Lately I’ve been having dreams, Train Dreams w/update

For decades, I kept a copy of “Fiskadoro” by Denis Johnson. I liked the idea of the book more than the book itself. It was an early post-apocalyptic novel set in the Florida where I grew up, the Keys, way south of my youth in Daytona Beach, but still, Florida. With my brother Dan, I was writing a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Central Florida I knew. It was the 1980s and we wanted in on the post-apocalyptic scenario that Reagan’s anti-Soviet MX Missile plan engendered. Dan, Air Force veteran and air traffic controller, was a Reagan man and I was not. There was energy in that – and we were brothers. I miss him still. Today is his birthday.

But back to Johnson. I read “Train Dreams” a decade ago when I still lived and worked in Wyoming. It’s a novella and I read it in two days. It touched me. I didn’t think it would. I did my best to read “Fiskadoro” but failed to finish -- I just couldn't get inside. Is this the same writer? My heart ached by “Train Dreams” end, much as it did last night when the credits rolled for “Train Dreams” on Netflix. It’s set mostly in Idaho, my old neighbor, and in the tall-timber forests I grew to love in my 40 years in the Rockies. Most of that time, the timber industry and environmentalists waged war. I wasn’t in the fight, but my location in the cities of the Colorado/Wyoming Front Range made me suspect.

I put that aside as I watched Robert and other loggers in early-20^th-century Idaho and Washington cut 500-year-old trees. Robert worked for his wife and daughter. He traveled to jobs by train, the most efficient form of transportation then. This was a love story featuring Robert and Gladys and little Katie. The couple planned and built the cabin themselves and did all the work. Tragedy came and some resolution followed. The ending is breathtaking yet somber.

It's a beautiful work, Johnson’s novel and the Netflix film directed by Cliff Bentley. The credits roll to a song called “Train Dreams” by Nick Cave. He was the right person for the job. I have it on my playlist now: 

Lately I’ve been having dreams, crazy dreams I can’t explain; A woman standing in a field of flowers, a screaming locomotive train; Crazy dreams that go on for hours and I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.

Robert doesn’t have the words.

I keep searching for them.

UPDATE: The Dec. 1 New York Times carried a review of a new biography about the late Denis Johnson. The book, "Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures," is by Ted Geltner. He assembled it through interviews with family and friends and fragments of notes left behind by Johnson. The writer spent his last years living in a cabin in north Idaho. If you live in the West, you can picture the cabin and know what it feels like as December snow swirls outside.

Halloween 2025: Lobsters roam the neighborhood

A big lobster walked down our street last night. He/She/It accompanied kids dressed as characters from kiddie shows I don't watch because no more kiddies. But they're in my neighborhood, swarms of families doing what we did with our kids, getting them into costume, grab a bag, panhandle for candy. Chris dressed as Smart Cookie and my son Kevin was Spiderman. They staffed a table by the sidewalk, prepared for the kids. Other neighbor did the same thing. The young marrieds across the street broadcast seasonal tunes. Decades ago, Chris stayed at home as candy-giver and I marched the kids around the neighborhood. One night it was just my daughter and her pal. Indian Summer day gives way to blustery afternoon and sundown rain. The snow came when we finished the first block. Snow crusted their outfits but they ignored my pleas to head home. Halloween! Candy by the bagful once a year. Lights and costumes, family together. My Mom used to dress us up, hand us each a pillowcase, and send us on our way. Kids stream from every house on the street, a mass of post-war boomer babies move as one, parents hold their own bash, peer out the window just to check. No concern about razor blades in candy bars. We brought home apples, oranges, Milky Ways popcorn balls, nickels. Candy canes. The usual Tootsie Rolls. The stars were out here last night; a gentle breeze blew. A lobster strolled by.

At sea level, remembering making mile-high muffins

Mile High Muffins

Muffix mix, two eggs, two-thirds cup water and canola oil, mix well and add blueberries from a can. May need to add more water and a dash of flour. Mix again. Spoon into muffin pan and cook at 400 for time stated on package plus four or five more minutes. It’s science, this Wyoming cooking. Takes longer for water to boil for tea. The oxygen is thinner so sea-level cooks may need to sit-a-spell while the muffins bake. It gives the cook time to look out the kitchen window, see the quaking aspens and their gold leaves, the sheen of frost on the browning lawn. Apples hang from the old fruit tree that’s missing a major limb. The fire hedge blazes. The muffins bake. I stand on an ancient sea.

