worldly of all the Founding Fathers. (Benjamin Franklin is up there, too.) Although ambitious, his patience, even-temperedness, humility, and knowledge were renowned amongst his political peers, including George Washington, who made him Secretary of State and often consulted him. Like so many in the 18th and 19th centuries, he experienced profound death and tragedy, losing his wife Martha at a young age, along with children and grandchildren.
Jefferson lived 83 years, dying the same day as his onetime rival but beloved friend, second President John Adams. It was 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote his own epitaph. It was simple and reflected his humble public persona, stipulating what he was most proud of: Author of the Declaration of Independence (and) of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia. Of his being president for two terms and his presidential accomplishments…nothing.
Monticello
As exceptional a human being as Jefferson was, his enlightenment was tempered by his place and time. Even during his lifetime rumors swirled of a slave concubine (in today’s parlance, “sex toy”) known as “Black Sal” or “Dusky Sally.”
For 200 years historians have grappled with whether slaveholder Jefferson fathered children with a quadroon “servant” named Sally Hemings. A DNA study in 1998 concluded there was a high probability he was the father of at least one of Hemings’s six children. However, that study also said Jefferson “can neither be definitely excluded nor solely implicated…”
Presently, most Jefferson scholars and historians, including the Thomas Jefferson Foundation—through combining the DNA findings with written evidence—conclude he did father children by her (not surprisingly, Hemings descendants do as well). Biographer Boles goes further to suggest their “relationship” was “founded on shared tenderness and love” and that “the sexual attraction between Jefferson and Hemings was likely mutual…”
I find Boles’s suggestion of romantic love between master and slave plausible, but unnerving, and it’s one of the few criticisms I have of his book [in addition to some qualified language such as “Jefferson rarely (sold slaves),” “he made an effort (not to separate mothers from their children),” he “(only sold his slaves) out of economic necessity,” and “Jefferson’s theoretical opposition to (whipping)”].
It was in Paris between 1787 and 1789 while Jefferson was American minister to France that their (probable) intimacies probably began. Hemings was a teenager who was acting as companion to Jefferson’s younger daughter, Maria. By several contemporary accounts, Hemings was extremely beautiful, with “very light skin; long, straight black hair.”
Slavery had been illegal in France since Louis X in 1315. Was Hemings technically free while on French soil despite being owned by an American? If so, did Jefferson think this mitigated a middle-aged widower like himself having sex with a young, uneducated, recent ex-slave? Did love blossom either before or after she agreed to return to the states with him? Can love even exist between a master and servant/slave, or is it always rape?
Soap opera aside, bottom line is Jefferson owned people. Any additional moral crimes stem from that original sin.
Sally Hemings was born in 1773. Her white father, John Wayles, was Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law. She died in 1835 and there are no photos or drawings of her. This is a detail from a Monticello “Farm Book,” displaying her four children: Harriet, Madison, Eston, and Beverley. Notably, all were named after friends or relatives of Jefferson (Madison after James Madison).
In his meager defense, Jefferson successfully banned American importation of Africans. And despite unenlightened views on racial equality/inequality, he opposed slavery throughout his life and, at least at the start of his political career, tried to abolish it through state and federal legislation. Of course, his efforts were fruitless, primarily due to violently intransigent southern politicians who, two generations later, would finally have their apocalypse. Of the roughly 200 slaves owned by Jefferson during his life, he freed only two. He freed five more in his will. Three more left Monticello with Jefferson’s consent. All except two were domestic help and part of the Hemings family.
As I expected, while Boles justifiably devotes extensive print to slavery and Jefferson’s immersion in it, his coverage of Jefferson’s American Indian policies and affairs, including their removal, is woefully inadequate. So I’ll offer a few paragraphs on that subject.
Jefferson the amateur anthropologist admired Indians and believed they were superior to blacks physically, intellectually, and culturally, and also that they might eventually become ingratiated into white agrarian society as equals. But even here there was a great hypocrisy. He stipulated to Meriwether Lewis that the Corps of Discovery restrain from any acts of hostility toward Indians they might encounter…but he also hungered for the land they inhabited.
