This week on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson visits with Pat Brodowski, formerly the head gardener at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Pat explains how she found her way to Monticello, what she learned about Thomas Jefferson from working every day in his extensive garden, and how she is occupying her time now as a retiree. Plus, Pat gives tips to our listeners about how to grow something in the next year.
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay Jenkinson discuss Jefferson's daughters. Thomas Jefferson was highly expectant of their behavior and let them know it through a series of letters. When he died in bankruptcy, his daughter Martha was left nearly penniless and had to deal with the aftermath of Jefferson's poor money management.
Clay Jenkinson speaks with David Swenson about the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore and her work with the Lakota in the Dakotas beginning in 1911. David has spent the last year working on The Densmore Repatriation Project, re-cataloging and restoring her wax cylinder recordings.
At Standing Rock in 1911, Frances Densmore met with dozens of tribal elders and recorded traditional songs on wax cylinder. Densmore documented this work in her book Teton Sioux Music which became a touchstone for learning about Lakota/Dakota culture. The Densmore Repatriation Project reintroduces the songs with new recordings made by contemporary Native singers.
The Densmore Project’s website: lakotasongs.com
The Densmore Project on YouTube
KX News: Re-introducing Lakota Songs
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay Jenkinson discuss King George III and his effect on the American Revolution. According to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan, the King was determined to "keep the rebels harassed, anxious, and poor, until the day when, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and disappointment were converted into penitence and remorse."
Each year, Odyssey Tours and Clay S. Jenkinson host a winter humanities retreat at Lochsa Lodge in north-central Idaho. This week's program, hosted by Russ Eagle, was recorded on location during the winter book retreat and and features questions for President Thomas Jefferson from those in attendance.
I've been checking in with my friends scattered around the country lately, reflecting on what each of them has taught me or brought me in friendship. I consider friendship the highest form of human relationship: the steadiest, the most reliable, the most harmonious. My daughter and I have reached the point, now that she is a young adult, where we are close friends in addition to everything else. That gives me a joy I never expected from life.
My old friend Bill Chrystal lives now in Virginia, but when I knew him best he was a Congregational preacher in Reno, Nevada. One of his parishioners was involved in a sad public scandal of the domestic sort. Bill wrote a sermon to help the community make sense of the lurid thing that was getting plenty of press. About two thirds of his way through the sermon, Bill uttered some of the most insightful words I have ever heard. "Which of us," he asked, "would wish to be judged by his worst day?"
Every human being (at least every one I have known) has done stupid things that have endangered all that they have dreamed of achieving in life. Everyone has weaknesses, vulnerabilities, susceptibilities, and temporary lapses that accompany periods of stress, fatigue, or depression. There are perhaps a few people who are immune to the human condition, but those who speak most righteously along these lines are usually not telling the full truth. A character in Shakespeare's play Henry VIII says it perfectly: "We are all men in our own natures frail, and capable of frailty."
It's easy and even fun to fixate on the most sensational stories of self-destruction that flash through a community, especially when prominent people do really dumb things. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said, "No one gossips about other people's secret virtues." When otherwise good people get themselves into trouble, I always feel immediate waves of sympathy, partly because I recognize that nobody likes to endure the leer of public humiliation, partly because I always feel, "There but for the grace of God, go I." If there were a celestial TSA, with magnetometers stationed at every public doorway in Bismarck, that displayed the secrets and the discreditable information about everyone who walked through them, it would be quite a spectacle. Ask yourself this: what incident of your life, what dark spot in your soul, would you least like to see reported on the front page of the New York Times? Which of us would want to be judged by our worst day?
Sometimes in the evening I walk around a new subdivision up near my neighborhood with a book in hand, reading and taking in the fresh air. The houses are all attractive and unblemished, with gleaming new SUVs in the driveways, fronted by well-groomed yards, sometimes perfectly groomed yards. There are costly basketball hoops in about a quarter of the driveways. You never see an oil stain on the concrete or an old battered up Toyota or Impala. Everything is fastidious. The overall look is one of complacent prosperity. I find myself wondering, sometimes, as I wander aimlessly from block to block, what really goes on behind those splendid facades. What hidden dramas unfold behind closed doors? I know what we see, but I sometimes wonder what we don't see.
