Mississippi has three national heritage areas: Delta, Gulf Coast and Hills. Culturally, Mississippi is one of the best states in the country.
The Delta area is fascinating, and I recommend the Delta Blues Museum when you’re in the area listening to live blues music, like Terry ‘Harmonica’ Bean pictured in Clarksdale. Vicksburg and Emmett Till are both in the area too.
I drove the Gulf Coast area while visiting the Gulf Islands National Seashore, and it is beautiful. (I skipped Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis “Presidential” Library, since he was never president of our country.) You will see signs marking the Mississippi Blueways, which are mostly paddling river routes near the coast and unrelated to the popular Mississippi Blues Trail.
This year, I visited William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, which is part of the Hills area, along with Elvis’ home in Tupelo, Tennessee Williams’ home and Eudora Welty’s too. Brices Cross Roads, Natchez NHP and Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home are in this area too. I enjoyed visiting Faulkner’s home, ‘Rowan Oak’, and walking in the pretty woods nearby, but Faulkner would much rather be remembered for his screenplays, stories and books, including The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absolom, Absolom!.
UNESCO chose eight Frank Lloyd Wright sites for World Heritage status, and I visited them all this year by EV. An exhaustive tour of Wright’s designs could visit 100 sites, but the Heritage 8 are sufficient for me. My cross country trip went from Hollywood, to Arizona, Wisconsin, Chicago, Pennsylvania and finally to New York, but it’s easier to understand his life’s work below chronologically.
His home and studio in Oak Park Illinois showcases his various styles, influences and experiments, including his first design: his own home. While this is the one site I visited that is not on the World Heritage list, just walking the neighborhood is worth the trip.
Unity Temple in Oak Park in 1905 is a church built for his mother.
Robie House at University of Chicago in 1910 is my favorite, built for a wealthy client who only lived in it briefly.
Taliesin in Spring Green Wisconsin in 1911, later rebuilt after a dramatic tragedy, used funds from Robie to build a family country home with a school for his acolytes.
Hollyhock House in Hollywood California in 1921, was built for a theatrical oil heiress who fired him for going over budget.
Fallingwater (above) in Mill Run Pennsylvania in 1937, is his most iconic private residence, built for a wealthy department store owner whose son gave it to the park service.
Taliesin West in Scottsdale Arizona in 1937, used funds from Fallingwater to build a winter home with another school for his acolytes.
Jacobs House in Madison Wisconsin in 1937, was built to demonstrate that Wright could design something affordable on a budget.
The Guggenheim in New York City in 1959, was built to display art and to be art, for the future.
I hope you enjoyed this brief tour of 50+ years of the most widely recognized designs from America’s greatest architect.
Honestly, the show was disappointing, but not every show is going to be like the Doobie Brothers’ Live At Wolf Trap. If you go, be sure to book your tickets months in advance to get seats to the most popular shows. Lots of folks arrived early to sit on the lawn in ‘general admission’ up above the seats, watching on big screens. I’d prefer just to hike the 2.5 mile trail through the Virginia woods, but I braved the crowds for the experience. And it was fun, so I shouldn’t complain that the artists were a bit out of tune and didn’t have much of importance to say. At least the expensive beer and crab cake sandwich tasted pretty good, so, except for my hearing loss, it was a good night.
Inside the Zane Grey museum in Lackawaxen PA, there are a couple of photos Grey took that make me extremely envious. One is him in 1920 sitting under Rainbow Bridge—which is a park site that I honestly can’t figure out how to visit—, and another is of his three masted schooner Fisherman in 1932, on one of his many adventures at sea. Grey introduced the world to the great American West, writing dozens of novels selling millions of copies in several languages along with movie and TV adaptations. I consider myself a bit of a traveler now, but many times I’ve reached a remote place, only to find that Grey beat me there by 100 years, on horseback or by boat. My grandfather and uncle inspired me with their travel stories, and I now have their journals of their trips out west with me to compare notes (thanks Nim!). I also have a decent collection of Zane Grey ebooks, although I read them mostly for the journey descriptions. Zane and his wife loved this place on the Delaware River, and I’m sure he’d have loved to see so many people taking their families out on small boats right off his front porch.
Before the Revolution, Charles Ridgely grew his fortune making iron and exporting it to Europe for finished goods. His land had all the essential elements for this business, nearby Baltimore had the port, he purchased his own merchant fleet, and even received tax incentives from the British government. He diversified into other businesses, growing corn, fruit, and bottling casks of port to sell in the city. And he didn’t pay most of his workers.
When the war began, Ridgely sold iron and supplies to the Americans. His craftsmen were skilled, and he was likely the largest enterprise in the country at the time. For cheap, he purchased the lands confiscated from Loyalists. But he didn’t adhere to the ideals of the American Revolution. In fact, he built the largest, most purely British Georgian mansion above, while the country was just finishing fighting its War of Independence from the British King George.