 

If androids dream of electric sheep, why are there no sheep in my dreams?

I discovered Philip K. Dick and his mind-blowing novels at just the right time. In November 1975 I was a non-trad student at the University of Florida. Non-trad because many in my 1969 high school graduating class had claimed their diplomas and were now looking for work in all the wrong places. Meanwhile, we laggards and slow-learners were on campus with a younger crowd and a passel of Vietnam veterans. And the Krishnas -- can't forget them and the Krishna lunch. 

I spent many of my waking hours at the library where I gobbled up novels I missed reading in high school and copies of Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, and any other pub that featured great writers -- Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Eszterhas among them -- and Esquire carried Harry Crews' Grits column and its annual dubious achievement awards. I learned snark from the witty DA awards and writing through Crews in print and in person in his creative writing class. 

A profile of PK Dick arrived in the Nov. 6, 1975 Stone. Great graphics by G.K. Bellows showed the author, book in hand, with an alien invader coming through his window. The header: "The True Stories of Philip K. Dick: Burgling the most brilliant sci-fi mind on Earth -- it is Earth isn't it?" Paul Williams wrote the piece. Was this the same Paul Williams from TV and film? No, it was Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, who RS called "the first rock critic" and who died in 2013. He also loved sci-fi.

So I had to look up the RS piece. I printed it out and the type was too small for these tired eyes. So I enlarged the e-piece and read the whole thing. I remembered most of it from '75. I found as many PK Dick books as I could, in libraries and second-hand bookstores, and wrapped "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" into the folds of my brain that also held Shakespeare in Elizabethan English, Chaucer in Middle English, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dreamscapes, all from my UF classes. All in books. 

Williams notes in his final paragraph that some PK Dick movies were being discussed. "Blade Runner" came out in 1982, just a few weeks after PK Dick died. It blew our minds. It wasn't Dick's novel but it was beautiful. There now is a Director's Cut and a Final Cut as well as sequels. And many movies based on other novels. 

What is PK Dick thinking out in the Bardo? You may have to go to Colorado to get an inkling of that. Dick's ashes were interred in a Fort Morgan, Colo., cemetery next to the grave of his twin sister who died at six weeks. She is the basis of the "phantom twin," a recurrent theme of his. Fort Morgan was in the middle of the Dust Bowl in 1928 so I assumed the worst about the sister's fate. Go to Fort Morgan on a winter's day in January. Stand outside in the winter gales and think of the many things that could doom an infant in 1928-29. 

Dick, who lived most of his life in California, including mystical Marin County, is buried on the prairie. Only 112 miles from my one-time home of Cheyenne, Wyo., the setting of Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," an alternate history of World War II (the Allies win!) in "The Man in the High Castle." Dick had the mountains and prairie in his bones which made the Rocky Mountains the best place for the opposition to the Japanese and German conquerors on the coasts.

Dig up that '75 Stone article and find out about the author's situation in a tumultuous year, 1971. There's a mystery at the story's center: why did someone burgle Philip K. Dick's house in San Rafael, blow up his 1,100-pound asbestos-and-steel safe, home to his precious manuscripts, and flood the floor with water and asbestos? All sorts of wild things were going on in 1970s California. Dick posits possibilities and Williams follows leads to no avail. 

The answer is out there somewhere.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer on "Trees"

I salute the turkey oak tree in my backyard.

It's a tough little oak. I was looking out the sliding glass door a few weeks ago and saw its leaves detach in a strong wind. Looked like late September in Wyoming but it was late July in Ormond Station, Florida. The flurry of leaves caused me to call the city arborist and she asked if the leaves were brown on the edges. They were. "Needs water," she said. She was correct. I started hosing it down every day and now the leaves have magically returned. 

The tree is a denizen of the soupy landscape that makes up my neighborhood. We're not in the soup but I can see it from here. I live in the dry section of the wetlands. We are right at the periphery of  the Hull Swamp Conservation Area and the Relay Wildlife Management Area. Wildlife we got. A neighbor spotted a black bear in his backyard. A big ol' Eastern Diamondback was squashed by an F-250 near our PO boxes. We've seen turtles and birds galore. 

We are interlopers here. But, back to the trees.

