On the Battlefield at Shiloh, Tennessee

Yesterday the blue in the sky acted like a magnet, dragging me into the puffed-wheat world of clouds. The road bored into a thick hardwood forest. The humidity and temperature pitied my dry-skinned Idaho-ness and remained in the realm of comfort.


Betty and I showed at Shiloh battlefield early, before the midday Sunday visitor rush descended like long lost Civil War angels. The official name is Shiloh National Military Park and the name “park” fits the location well. It looks like a park, with the requisite monuments and peaceful fields bordered by luscious stands of pine and hardwoods.

The fight at Shiloh on April 6 and 7, 1862, was the first great Civil War battle in the west with one-hundred-eleven-thousand combatants and resulted in 24,000 dead, wounded and missing in action. What happened there belies the peaceful place Betty and I encountered. Wild turkeys clucked and putted. Spotted white tail fawns loped across the East Corinth Road, the Corinth-Pittsburg Landing Road and the Bark Road. Woodpeckers drummed and cicadas sang.

Old Shiloh Meeting House

Only the monuments and the field markers told of the havoc and death that occurred there one-hundred-fifty years ago. Musket balls, grape shot, bayonet charges were apparent only in the history. All over this magnificent park, signs and testaments delineated every regiment, every artillery battery, the field hospitals, the troop movements, the savage engagements with names like the “Hornet’s Nest” and “Bloody Pond” and the “Peach Orchard.” A serious student of what happened at Shiloh in April 1862 could spend days walking from sign and monument to sign and testimonial and receive a detailed lecture in both historical and spatial facets of the battle.

Interior of the Old Shiloh Meeting House

But Betty and I were here for the country and the mood and the photography, and yes, the history, too. But what never fails to astound me is how these manmade cataclysms, these Antietams, Gettysburgs, Pea Ridges, Spottsylvania Courthouses all tendered their slaughter on terrain of breathtaking beauty. And not just in the Civil War: The beaches at Normandy are magnificent; the battle site of Little Bighorn—or Greasy Grass as the native Americans have named it—commands a kingly view of the surrounding plains, mountains and rivers of the Wyoming/Montana landscape.

When I arrived in Khe Sanh, Vietnam, in the spring of 1967, the triple canopy jungles, the mountains and marshes were gorgeous. When I left in the spring of 1968, the land was shattered tree trunks, rust red bomb craters and death death death.

Cannon at Shiloh

I could wax on about why we do this, but answers that make sense evade me as do so many other pat solutions when man goes about besetting himself against man. We love, we crave the beauty of our surroundings, and then we sometimes crush it.

On this day, in the rolling verdant landscape of southern Tennessee and Shiloh, we pondered man and history for a while, then went to dine on catfish filets at the Catfish Hotel, hard by the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing.

On Wood Storks, Murder and Idabel, Oklahoma

A couple of days ago Betty and I motored north out of east Texas up US Highway 259 into McCurtain County, Oklahoma, towards the small town of Idabel. I can recall my oldest living aunt, who would have been born around 1903, talking about that town when I was a kid. I have no recollection of what was specifically discussed, but I suspect the clan inhabited the place or adjacent diggings in the days before they had to flee the country for the searing climes of south-central Arizona.

The border between Texas and Oklahoma in that locale is the Red River. North of the river lies Red Slough, a marshy, tree-bedizened terrain pocked with ponds and sumps that before the Anglo settlers showed up and diked and drained would have been a tough place to farm and run cows.

As we drove north we spotted a large number of big white birds sitting on the other side of a long, narrow pond. Some of them looked like egrets, but others seemed larger and more…can I use this word to describe birds…authoritarian.
The day before, between Tyler and Mount Pleasant, Texas, we had seen what looked to us—or when we first saw them we didn’t know what they were because we’d never seen them—like wood storks. But the books say the storks live further south and blah blah with other stuff bird identification books say. But still, we thought we saw them. But we have thought we have seen rare birds before, only to find out they were something else, and the feeling of having made a rookie mistake forces us to hesitate anytime we think we have a rare bird identified.