His nephew inherited the home in 1790 and served in Congress and as Maryland Governor, arguing for peace with Britain. By the 1820s, Hampton was 25,000 acres and included cattle, horse racing and marble quarries. For six generations, the Ridgely family held on to this property and protected the family wealth. The work was done by over 300 slaves at any one time, and the plantation was known to be one of the state’s largest and hardest driving plantation, where other slaves feared to be sold as punishment.
The ranger was unable to point to any contributions made to society by the Ridgely family over 200 years, but she did have much evidence that they enjoyed an aristocratic life and drank copiously. They had a huge ice cave dug into the hill, filled in winter, so they could enjoy ice cream during the summer. (They lived in their Baltimore house during the winter). The four main rooms have been marvelously restored to different time periods, Colonial, the Governor (photo), pre Civil War and post Civil War, each with elaborate displays that would make European nobility blush. The hall and rooms are filled with large portraits of the vain slaveholders, none of whom made the choice to see their slaves as equally human.
The overseers house, farm buildings and some slave quarters have been restored as well, and all can be seen from the front step, far down the hill. The park service has done admirable research on the life of the slaves, and I learned how generations of young Ridgely children were taught to maintain the system of control. Slavery impacts every aspect of humanity, and the stories here are told with some meticulous details to evoke hundreds of years of cruelty. The house was donated to the park service by a wealthy foundation in part to preserve the fine art collection.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home until his death in 1959, this World Heritage site is a remarkable example of his architecture. The architect preferred to build just below the top of a hill, on the ‘brow’ or taliesin in Welsh. The triangular pool brings the background mountains into the foreground, and the front walk forms a point like the bow of a ship to admire distant mountains, like islands across the undulating desert landscape where cholla cactus looks like coral. Besides the bright red door behind the rock and the small ornately carved scene to the right, there are Chinese influences throughout, including many more carvings, an elaborate story panel, a round garden door, a bell, a dragon and other architectural touches. Inside you can sit in his origami chairs and study the internal structure of a nautilus or the draft blueprint of the Guggenheim. Wright brought his students and apprentices to live and work, and he established an institute dedicated to his school of architecture. Situated in the tony Scottsdale neighborhood, the audio tour of the property is detailed, takes you around step by step and explains his architectural philosophy. Guided tours are also available, and schedules & numbers are strictly limited to keep a steady flow through the small parking lot and on the tours.
The view from the cupola of Muir’s father-in-law’s orchard estate upsets me. Between the palm trees, you can see smoke rising from the refineries in Martinez, and to the right across the street is a gas station. Muir never rode in cars, took horse carriages and preferred walking. In the house, there’s a print of the Muir Glacier in Alaska, now the Muir Inlet. He lived just long enough to lose the battle to prevent Hetch Hetchy Dam at Yosemite. Many of the giant sequoia groves at Sequoia have been destroyed by wildfires. And all his work with Teddy Roosevelt and the Sierra Club he helped found to protect millions of acres of wilderness is failing to protect nature from the man made climate crisis.
The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is the universal warfare between right and wrong.
John Muir, 1896
At least he was happy in this house. Muir visited the owner, a Polish botanist who introduced varieties of fruit trees to the valley, and fell in love with his daughter, Louie. They married, settled here and inherited the orchards. They had children and also invited some of Muir’s siblings to join them, allowing John time to write. One of the oldest buildings in the area is the Martinez Adobe in the back of the property, which gave room for the Muir clan to stay and take care of the orchards. Influenced by Emerson, who he met later in life, Thoreau and Marsh, Muir continued traveling and became the most influential conservationist in the world, writing books, articles and letters to protect Yosemite, sequoia groves, glaciers and other natural wonders from human consumption. He would not forgive us for our fossil fuel pollution.
Being a cantankerous old mule, I decided not to reserve a spot on the free shuttle and hiked through Las Trampas Wilderness Regional Preserve to visit the site, partly because I’m trying to visit the parks via non-carbon transport and partly because I visited the park not too many years ago and didn’t need a repeat experience. The wealthy landowning neighbors (one property currently listed at $10 million) don’t like the riff-raff driving past their landscaping, so they insist that visitors take the shuttle from downtown, even though there’s plenty of space for parking on site. When locals benefit from tax spending on public parks, then try to limit public access, and typically complain about tax spending going to the poor, the selfish hypocrisy stinks. So I decided to park in front of the most ostentatious private drive I could find and hiked about a mile to Tao House.
O’Neill, America’s most accomplished playwright and father of American tragedy who won four Pulitzers and the Nobel Prize for Literature, used the stipend from that last award to settle here on this quiet ranch. He enjoyed several years here with his wife Carlotta and wrote some of his best work, including the autobiographical plays The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Many of the artifacts here are not original but do a good job of recreating the atmosphere of his comfortable, private writer’s retreat, and the few original items and personal touches, showing Asian theatrical influences and his love of his dogs, make the tour worthwhile. Illness forced him to leave during the war, prevented him from continuing to write, and he died in Boston, although his work continued winning awards.