One of my father's favorite poems was "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. It's beautiful, really, with memorable opening lines: "I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree."

Dad knew the poem by heart. It's easily memorized, rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter which makes for a memorable beat. Four iambs instead of the usual five in pentameter poems. I point this out because it would have been a great choice of poems to memorize during after-school detention at St. Francis Catholic Grade School in Wichita. If we seventh-graders transgressed enough to get detention, the nuns gave us a choice of poems to memorize. Because all 12- and 13-year-olds have places to go and things to do after school, we chose the shortest and easiest of rhymes. No free verse, thank you. No epics such as "Child Harold's Pilgrimage" or "Howl," although I am pretty sure Ginsberg and the Beats were not on the list of approved Catholic verse.

I once had a choice between "Charge of the Light Brigade" and some silly love poem. I chose the war poem and can still recite most of it. "Trees" was never on the list. Odd thing is, anything by Kilmer would have out me closer to war than Tennyson. He also would have brought me nearer to my Catholic roots had I known about the 1917 collection he edited, "Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets.

But "Trees" lives on in collections. Kilmer converted to Catholicism in 1913 and wrote of his spiritual life. He joined up at 30 to fight in the Great War. Died at 31 at the Second Battle of the Marne. He was leading a patrol into No Man's Land and disappeared in a shellhole. When his troops caught up to him, he was quietly looking over the bombed-out landscape. He didn't respond. They shook him, then looked at his face to see dead eyes and a bullet hole in his forehead. Death by sniper. He's buried in the U.S. cemetery in France across from the farmer's field where he was killed.

He's been called "the last of the Romantic Era poets." His poems are predictable and schmaltzy. They rhyme, for goodness sake. Across the blasted tundra, the British war poets -- Sassoon, Owen, Graves -- were leading the charge into the revved-up post-war realism of the 1920s. You might see Kilmer's poem "Rouge Bouquet" in volumes of war poetry. It's about 21 soldiers of New York's Fighting 69th who were killed by a random German shelling. His legacy lives on in the names of schools, neighborhoods, and a national forest in North Carolina. The Philolexian Society at Columbia University sponsors The Annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest. Lest you think this is just an Ivy League Putdown, it is taken very seriously on campus. Here's a description from the scribes at Wikipedia (I donated to the cause and got a cool [EDIT] T-shirt):

The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest has been hosted annually by the Philolexian Society, a literary and debating group at Columbia University, since 1986, drawing crowds of 200–300 students and participants vying for the title of best of the worst. Columbia faculty members serve as judges. The event is usually held in November and is heralded by the appearance of "Bad Poetry in Motion" flyers around campus (satirizing the New York City Subway's "Poetry in Motion" series) featuring some of the best verses of the last 20 years, as well as door-to-door readings in the dorms, usually performed by prospective new members ("phreshlings").

The event is named for "bad" poet (and Philolexian alumnus) Joyce Kilmer. His most famous work, Trees, is read aloud by audience members at the contest's end. In 2012, the Columbia Daily Spectator listed the Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest #1 among its "Best Columbia Arts Traditions".

 As a writer and arts administrator, I commend the Society's efforts to promote poetry and its performance. I can see my father, an army radioman in The Great War Part 2 and accounting graduate of a small Catholic college, standing tall in the auditorium and reciting "Trees" with Ivy League youngsters and aging fans of an almost-forgotten poet. 

"Trees," Joyce Kilmer, those lovely, lovely trees.

"Return to Sender" is more than just an Elvis song

I have got to hand it to Neil at LiquidLawn.com. He is persistent. I do not require his services at this time but there will come a time when I may. This is the fourth flyer I have received from Liquid Lawn and, really, the rare piece of mail I have personally received from anyone, human, company, or provider of services important to the Florida homeowner. My daughter receives disability and got mail from Social Security. It was sent to our Melogold address although it was spelled Mellogold but I wish they had written Mellowgold just to stop me from editing in my head JR Horton street names. On the envelope was handwritten "FWD" which means forward but why it would request forwarding when it was already destined for the right address with a slight misspelling? 