Wood Stork, courtesy of Wikipedia

Wood storks are the only storks that breed in the US. They are big white birds with dark heads and big long bills. They stand forty or so inches tall and weight six to seven pounds. They like to hang around in ponds where the water is receding so that as the fish concentrate, the storks can wade in and use their big long dusky yellow bills to capture dinner.

South of Idabel I stopped in front of a rundown Oklahoma honky-tonk and turned around and parked in a spot by the side of the pond. A line of bushes partially obscured the birds in question. Across the road, old rusty rakes and swathers and tractors and trucks ganged up around a falling-down barn. We got out and took a good look at the birds. We had our Sibley bird book out and our binoculars that had fogged-up lenses because they were cold from the air conditioner and it was hot and humid outside. We rubbed the moisture from both the lenses and the eyepieces again and again and as we looked up, one of the suspect birds flew in low for a landing and the flight feathers were black, a distinguishing factor in wood stork identification. The big gang standing around in the water sported dark heads and big long dusky yellow beaks just like Sibley says they should if they are indeed wood storks.

Given our experiences mis-identifying avian critters, and given the experts saying that the birds hang out further south, I was hesitant to write this blog.

The Internet is a terrible thing sometimes, and sometimes it is wonderful. As I type this blog, the Internet is wonderful. This evening I found enough blog posts from local Oklahoma birders to believe that we really did see wood storks. Evidently, they tend to hang out around McCurtain County, Oklahoma.

In my memory, my paternal ancestors fled the Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas region because of murder. Maybe there was a trial and the killer was acquitted, or maybe they hightailed it west with a name change providing just enough curtain to hide them from the law.

As I watched those wood storks near Idabel I had the feeling that I was observing something ancient and full of wisdom like judges, but not the local circuit court justices who would have judged my murderous grandfather or one of his killer brothers, but something more in the vein of half-human, half-avian beings that judge the dead as they enter the netherworld. Bird-like thinkers who own a roll call of every deed a man or woman ever did, bad or good, a ledger of sorts, toted up and spit out from the big dusky yellow bill as one passes his/her way into eternity.

Maybe Dante was thinking about something like these wonderful storks when he penned those words “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” Of course the scientists will say they are just birds who cannot think or reason and as such they are incapable of making calculations of any kind. But I am a creative writer and a filmmaker and I say if I can conceive a notion, then I can believe in its possibility.

Back there in Idabel, Oklahoma, Betty asked me if I felt any ancestral tugs as we passed through the land where my father’s father, and his father, spent large chunks of their lives, and I told her, “No.”

But tonight, here in Memphis, Tennessee, I think maybe I did. Maybe I felt that tug that tethered them until they had to leave in the night and change their names from what…from Banta or something like that…to Rodgers. Part of that tug was the gut feeling with which those big judges with the long dusky yellow bills have netted me, or I have netted myself, or I am so enamored with those birds, and with the land, and its history, that I create my own realities. And of course, maybe I should be more tentative about all this speculation, like I often am when identifying rare birds.

On the Road–Capitol Reef to Bentonville




Colorado River Country


Mesa Verde


Dallas, TX


Brownwood, Texas


Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art


Pea Ridge, Civil War Battlefield




Capitol Reef and Graffiti

Wayne County, Utah, at 6:00 AM, and the morning breezes crowded around the willow leaves and brought the mosquitoes. First light spread over the red land. With all the Mars hubbub in the news, it made me wonder. We live on a red planet, too. And yellow and travertine green and gray and blue and the purple rock that the geologists tell me cannot be purple, but my artist’s metaphor mind screams, “That’s purple.” The sunlight scudded above the herringbone clouds. The Fremont River running rusty from the push of mountain rains.