In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, who was then the territorial governor of Indiana, President Jefferson outlined a devious policy of using government trading posts to drive Indians into debt so they would more easily “lop (the debts) off by a cession of lands.”
And when a patronizing Jefferson addressed a delegation of Shawnee and other Indian tribes in 1809, hoping to win them over from the British, he threatened that “the tribe which shall begin an unprovoked war against us, we will extirpate (exterminate) from the earth or drive to such a distance as they shall never again be able to strike us.”
Then, as now, enlightenment only goes so far.
Indian Head nickel and Jefferson nickel: opposing views of Liberty
Originally, I ended my post with the pithy statement above. Then I thought, who am I? Thomas Jefferson deserves better. After rereading the Introduction in Boles’s book, I landed on this excellent paragraph, which perfectly summarizes how I feel. Anyway…thanks for taking time to read all of this. Peace.
We should not expect (Jefferson) to have embraced the values of a cosmopolitan, progressive person of the twenty-first century. How could he have possibly done so? Instead, we should try to understand the constraints—legal, financial, personal, intellectual—under which he lived. To understand certainly does not mean to approve or even forgive; rather, it means to comprehend why Jefferson made the kinds of decisions he made and saw the world as he did. He was a gentle, well-educated, idealistic man who sought—by his lights—to do right. Yet at times he acted in ways we now find abhorrent. Appreciating how this can be so is the task of the Jefferson scholar, the student of history, and perhaps every American citizen.
The Wall Street Journal not only honored Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday (see my last post), but the same issue had an article entitled “Why Millennials Want Their Parents’ Vinyl Records.” The sub-title was “Sales of LPs soared during the pandemic as younger listeners discovered their nostalgic and sensory appeal.”
For years I’ve tried to get my millennial son to understand this. Maybe it’s finally kicking in.
On that note, when I was even younger than Nick is now, I made the discovery of music appreciation books, guides, and encyclopedias. They assisted me when, as a teenager, I began compiling my (now massive) record collection that I hope to one day bestow on Nick. They helped me peel back layers to reveal all sorts of juicy musical fruit under the outer skin.
Paul Gambaccini
Just recently I revisited an old book that I’d once pored over while wasting time in Walden Books at the local mall. It’s called Rock Critics’ Choice: The Top 200 Albums. It was compiled way back in 1978 during the Pleistocene Age, when the publication of rock music books began catching up with magazines like New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and Creem. The compiler was a venerable BBC presenter named Paul Gambaccini (an interesting man, in more ways than one).
Rock critics you say? Someone once called them frustrated rock musicians. Musician Lou Reed was more succinct. He called them “scum.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but as with everything, there are good ones and bad ones. In their defense, rock critics provide potential purchasers with insights into music that circumvent “record company advertising (and) the squeals of the loudest fans.” It’s nice to have a temperate and unbiased guide before one contributes one’s hard-earned cash to Artie Fufkin of Polymer Records.
Most rock fans, especially in the U.S., get their music from the radio or television. But deejays and “veejays” have always been at the mercy of their employer, or corporate wankers like Fufkin.
Rock critics cut through the hype (sometimes) and were helpful when I became a serious listener in the 1970s. Rock Critics’ Choice in particular introduced me to artists I might otherwise never have heard. The other book so beneficial to me over the years has been The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, compiled by Nick Logan and Bob Woffinden of New Musical Express.
(Last month, during one of my late-night vinyl appreciation sessions, I joyously re-listened to Edgar Broughton Band’s album Oora, which Illustrated Encyclopedia had led me to. Talk about a great unknown record.)