Yesterday I received a call from my former employer of 25 years. The caller asked if I had a new address as mail sent to Ocean Shore Drive had come to her, "Return to Sender," you know, like the Elvis song that got to number two on the charts in October 1962 after "Big Girls Don't Cry." The caller asked if I had sent USPS a change of address and I said yes, I dutifully did so. I did neglect to send that information to my trusted former employer, but had to wonder why they got "Return to Sender" when I had filed an official forwarding request to USPS on June 2. She was a bit stumped too but was friendly and polite as are most people in Wyoming. 

I filed an address change last August on my Wyoming address and mail seemed to find its way fine from Townsend Place in Cheyenne, to Ormond Beach but for some reason, USPS can't seem to get mail from Ormond-by-the-Sea to Ormond Station about five miles west as the crow flies. Now that USPS has raised rates on first-class mail, and has cut back on their trucks running from the big mail-gathering places to the little P.O.s on the coast, they can afford some drones to fly out our way. I wouldn't mind a drone mail drop. Really. 

"Old Girls and Palm Trees" by Meg Pokrass is a dream

I am reviewing a new book today but first wanted to outline the pleasures and dangers of late-night reading on the Fourth of July weekend.

I've read about the gender gap among White American Male Literary Fiction Writers, notably novelists. Upstarts such as Salinger, Hemingway, and Updike seem to be a vanishing breed. Guys whom you can't wait to read. Guys that hog the bestseller charts. 

I made the mistake of choosing Marc Tracy's July 3 New York Times article for late-night reading. My wife Chris was asleep, or trying to get to sleep as fireworks exploded around us in Ormond Beach suburbia. A few hours earlier we'd joined friends for dinner at a Flagler Beach bistro with a view of the rickety old pier under reconstruction. Made me wonder about hurricane season. The sky burned red as we drove west toward home. Should have taken that as an omen.

"The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel" was compelling reading. I am an old straight white man fiction writer who has published one story collection and written two as-yet-unpublished novels. I've published a number of short stories and a smattering of flash fiction and prose poetry. I left the corporate world to get my M.F.A. in creative writing. I wrote and raised a family while working full-time as an arts administrator, a rapidly dissolving field thanks to MAGA. Agents and editors will admit over late-night beers at writers' conferences that white guys aren't getting published because it's a new world out there, a new multigenerational, multiethnic, gender-neutral world out there. And young white guys are spending their 10,000 hours gaming and not sitting alone in a cafe populating their journals with trenchant observations. So suck it up, buttercup (what is a buttercup anyway? Must Google it). 

I am including a photo of a buttercup.

This buttercup looks happy. Or surprised. Or maybe it's surrendering. They can be poisonous and in the South they are seen as an invasive species. On the plus side, kids like to hold the flower up to their chins and the reflective petals turn skin the color of butter. Like butter!

Since I'm a buttercup, I ordered a nifty little chapbook by Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees." Published by Bamboo Dart Press, a nifty little outfit with offices in Claremont, Calif. It's illustrated by artist Cooper Renner, who has a playful style. I tackled this book late at night and it pleased me. Meg is a writer friend I met a dozen years ago on Facebook who wasn't afraid to put her flash fiction on display for all the e-world to see. She's from California but now lives in Scotland. Many writers, me included, were a bit concerned about placing our work on social media. Into what dark and dreary and corporate place will it end up? Any Tom or Dick, Harry or Sally, can scoop it up and claim it as their own. That occurred to Meg but didn't faze her, probably because she is represented by crackerjack agent Peg Mokrass who sports huge eyeglasses and looks a bit like Meg. So here it is, years later, and Meg had published some 900 pieces in various mags and online sites. And she's published eight flash collections and two novellas. I brought her to Casper, Wyoming, in September 2014, as a presenter at the Equality State Book Festival.  

The book is delightful. Can a SWMW say delightful? I await your response.

Meg's book features flash pieces about her imagined life with an old friend in California. In the opening piece, she imagines this old friend behind her, "a friend who had become a shadow that needed to be sewn back on." I had to stop there because this is a scene from the black-and-white "Peter Pan" I grew up on. Peter loses his/her/their shadow and has to sew it back on. I watched my own shadow for weeks after that, afraid if it came off I wouldn't know how to sew it back on. I close my eyes and remember that feeling. I'm scared, but also aware that my shadow is a living thing with its own life. It may have turned me to writing, as my Mom read Peter Pan to us after and I saw that words were kind of like a shadow of life, that the writer has thoughts and it travels down the arm for finger to make imprints on the page. Did I think that at five? No, I am imagining that now. Something magical was going on, I knew that much. Somehow I understood that knowing how to read those shadow words could open up new worlds to me. I was a nuisance. I read everything: cereal boxes, candy wrappers, billboards, and eventually magazines and books. I am still a nuisance; any printed matter within reach is not safe. I can read upside-down like a noir detective. So much joy and heartache comes from reading and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is joy and heartache on the pages of "Old Girls and Palm Trees." It is a dream, basically, and dreamily written. 