Capitol Reeg

My first foray into Capitol Reef, AKA the Sleeping Rainbow and the Water Pocket Fold. Over a hundred miles long, north to south, a crooked, twisted sandstone dragon of exposed remnants of primordial volcanic ash, hot monsoon forests, magma runoff from eastern volcanoes, Sahara desert-like dunes, all leveled one on top of the other, a loaf of multicolored sandstone with names like Chinle and Kayenta and Navojo Sandstone with arches and bridges and hoodoos that look like chairs and tables and goblins and rabbits and many other things the imagination of man and woman can dredge up.

Betty and I dove into the depths of the reef, first the Gifford House and the fruit orchards of Fruita that belie the geologic chaos just beyond. Into Capitol Gorge and the petroglyph narrows where we stopped and spoke the name of friend, mentor, and long-time resident of Wayne County, Gail Larrick. We spoke it softly, then I bellowed it and the echoes rambled up the red walls that loomed above us with their black water stains. Rambled, then bumped and jumped and floated back to us like the voices of the long-ago etchers of the figures in the red rock. Farther in, the Pioneer Registry, signatures of the pioneers who used the gorge as a passageway from east to west. And newer namings, too, unwanted names of kids from LA and Phoenix and Salt Lake. Graffiti we call it. The oldest stuff on these walls are petroglyphs; the earliest Anglo names we call a registry, the newest stuff a blight. But wait, what is now petroglyphs might once have been graffiti and what is now graffiti might one day, one thousand years hence, be a thing revered. Our descendents might call it a registry or…petroglyphs.

At Petroglyph Narrows

Out of the canyon and out to Teasdale, old home of Gail Larrick and then on to Boulder Mountain and a gut-punching view of the reef, the Henry Mountains beyond and if not for thunderstorms, the mountains of western Colorado.

Gifford House

We traveled farther east; at Caineville and Hanksville, a land that reminded us of another planet that we had seen in some science fiction movie. Dead trees, tumbled-down gray and tan rock. Buttes that stood out like monuments built by ancient Native Americans, but with Anglo names like Factory Butte. A wild and windy place, sand in the gaps between the teeth, uranium mines, gold mines, turf so tough the cattle showed in ones and twos, miles and miles apart. Rain storms boomed in the surrounding peaks.

I am a native of the southwest. My people came in the 1840s. I thought I knew the red rock country. But Capitol Reef and points east…Vavoom!

On the Road to Capitol Reef

The first time I traveled through Utah was in the summer of 1962 with a busload of Junior Classical League kids from Arizona on our way to a convention in Bozeman, Montana. Back then, there was no Interstate 15 severing the heart of Utah from north to south; just US Highway 89 which snaked from one small Mormon town like Kanab to another like Manti until we rolled into Salt Lake City, where, if I remember correctly, the only high-rise was the Mormon temple built from 1853 through 1892. Most of the country was high plateau covered with sagebrush or cliffs of red or gray, and mountains blanketed with conifers. The most prevalent mammal was of the bovine type.

On the road to Capitol Reef

Today, while Betty and I traveled from Boise down to Torrey, Utah, and Capitol Reef, Interstate 15 barged past town after town jammed with new housing, and there was close to a hundred miles of express lane and freeway construction, harbingers of more people, more growth, more towns and cars.

I don’t begrudge folks moving where they want. I do, and I don’t begrudge them seeking better jobs, a better climate, a landscape more remote than California or the east coast, but still, way down inside, I just hate to see what is happening to the corridor running on the west side of the majestic Wasatch Range. The temple in Salt Lake is now dwarfed by high-rise buildings that surround the pinnacles that used to announce one’s arrival into the Salt Lake Basin.

Torrey, Utah

Once we got through Nephi, traffic improved and we finally cut off the freeway and encountered deer and lakes and farms, old barns, tiny towns with old stone houses the color of the local cliffs…pastel yellows and russets.

We arrived in Torrey as the sun was cutting a low swath in anticipation of its setting, and the rays lit up the red rock hoodoos and made them almost luminous.

Tomorrow, day two of our journey to show BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, across the US, we investigate the Capitol Reef country sans traffic and high-rises except for the ones that have been towering here for several million years.