This most-visited park protects land in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo Counties, but most of the fun stuff for visitors is near the Golden Gate Bridge. The southern units include the unimaginatively named Ocean Beach, Fort Funston which is great for watching hang gliding, Rancho Corral de Tierra for horseback riding, and Sweeney Ridge which has views, hikes and wildlife. If you’re on your way north to Muir Woods and Point Reyes, then you can wind your way up the coast past Muir and Stinson Beaches, past Bolinas Lagoon and through the bucolic Olema Valley. If you have young kids, a stop at the Bay Area Discovery Museum is fun, especially if you’re going to Sausalito. The urban units include Alcatraz, Fort Mason, the Presidio, China Beach, and Lands End near the Legion of Honor art museum.
But if you’re focusing on San Francisco, then you may want to start with the bridge. On the north side, there are nice views from the Marin Headlands, not just Vista Point, but through the tunnel to the Marin Headlands along the loop road to the old forts. On the south side, there are good views from Lands End to the Presidio. If you’re taking photos, note that the north end of Baker Beach is clothing optional. Crissy Field, the naturally restored area once used by the Wright Brothers, is popular for kite surfing, which must be a fun way to see the bridge. Fort Point is under the south east side of the bridge, about as close as you can get without being on the bridge. At the last northbound exit, there’s a visitor center with a small parking lot and info about the bridge, and if you want to go on the bridge, one side is for pedestrians, the other for bicyclists and the middle for cars ;).
The Presidio was originally fortified by the Spanish in 1776, passed to Mexico, and then was taken by the US around 1846. It was an important military base for every US conflict for the next 140 years, and it includes a national cemetery, an officers club dating back to Spain, a former military hospital now used by Lucasfilm (see Yoda above), and a museum dedicated to Walt Disney, who stole some of his best ideas from Oakland’s Fairyland, along with a whole list of other interesting projects. The park leases many of its historic buildings as private residences. I don’t normally write long travel guides to parks, but I can’t help it as I used to live near the Sutro Baths ruin. OK, one last tip. Reserve tickets for Alcatraz months earlier than you think is necessary and try to do the night tour if possible. Unfortunately, the only way out there is by fossil fuel ferry.
Before the bridge was even conceived, the opening from the Pacific into the San Francisco Bay with passage up the Sacramento River was known as the golden gate, and people came from all over the world to get rich quick. In Chinese the area was called 金山 meaning ‘Gold Mountain’, and San Francisco is still called 舊金山 or ‘Old Gold Mountain’ today. (Many Chinese immigrant dreams were quashed by racist immigration policies, despite laboring on the railroads, levees and in a variety of businesses). Of course, nowadays, the path to riches is in the Bay Area’s high tech industries, where dreams are spun into gold. Which is why Yoda is a fine image for the Golden Gate NRA.
What anxiety or misgivings troubled me so incessantly today, I know not. Perhaps the unseasonable heatwaves dragging on interminably through the nights have robbed me of my wits by denying me the respite of unconsciousness, no matter how much gin I consumed. Even staying in the drafty old seaside cottage that I once played in as an eccentric child, only served to remind me of my age, my lack of gainful employment, my failed marriage, and the solitary road ahead of me. The storms of late have struck frequently with bizarre intensity, with lightning barrages casting ghoulish flashes on the faces of my now elderly acquaintances, as if to taunt me with signs of my own mortality.
The inexorable tides reach higher on the barnacled rocks with each passing year, and the great lawn, strained with drought, is over-crowded with groundhogs, rabbits and even passing deer seeking refuge, so desperate for food that they eat any flowering bud of beauty, no matter how small or hidden. I have long been tormented by the certainty of impending doom that renders me humorless and unappreciative of the banal social events that my family includes me in vain to soothe my awkward, sulking gloom. But now, some fiery rage is stoked in my soul, as avarice and willful neglect threaten all species with mass extinction while casual citizens busily immerse themselves in the capricious and mundane.
Certainly, knowing the tragic and unexplained death that befell the strange man whose steps I follow from Boston to Philadelphia weighs heavily on my brooding mood. A poet, critic and editor whose genius never quite paid the bills nor protected him from loss. His wife died of consumption at 24, perhaps pre-cognizant of her fate, visualizing her flower surroundings she would not smell. All of their furnishings of course are long gone, so there’s nothing left to do but study the cracks in the walls, read his disturbing writings and let your imagination call you into the basement, where his fevered dreams dwelled too long. The crazed rantings of his characters echo in the cobwebbed corners, some quietly creaking like the stairs too treacherous to climb and some screaming in my head like the gasoline fueled monstrosities on the roads outside. How was one genius able to create the Detective, Horror and Science Fiction genres, I wonder, before once again losing myself in the melancholic realization that our future may yet become a deviously difficult to solve dystopian hell-scape of our own pollution. This is one of my favorite sites, if only in my imagination.
Zero Carbon Travel 