About the book: It's a chapbook, 6.5 x 6.5 inches. Well constructed, with a sturdy coated cover, and easy to carry on the Metro or to the beach (as we retirees do) in your E-Cycle or E-Tricycle basket. Nice gifts at $10.99. E-book version available but that kind of defeats the idea of having a nice little chapbook to carry around. As I mentioned, art is by Cooper Renner. Cover art by Meg and Dennis Callaci. 

Support small presses: www.bamboodartpress.com

How to choose art for the bare walls of a new house

It began with a June 19 Facebook post by artist Linda Anne Lopez of Winchester, Virginia. Linda and I met several times over the years. She's married to diehard reader and biker Ben Lopez, a longtime friend of my late brother Dan and his wife Nancy. They met in Santa Barbara while going to UCSB. Turns out they all moved to Florida for work and kids and riding motorcycles year-round. 

Ben is the most voracious reader I know and we trade book titles on FB. His most recent: a biography of Rudyard Kipling. My most recent is a novel The Sleeping Car Porter by Canadian author Suzette Mayr. I am now hip-deep in Carl Hiaasen's newest, Fever Beach. Ben sticks mainly to non-fiction and I'm a creature of fiction as that is what I write. And, sometimes, like these crazy times right now, who can tell the difference?

Linda got serious about her art after retirement. Photography was her thing. Along the way she discovered encaustic mixed media and that's what you're seeing here. 

Linda is  a bird-and-flower person which carries a lot of weight with me, a hummingbird admirer and gardener. She describes her specialty as Encaustic Mixed Media. She combines her love of photography with the ancient arts of encaustic. See further explanation below. Find out more at Lindalopezartist.com

And I spent most of my professional career in the art world, mostly in the realm of state arts agencies (SAAs), local arts funding, a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts, and dabs in arts and literary criticism. All of these worlds are being decimated by Trump and his goons but I will leave my political critiques to other posts on Hummingbirdminds and other rabble-rousing sites.

Linda got my attention with this FB post on June 19:

Hummingbird and flowers, encaustic mixed media, 8-by-8 inches, Linda Lopez

It got my attention because it is beautiful and because it features a hummingbird and flowers. I must have it, I told my PC, and contacted Linda. It was for sale and she also had a companion piece, shown in this June 25 FB post by Linda: 

Encaustic mixed media, Linda Lopez, work at left is 9-by-17 inches.

The new home this refers to is mine in Ormond Beach, Florida. They will be the first works of art to go up in our new home in a woodsy place called Groveside at Ormond Station. I plan to turn these bare walls into a gallery of sorts, one that will feature groups of pieces celebrating my wife Chris and me. These two pieces will hang above our dining room table which, strangely enough, matches the color schemes of the art. It will feature work by Florida and Wyoming artists with a Virginia and Colorado artist in the ranks. 

You might ask: Hey Mike, what, exactly, is encaustic? I will let Linda answer that:

Explanation and History of Encaustic 

Encaustic is a wax-based paint (composed of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment), which is kept molten on a heated palette. It is applied to an absorbent surface and then reheated to fuse the paint.  The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to the process of fusing the paint.  

 

Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Fayum portraits are the best-known encaustic works. These funeral portraits were painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. 

 

Modern encaustic painting was made possible by the invention of portable electric heating implements and the availability of commercial encaustic paint and popularized by its usage among many prominent artists. Encaustic paintings do not need varnishing or protection with glass. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, which is one of the major causes of deterioration in a paint film. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil. Buffing encaustic will give luster and saturation to color in just the same way resin varnish does. 