Maybe this is a precinct of harmony and domestic bliss, but I'm guessing that the usual struggles of human existence, the chaotic trials of close human relationships, the agony of parenthood, and the sheer angst of adolescence, unfold here as frequently as anywhere else. The seven deadly sins hover about our neighborhoods looking for a warm moist place to set up shop. The first two families that lived in a new house across the street from mine suddenly scattered in divorce. Until that time I had envied them as I observed their seemingly harmonious domestic rhythms.
When Thomas Jefferson's daughter Martha expressed severe embarrassment and a sense of horror after her cousin Nancy Randolph became involved in a tragic sex scandal (possibly involving infanticide), Jefferson wrote one of his most beautiful letters in response. Never distance yourself from a dear friend in her hour of greatest need, he said, no matter how terrible the offense and profound your sense of embarrassment. That's precisely the moment when our friends need us most. We lose nothing of our own standing in the community in being seen visibly offering our support. "I shall be made very happy," he wrote, "if you are the instrument not only of supporting the spirits of your afflicted friend under the weight bearing on them, but of preserving her in the peace and love of her friends." That quality in Jefferson—an exquisite gracefulness and generosity of spirit—is what makes him the most civilized of the Founding Fathers.
My rule as a humanities scholar is that "all bets are off below the belt." In other words, whatever we might think we know about others, or for that matter ourselves, breaks down over the issue of human sexual urges and expression. If some terrorist put truth serum in our water supply and everybody began to blather out the secret history of their libidos, we'd probably have a collective nervous breakdown. Some things are better left in the dark. Our romantic lives are sometimes messy. The world below the belt, indeed the world of the heart, is extremely intense, private, impossible to explain to others, and nobody's business but our own. George Washington, the wisest of our presidents, and a man of great personal restraint, understood this. In a letter to his high-spirited niece Nelly Custis, the grave president wrote, "The passions of your sex are easier raised than allayed. In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may life for a time."
In the face of another scandal, Jefferson wrote, "Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love." When I think about history or about the people around me, I always try to apply the "whole man theory." We all have vanities, and foibles, and sins that trip us up and seem gigantic at the moment of their exposure, but when you step back and look at the complete life—the accumulated achievement, the whole set of principles and values, the whole character, the larger purpose of another person's existence—then what do you include? Martin Luther King was a shameless womanizer, but any fair examination of his whole life and achievement must conclude that he was a benefactor of the human project, one of the greatest human rights advocates in our history. Jefferson had slaves, and apparently had sexual congress with one of them, but on the whole we are all fortunate that such a man lived at so critical a moment in America's history.
We owe it to each other to be charitable. And understanding. And sympathetic. And forgiving. And humble in the face of our own weaknesses. And to mind our own business. When the scribes and the Pharisees thrust an adulteress in front of Jesus and reminded him that according to the Law she must be stoned to death, Jesus put it perfectly, in a timeless warning to the judgmental and the righteous. "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."
A favorable and a confidential opportunity offering by Mr. Dupont de Nemours, who is revisiting his native country gives me an opportunity of sending you a cipher to be used between us, which will give you some trouble to understand, but, once understood, is the easiest to use, the most indecipherable, and varied by a new key with the greatest facility of any one I have ever known.
Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingstone
April 18, 1802
The success of the recent film, The Imitation Game, reminds me of Thomas Jefferson's efforts to encrypt his official and personal correspondence. Jefferson was a Renaissance man, America's Leonardo Da Vinci, and there was almost no subject to which he did not turn his genius in the course of a long and amazingly productive life.
Jefferson was an exceedingly private man, sometimes a secretive one. He was well aware that the fledgling U.S. Postal System was inefficient and seldom secure. It was not uncommon for postmasters to open the mail that passed through their offices, especially letters written by political figures or famous men and women. Jefferson rightly understood that his Federalist enemies would very gladly open his correspondence, read it out loud to those gathered in the nation's post offices, and take hand written extracts from his correspondence to use against him in the political arena.
Jefferson experimented with several cyphers. His famous "Cypher Wheel" was developed sometime between 1790-1800. His Enlightenment friend Dr. Robert Patterson, a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, and vice president of the American Philosophical Society, may have had a hand in the project. The Cypher Wheel was a set of 26 cylindrical disks, each with all of the letters of the alphabet etched randomly on its circumference. Each wooden disk had a small hole at its center, and they were assembled on a stiff wire and bound at either end. Jefferson would turn the wheels to spell out the words he had in mind to encrypt, and then choose another random line of letters to reproduce on the page of his letter. The recipient, with an identical set of disks, would align his device to reproduce the encrypted gibberish on the baseline, and then turn the cypher wheel until an intelligible line of English words appeared.