Anyway, back to Rock Critics’ Choice…compiler Gambaccini queried about 50 of his print and radio colleagues, asking them to list what they consider the ten greatest rock albums, in order of greatness. He defined “greatness” as whatever criteria the particular critic wanted to use. He permitted “Best Of” and “Greatest Hits” collections. (Not sure I’d allow that.) For fair and diverse representation, he consulted critics who were male, female, young, old, white, black, American, British, Canadian, French, Jamaican, and Eskimo.
He then tallied the results and assigned points to each album. (I assume an album in the first position got 10 points, and tenth position got one point.)
Unlike those ubiquitous Rolling Stone lists, quoted everywhere and which are heavy on mainstream rock and dripping with set-in-stone conceit, Gambaccini’s book is looser and more democratic. It permits diversity (both critic and music) and honors both rock establishment (i.e. classic rock) as well as cult artists.
I found his ultimate Top 200 list predictable in some ways, but surprising in others.
Predictably, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones dominated the top positions. Also predictably, older critics leaned toward early rock ‘n’ roll (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the like). There were a lot of soul records, ala Otis Redding, the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, etc. Some choices teetered over the boundaries of rock (Huey “Piano” Smith, B.B. King, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew).
The book also had some truly oddball choices. For example, a minor South African actress named Genevieve Waїte (note deliberate umlaut over the “i”) made one and only one album in 1975 called Romance Is On The Rise. It made two critics’ lists, clocking in overall at number 98. It’s actually more of a John Phillips (Mamas and Papas) album with his then-wife doing the singing. She sounds like a disco version of Cyndi Lauper trying to imitate Billie Holiday. I concluded Genevieve must have been a flavor of the moment.
Michael Nesmith, who got off to a dubious musical start with the Monkees, actually had talent. One critic, however—as his number one greatest album of all time—selected Nesmith’s solo country-rock effort And The Hits Just Keep On Comin‘. Though I’ve yet to hear it, this offbeat choice also raised my incredulous eyebrow.
Another critic chose as his list topper a collection by the R&B group The “5” Royales (note deliberate quotation marks around the numeral). I appreciate certain fifties music from a historical perspective, but this elicited more head scratching. My guess is that the Royales’ song “Dedicated to the One I Love” might have been playing in this particular critic’s Buick Roadmaster the first time he got laid.
One cheeky rebel without a cause listed a bootleg album, by Bob Dylan and the Band.
The book’s lone Canadian critic, for both his number one and number three picks, listed Supertramp albums. Yes, you heard right. Respectfully, sir, I have to take issue with your thinking.
Another critic, the late Robert Shelton, had no less than three Bob Dylan albums in his top ten. But considering Shelton virtually launched Dylan’s career in 1961 with his New York Times review of a performance at Gerdes Folk City—and considering it’s Bob Dylan, not Supertramp—I can forgive Shelton’s zeal.
Rock Critics’ Choice is an enjoyable little book—great bathroom reading—and like I said, when it came out in 1978 it prodded me to explore music I wouldn’t otherwise have explored. The book’s only negative is its vintage. Although punk bands like the Clash and Ramones are represented, it was published before new wave, alternative, indie, thrash, grunge, rap, hip-hop, and other assorted popular flavors of rock.
But if you’re a baby boomer like me whose era was the late fifties through the mid-seventies, this book provides pleasurable non-think entertainment, and spurs one to make one’s own list. My own top 10 “greatest” list had five albums that made the top 20 of Rock Critics’ Choice: Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan (ranked number 3 in RCC), Rubber Soul by The Beatles (number 5), Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys (number 12), The Velvet Underground And Nico by the Velvet Underground (number 14), and Forever Changes by Love (number 16).
My champion pick, The Velvet Underground And Nico, was listed by many of Gambaccini’s cohorts and made number 14, but only one picked it to top her list: New York critic Lisa Robinson. Lou Reed and I like her.
Of course, the term “greatest” is entirely subjective (excepting Muhammad Ali, who truly was The Greatest). But if you have a pre-1979 rock album or albums you consider deserving of this descriptor, and wish to share them here, leave a comment and I’ll see where they rank in Rock Critics’ Choice.
longitudes 
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