 

Encaustic can be used as a traditional painting medium, but it can also be used to create sculptures, with photography (transfers and prints), drawing, and printmaking (monotypes). Painting with encaustic is a multi-step process. First, the paint must be melted. Then the molten paint is applied to a porous surface. The wax is then fused into the working surface, allowing it to form a bond. As a final option, the cooled paint can be buffed to bring up the luster of the wax and resin. Every layer of encaustic wax must be fused. 

All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

The message to the Florida Legislature is clear: Don't mess with our state parks!

I feel nostalgic today. Not sure why although it may be that I have many years to be nostalgic about. To begin, I was reading the Sunday paper after freeing it from its two protective envelopes but first I had to shake off the water from my neighbor's pre-dawn sprinklers (the lawn looks great!). The meaty part of the Daytona News Journal, Sunday edition, is its Outlook section or op-ed. It includes some meaty opinion columns such as Bill Cotterell's exploration of next year's governor's race ("We're in for a fun race" wrote the headline writer with just a smidge of sarcasm) and Ingrid Jacques' "Trump's tariffs might bring back jobs at a price" and that price may be -- in my opinion -- America's democracy. That anyone might believe that the witless White House resident actually has a policy of any kind, well, I guess that's how we got to this dystopian hell in the first place.

My attention was focused in Florida state parks, trails and historic sites. Rick Christie's column featured letters from state park fans. Six weeks ago, Florida opinion journalists of the USA Today network asked residents to send in written and visual memories of state parks in an effort to save our 800,000 wonderful acres of pristine land from greedheads fronted by the State Legislature. Many writers have warned us about the paving instinct of developers. We can go back to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' writing about Cross Creek and Paynes Prairie among other places. She was friends of some of Florida's early women environmentalists. From Florida Memory at the Florida State Archives: 

In Florida, Marjorie Harris Carr, May Mann Jennings, Jeanne Bellamy, Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Mary Grizzle are just a few of the women who worked to protect Florida's environment.

When I was growing up in Daytona, John D. MacDonald raged in "Condominium" about unbridled development. From afar, I read Miami Herald columns by Carl Hiaasen. I don't know most of Florida's recent environmental history as I was working to save and improve Wyoming state parks through  the arts. But those who never left and those who moved here for the Florida that is rapidly disappearing, you were on the front lines to save this heritage. 

I am a retiree returning to Volusia County. My prime growing-up years (13-27) were spent here in Florida's prime growing-up years (1964-1978). My eight brothers and sisters had their globe-trotting years. My brothers Pat and Dan were in the USAF and my sister Molly spent several years tending to new mothers at a base in Italy. My sister Mary tried out New Hampshire and my sister Eileen joined me in Colorado for awhile. Sister Maureen has lived in Mexico City and Lyon, France. Brothers Tom and Tim tried California. They all returned to Florida. I did not. Their roots were deep. Their memories are of sand dunes and unspoiled beaches, heading to Juniper Springs and Ichnetucknee, fishing for snook. camping in the woods. Mine too. 

So I wrote a letter supporting Florida parks and the legislators trying to protect them with House Bill 209 and SB 80. Mine is not featured in today's Outlook. But you can read it here. I reminisced about my days at Tomoka State Park and the Loop Trail. And the beaches where I surfed and hung out with my friends. Florida is a state park and a historic site for its rich heritage. Some of the latter is being scrubbed from school history books as I write because it involves genocide and slavery which apparently never happened although the park has a nice statue of Chief Tomokie of the Timucuan People based on a legend. There is a Timucuan Heritage Trail at Alexander Springs in Ocala National Forest. For some reason, it is "temporarily closed." I give you one guess as to the reason. 

I love this country!

I learned a lot from reading today's letters. Dana Hunsley of Panacea, a former park ranger and park safety officer at St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, reminded readers that the the Florinda Dep0artment of Environmental Protection (DEP) is better know as the "Department of Environmental Prostitution" for its tendency to favor greed over environmental preservation. Military veteran Tom Wonsiewicz of North Naples celebrated Thanksgiving with his family at Delmore Wiggins Pass State Park. He writes this: "The joyful noise, in many languages, of people enjoying life and each other in beautiful, natural settings is unforgettable." Frank Cover of Cape Coral credits a 2014 visit by boat to Cayo Costa State Park got him hooked on wildlife photography.

The message is loud and clear: Don't f*ck with our state parks. Make sure your legislators hear your pleas. Earth Day is April 22. That's a good day to fire off a letter or e-mail. 