According to historian David Kahn, "Jefferson's wheel cypher was far and away the most advanced devised in its day. It seems to have come out of the blue rather than as a result of mature reflection upon cryptology." Kahn's second sentence almost certainly fails to do Jefferson justice. Jefferson had a genius for this sort of creative thinking. He puzzled over systems, ways of ordering (and disordering) knowledge, and what he called "gimcracks" all of his life. He had a rage for order that enabled him to see into the heart of machines and taxonomical systems, and to discover possible improvements.
Jefferson seems to have abandoned the cypher wheel in 1802. The device was forgotten, therefore, and not rediscovered among his papers in the Library of Congress until 1922.
Meanwhile, Jefferson's system was discovered independently, twice, by other individuals. In 1817 a man named Colonel Decius Wadsworth created a similar cypher wheel His cylinders were made of brass. He added the numerical digits 2 through 8 to the system. Wadsworth was probably assisted in this invention by his friend Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin and a pioneer in the use of interchangeable parts.
A second re-invention occurred just before World War I. The device, known as M-94, was used by American military personnel from 1922 until just before World War II.
Jefferson's Cypher Wheel bears no resemblance to the Enigma Machine devised by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I.
Jefferson also developed a two-dimensional encryption device, though it was not an original creation. It was based on the European Vigenere cypher. It was a 28-column alphanumerical grid. Jefferson made that version available to Meriwether Lewis when he ascended the Missouri River in 1804. Jefferson believed that Lewis may need to send messages of a sensitive geopolitical nature to Washington, D.C., and the president did not wish such communiques to fall into the hands of America's rivals for the West, Britain, France, or Spain. In his letter of instructions to Lewis, Jefferson showed his protege how to encrypt the sentence, "I am at the head of the Missouri. All is well, and the Indians so far friendly." This quintessentially optimistic and Jeffersonian sentence would be encrypted as "jsfjwawpmfsxxiawprjjlxxzpwqxweudusdmf&gmlibexpxu&izxpsecr."
Lewis never employed encryption in the course of his transcontinental journey.
A children's version of Jefferson's Cypher Wheel is available in some bookstores and online.
"For Franklin, knowledge was important, but application of knowledge ... mattered to him as much as any pure science."
— Clay S. Jenkinson
Thomas Jefferson had an immense respect for Benjamin Franklin, who was nearly 37 years his senior. Franklin became one of the most respected Americans during the revolution and was, in a sense, pushed there by British arrogance.
President Thomas Jefferson speaks to us this week about inventions and scientific discoveries of his time including some he was responsible for.
"He and Jefferson talked about everything."
— Stephen Fried
Benjamin Rush was a physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, and a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Rush was a leader of the American Enlightenment and an enthusiastic supporter of the American Revolution. Born the son of a Philadelphia blacksmith, Rush touched virtually every page in the story of the nation’s founding. It was Rush who was responsible for the late-in-life reconciliation between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This week we speak with the author Stephen Fried about his new book, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father.
"We should always listen to science. Science is not political. Science is rational."
— Clay S. Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson
President Thomas Jefferson answers listener questions this week, including inquiries about Jefferson and wine, Welsh “Indians” in the Dakotas, repairing friendships, and the idea that “the rain followed the plow” during Jefferson’s time.
Prompted by a listener question, this week's show is a re-broadcast of a classic show from 2008 when President Jefferson was asked whom he would invite to a dinner party if he was unrestricted by location or time. Listen to find out which friends or historical figures he would like to share an evening with.
Last night two ants walked across my kitchen table while I was reading. I've heard about the January thaw all of my life, but this is ridiculous. The record temperatures seem to have thrown off the internal clocks of the ants and propelled them out along my kitchen floor in search of crumbs. I didn't have the heart to crush the life out of the two advance men, the Lewis and Clark of the kitchen recon. They will die of natural causes soon enough, I think.
I was in Medora over the weekend for an educational retreat, and each afternoon walked west on the asphalt trail that parallels old highway 10 and the railroad out to where the Marquis de Mores' goons shot Riley Luffsey in cold blood on June 26, 1883. On the first day the wind was blowing like a son of a gun, as we Dakotans say, so although the temperature was 38 or so, the wind chill felt like ten below. On the second day, I walked with my jacket unbuttoned, no mittens, no hat, and only twice in two hours did I think it might be smart to button up the jacket. On the third day, shirtsleeves were entirely adequate.
Before I left for Medora, I would have shoveled my sidewalks and driveway if there had been time, because they were covered with a fair amount of crusted snow where the winds have packed it up in the past few weeks. There just wasn't time to shovel. When I returned three days later every square inch of my corner sidewalk and big driveway was bone dry. The garden had emerged in the back yard from under the snowpack.
It's the mildest January I can ever remember. I know some severe weather is still to come, and winter is at least ten weeks from being over. This is not a state to get complacent in. I love North Dakota in all of its moods and seasons. In fact, I love a brutal winter. There is nothing like that early morning encounter with what Jack London calls "The North" when you step out of doors at 43 below, that somewhat anxious realization that we are living high up near the edge of the last latitudes of human habitation. On mornings like that you involuntarily scan the horizon.
I love not knowing for sure that the car will start. I love the dull sound of my boots on the 30-below snow. I love the camaraderie of the grocery store and the coffee shop when people stomp in and clap each other on the shoulders and do the standard North Dakota riff raff chorus. I love that moment in a calm night when the wind whips up suddenly into a frenzy and you can hear the grit grinding the surface of the siding on the northwest side of the house.
I can remember from my childhood on grimly cold mornings turning on KDIX on our battery powered portable radio to hear the litany of event cancellations. Mother would perch the radio on the bathroom sink or the kitchen table and tell us to "get dressed just in case." And then Stan Deck's KDIX baritone: "The Busy Bunnies 4-H banquet is canceled tonight at the Eagles Club and will be rescheduled at a later time." "The Knights of Columbus style show has been indefinitely postponed." "And now here's a little tune from the Monkeys to cheer you up." Once we learned—to our deep chagrin—that school had not in fact been canceled, though it might be let out early, we switched back to the Ole Reb on KFYR, where we belonged. School was hardly ever canceled in those days, but during my high school years the rural buses didn't always come in when it was blizzardy.
There is a paradox of inverse proportions in our time. Back in the 60s and 70s the cars didn't start very well when it got brutally cold. Parkas, hoods, gloves, and boots were much less sophisticated. But we all soldiered on through the bitterest weeks of winter with a kind of resigned stoic calm. I remember walking to and from high school, well more than a mile each way, on the worst days of the year and not thinking anything was amiss. Today we have infinitely better gear. Fuel injection means that most cars start every time. The doors and seals on vehicles are much tighter now than they were in my youth. I have three or four pair of winter boots, one of which is guaranteed to keep your feet warm to 100 below. The mittens and gloves are outstanding, if you spend enough, and for the wimps of the world there are chemical hand and foot warmers. The winter undergarments now wick the sweat away from the body almost instantly. And yet now our institutions seem to have a hair-trigger for cancellation. Sometimes it feels as if we North Dakotans have become pathetically squeamish—every superintendent now seems to fear "an incident on my watch" more than lost education.
Through the first half of my life they never really closed the Interstates, no matter what. No travel was advised, sometimes sternly, but if you were dumb enough to venture out, you could usually piece your way through to the other end of the state. Such lurching, low or no visibility, white-knuckle, "oh please, Lord, oh please" road trips are part of the joy of living in North Dakota, at least in retrospect. I remember once when my friend Philip Howard's mother drove to Williston to see her older son play basketball in blizzard conditions that were universally regarded as suicidal. She was driving a low-slung Chevy four-door with rear wheel drive. We reckoned we would never see her again. About midnight she calmly walked back into her house in Dickinson. "Yeah, roads were pretty bad," she said, and brewed a cup of tea. Nothing more. Today the big gates go down on the highways whenever serious storms blow through the state.
If this winter remains mild (unlikely), it will be good news for stockmen, for oil workers, for every town's snow removal budget, for everyone's fuel bills, especially the American Indians who live on extremely tight budgets at out of the way places on the reservations, and for the state's wildlife. We need a few mild winters to rebuild the populations of deer, pronghorn antelope, and other wild creatures. A few mild winters would enable us to measure more precisely how much of the wildlife drawdown has natural causes and how much is the result of the intense industrialization of western North Dakota.
Even if this winter takes a harsh turn, we have broken the back of it already, and we'll will march forward with joy rather than grim determination. The light is returning. We are already 42 days past the longest night of the year. Already we get at least 9 hours, 27 minutes of light every day, up from 8 hours, 32 minutes on December 21. "Official" calendar Spring is now only 47 days away, and "Actual North Dakota Spring" is now no more than three months away. In other words, we're home free.
I'm starting to gather up my garden seeds. I'm going to walk five miles on the bare trails during the Super Bowl halftime, and see if I cannot stir up my own costume malfunction.
Clay Jenkinson welcomes back David Nicandri for a discussion about Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, the explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. They also talk about Thomas Jefferson's influence on exploration. Nicandri is the author of River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia and Captain Cook Rediscovered: Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes.
Clay Jenkinson recently lead a conference for the Smithsonian that introduced attendees to the Lewis and Clark expedition. The lecture was brimming with questions, so many that there was not enough time to answer all of them. This week, we try to finish that task and answer those extra questions about Lewis and Clark.
We present a fascinating conversation with HannaLore Hein, who in 2019 became Idaho’s first woman state historian. Clay Jenkinson and Hein discuss her duties as a state historian and talk about an author from Idaho, Vardis Fisher. His first novel, Mountain Men, was used as the basis for the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson. His book, Suicide or Murder: The Strange Death of Meriwether Lewis, published in 1962, is regarded as starting the longstanding controversy over the death of Meriwether Lewis.
This week on the Jefferson hour, a conversation with David Nicandri about his new book “Lewis and Clark Reframed: Examining Ties to Cook, Vancouver and McKenzie”, and the importance of reading not only the journals left, but also their “day books”. In writing the book, Nicandri speaks about his goal to not just get get into explorers shoes, but to get “into their heads’.
This week, President Thomas Jefferson discusses and explains his complex view and vision of an agrarian America. While in Paris in 1785, Jefferson wrote, "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it's liberty and interests by the most lasting bands."
Road-tripping in France circa 1787: Roads and Canals
In his circumnavigation of France, Thomas Jefferson took roads, floated canals, sailed seas, rode mules, and rode horses. But mostly he took roads. The roads of 18th Century France were highly variable – some good, some grand, some execrable (little more than cakes of rubble) – and they were maintained by a system of local slavery called “le cuvée.” The roads of Languedoc were superb. The roads of sandy Brittany deteriorated faster than they could be built, leading to the unusual predicament that the more they were worked on the shorter they became. And the best roads were those constructed 2000 years earlier by the Romans. In this segment we talk about the roads that Jefferson traveled, with brief mention of the marvelous Canal du Midi.
References:
Robb, Graham, Th-1788-1789e Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War, WW Norton, 2007.
Gabler, James M. Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson, Bacchus Press, 1995.
Young, Arthur, Travels in France During the Years 1787 – 1788 – 1789, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969.
Overview of our Jeffersonian tour of France
Eighty-three thousand one-hundred eight days after Thomas Jefferson left Paris in his American-made horse-drawn carriage to circumnavigate France, we departed Paris in our tiny diesel Renault to do the same. Our intention was to follow his footsteps through the vineyards, antiquities, engineering marvels, cities, and pastures that he passed – to recreate to the extent possible his experience 227 years later, to understand what it must have been like to travel the country alone in 1787, to try to channel the people he met along the way.
References:
Peterson, Merrill D. (Ed.) Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Library of America, 1984.
Gabler, James M. Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson, Bacchus Press, 1995.
Road-tripping in France circa 1787: How Jefferson Traveled
What few travelers there were of 18th Century France spent more time on water than they did on roads, taking advantage of rivers, coastal waters, and an extensive system of canals. Thomas Jefferson spent a good deal more time than other travelers in his private carriage, driving along the Royal Postal Road that had only recently been opened to private traffic. He opted not to ride with others in a “diligence” or stage coach which, in his time, would have been crowded, dirty, smelly, uncomfortable, and so dangerous that a French-German phrase book of the time included such entries as “I believe the wheels are on fire” and “Gently remove the postilion from beneath the horse.” Jefferson chose to travel alone – in cognito – which added a dimension of dangerous novelty to his adventure that may seem inconsequential in our time but was extraordinary in his.
References:
Robb, Graham, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War, WW Norton, 2007.
Bruce Pitts grew up in Rhode Island, attended Yale and then attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and completed his residency in internal medicine at Temple University. In 1982, he joined the Fargo Clinic where he has practiced for the past 30 years. He is married and has two children.
His lifelong interest in American history comes from two sources: growing up near Plymouth Colony and the seven years he spent in where he became fascinated by American revolutionary history and the found of the nation.
Read Bruce Pitts' blog, Pitts in Paris.
"It's such a gift. Every day."
— Pat Brodowski
We speak with two of our favorite Jefferson Hour correspondents: Pat Brodowski, the head gardener at Monticello, and Beau Wright, a frequent contributor to the show and a city council member of Lynchburg, VA.
"I saw the future of the American experiment in the West."
— Thomas Jefferson, as portrayed by Clay S. Jenkinson
Catherine Jenkinson returns to host a conversation with President Jefferson about his travels in France, Europe and the United States.
This week, Thomas Jefferson Hour creator Clay S. Jenkinson returns to the "Jefferson 101" biographical series with the final of three shows devoted to Jefferson's time in Paris from 1784 to 1789.
This week, Thomas Jefferson Hour creator Clay S. Jenkinson returns to the "Jefferson 101" biographical series with the second of three shows devoted to Jefferson's time in Paris from 1784 to 1789.
While I was out of the country one of the great writers of the Great Plains died. His name was Kent Haruf, born February 24, 1943, in Pueblo, Colorado, the author of the celebrated novel Plainsong (2004). It won several awards, but not all that it deserved. Haruf died in his home in Salida, Colorado, at the age of 71.
I was in Rome when I heard the news—from a journalist friend in Telluride, Colorado, a woman from the Great Plains now "imprisoned" in the mountains of western Colorado, if anyone who lives in Telluride could ever have cause to complain. Our friendship is based on the Great Plains, and we discovered right away that we both love Haruf's work. We had actually been making tentative plans to visit him together, to interview him, converging on Salida from Dakota and from Pueblo, Colorado, her true home. I felt helpless to learn of his death in Rome, a place so profoundly opposite to his fictional plains town Holt, Colorado, that they really don't belong in the same sentence. Holt is all dust and Dairy King, a declining backwater where high school sports are the principal town passion, aside from drinking, adultery, and prunish church ladies.
If I had been in North Dakota when I heard the news, I would have thrown a few things in my car and driven in no hurry the back roads to Belle Fourche or Broadus or Lusk, with his books in the back seat, and I would have checked into a shag carpet motel where they still issue you a diamond-shaped green key with your room number on it. I would have ordered a chicken basket at the drive in (oops, "See U in the Sumr") and had a shot in the "Rustler's Bar." That's how Haruf would have wanted to be honored, by a loopy auto pilgrimage through the empty quarter where his characters struggled to pay their bills, pull calves, find mates, make peace with small town bigotries, and wrestle with a God who dwelt partly out of the Old Testament and partly out among the bluffs and coulees and lone cottonwood trees. I'm still going to do this before we settle into spring.
The plot of Plainsong is less interesting than the feel of its portrait of Great Plains life in those towns that continue to exist now only because they once did, towns that somehow hang on beyond the laws of probability even though the quality of life has long since been dimmed and the mating pool is no bigger than a large punchbowl. Plainsong is about a young woman (a girl) named Victoria, whose single mother throws her out when she gets pregnant. Victoria winds up living with two old bachelor farmers, so unbearably single and set in their basic rhythms that they regard Victoria like a fawn they have rescued from the hay rake or a porcelain doll that might break if you look at it cross-eyed. In the end everyone is damaged precisely as they (and we) knew all along they would be, and life goes on in Holt because it's never going to be otherwise on the high plains "where the rain don't come."
I met Kent Haruf four or five years ago when I was giving a lecture in Salida. There was a reception after my talk, a picnic, and I was being introduced to one eccentric after the next. Then my host, a glorious redhead in a top hat, said, "This is Kent Haruf. He's a writer." When she said Haruf, I nearly sagged to my knees. I had recently read Plainsong and loved it. In fact, when I finally put it down I wondered if it would be possible to locate the author and strike up a correspondence. Haruf's novels are set in a fictional town in eastern Colorado, but they may as well be the actual towns of Limon, La Junta, Trinidad, or Lamar. I lived just on the other side of the Kansas border from all that wild open dry high plains country when I was first married. Haruf absolutely nailed its windswept dilapidation, the sense that every time folks aspire to climb out of the lowest rung of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, trouble and bleary confusion are sure to follow. Haruf is my kind Great Plains writer. We had an hour of conversation together in Salida, and he offered to read my work and help me in any way he could.
Last June I gave the keynote talk at the annual Willa Cather festival at Red Cloud, Nebraska. Turns out I was a sub. The keynote was supposed to be Kent Haruf, but he was not feeling well enough to make the journey. At the conference I met the photographer Peter Brown, who collaborated with Haruf on a magnificent Great Plains coffee table book called West of Last Chance. It contains some of the best Great Plains photographs I have ever seen. They are not all landscapes and they are not all pretty. Brown has an eye for the townscapes that Haruf writes about—real plains Americans standing in front of barber shops and gas stations, junked vehicles next to deteriorating farm to market asphalt roads, home brew restaurant signs, hail bales painted as the American flag, farmers standing gothically next to grain elevators, a man crouching below a giant mural that imperfectly depicts John Wayne. If you are still looking for a great Christmas book for those who love the Great Plains, you can find discounted copies at Amazon.com. West of Last Chance is the Great Plains not as state tourism divisions like to depict us, but the Great Plains as they actually are.
The photos are superb, but it is Kent Haruf's short prose commentaries that I really prize. Here's a bit of one: "We were in Shattuck's Café middle of the morning… it's one of those places where they bring you biscuits and gravy with every breakfast order unless you tell them you don't want any…. I was paying more attention to what the three men at the next table were saying. They had on orange vests, worked for the highway department … and at one point—I can't recall now what had prompted it—one of them said to the other two: 'We may not be the smartest sons of bitches in the world, but we sure can kill weeds.' And I thought to myself: Bud, say no more."
Haruf's long passage on church suppers is one of the greatest short pieces I have ever read. If you email me I will send it to you. I've read it a dozen times now, always out loud, and I burst into tears at a different place every time. I've been in that church basement in five or six locations on the plains, because they are all the same out there everywhere. "And there were a good many church women in the kitchen getting things ready, making coffee and stirring up pitchers of iced tea, and uncovering dishes that people had brought in, and heating things up, and cooling things down, and sticking in serving spoons, and hustling back and forth carrying loaded dishes and platters out to the serving tables… and don't you know when she made something it always tasted as good as it looked."
Haruf's last book Our Souls at Night will be posthumously published in 2015. Meanwhile, I'm re-reading the five previous novels.
This week, an interview with Clay S. Jenkinson about his new book, The Language of Cottonwoods.
We're joined by Char Miller to discuss a new book, Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena. The book is a collection of noted essays by Roosevelt scholars and was edited by Miller and Clay Jenkinson. Char Miller is W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College.
"Understand him for his flaws as well as for his greatness."
— Joe Ellis
We welcome historian Joseph Ellis to the program this week to talk about his book American Creation. In the book, Ellis notes a series of five contributions the founding fathers made and Clay Jenkinson asks how those contributions are holding up during our time.
Over the past few days I have had the wonderful guilty pleasure of sitting down to read Robinson Crusoe cover to cover. I know I should have been doing other things, some of them pressing, but I just sat there and read this famous and fabulous account of a man who is shipwrecked on a small island off of Venezuela and spends 28 years there, 26 alone with a parrot and some semi-domesticated flocks of goats.
"If we failed, it would be such a setback for the human project; if we succeeded, it would certainly become a template for the future."
— Clay S. Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson
Some of the things Jefferson did were not designed to make a statement about democracy or self-government. In some respects, Jefferson was just weird.
"He was drest, or rather undrest, with an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small clothes, much soiled-woolen hose-and slippers without heels."
— William Plumer, 1802
This week we talk about Thomas Jefferson’s talent for political theater, and the ways he used this talent to reinforce the public perception of his firm beliefs in republicanism and guard against what he saw as a threat of monarchy in the young nation.
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."
— Thomas Jefferson, 1800
This week, we ask President Jefferson about his famous dinner parties and their extensive menus. It was important to Jefferson to not appear too regal, and the dinner parties were kept somewhat casual. In 1802, a Federalist senator from New Hampshire was meeting Jefferson at a dinner when “a tall high boned man” entered the room wearing “an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small clothes, much soiled—woolen hose—& slippers without heels.” He added, “I thought this man was a servant; but was surprised by the announcement it was the President.”