Anti-Trump protests? Better term: We gather together to save our democracy w/u

Update 4/10/25: "Hands Off" was the official term for the April 5 protests. Sorry I forgot to mention it. Perfect label for a response to Trump & Company's hostile takeover of the USA.

I didn't attend any of our local "anti-Trump protests" as the header read in this morning's Daytona Beach News-Journal. I couldn't bring myself to gather the support materials I would need for an extended stretch in the Florida out-of-doors. I need to slather sunscreen over every exposed inch of my body to avoid the return of skin cancer. Yes, it takes years for a burn to turn into cancer and I may not be around for that future dermatologist visit but I always try to think of my long game. I'll need a hat and a jug of water. A clever sign, which I hadn't yet made although many ideas are floating around the Net. 

I also must transport my e-scooter on the rack attached to my SUV. I have to make sure it's charged so I don't get stranded on the way back to the vehicle parked at a handicapped space if I can find one. Once on site, I have to make sure there is an accessible restroom nearby and that I can get to it. My wife usually helps with transportation but she was out with old friends on Saturday.

So I didn't make it. But millions did. I loved the photos that appeared on social media. I was able to view old Wyoming friends at sites in Cheyenne, Laramie, Rock Springs, Casper, and other places. Joe Barbuto and his brave compatriots in Rock Springs endured lots of nastiness. The city was once a Democratic stronghold, back when union miners were Dems. It takes an inner fire to get out on the streets in very red Wyoming. There were opposition rallies although not well-attended since Trump needs no more help destroying our fine country. Some name calling, screams and shouts. But most responses from passing motorists were horn honks in agreement. 

I saw a video Sunday of an armed MAGA man getting out of his truck and threatening protesters with an automatic weapon. Not in Wyoming, though. Not wise in the Still-Wild-West to go around threatening citizenry when so many are armed. And these protesters were mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore as a movie character once shouted from the rooftops. Despite what you may hear in the MAGA blogosphere, the rallies were peaceful, police wisely keeping their distance lest they be branded as Gestapo wannabes. 

So Mike didn't go. Boo hoo. Millions did and that's what matters. As a long-time Facebook scribe kept reminding us, none of this matters if we don't get out and vote. It would be tempting to ask rally attendees if they voted in the recent special Florida election that sent a GOPer that not even GOP stalwarts like to a seat in Congress. Volusia County's turnout for Democrat Josh Weil was impressive. Still, the majority of registered Dems stayed home. Chris and I voted by mail. The GOP seems worried that there will be a record turnout in midterm elections. They are busily crafting legislation to keep us from voting. 

I have participated in many protests and rallies. I was an onlooker as a confused young man at Vietnam protests in D.C. and South Carolina. Later, I participated in a big way. I was so proud to help plan the Wyoming Women's March in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on Inauguration weekend 2017. Some labeled it Wyoming Women and Allies March. I was part of the security detail and served the hungry at the post-rally potluck with my heart-friendly low-sodium chili. The Laramie County Democrats fed 1,200. We plugged in so many crock-pots that we shorted out the electrical system at the Historic Cheyenne Train Depot. Lukewarm chili still can keep a person warm on a chilly January day. 

Seems like ancient history now. We thought those days were behind us.

Thanks to all those who participated this past weekend. I will be there next time.

For my blogs on the 2017 rallies in Wyoming:

https://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2017/01/wyoming-womens-march-and-potluck-draws.html

https://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2018/01/i-wonder-if-ive-learned-anything-after.html

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Nostalgia

Artwork courtesy Dean Petersen

My friend Dean Petersen in Wyoming is a talented writer and filmmaker. He once joined us at Jeana's Dining Room Table Writers' Group in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He has many stories to tell, as he showed in his novel The Burqa Cave. We critiqued each other's work with other members and sipped tea and gnoshed on baked goods. It was helpful and civilized and almost all of our members, past and present, have multiple published books. 

Dean always has a new project, his latest is an intriguing podcast, "That Doesn't Happen Every Day." He has profiled sand sculptors, Laramie's lone ska band, WYO nukes, and this hitchhiker. I imagine myself as the guy with my thumb out in the illustration, although it's been awhile since I hit the road in the 1970s. Dean is from the generation younger than mine (Gen-X?) and he notes in the episode that in school and at home they were lectured often about not getting into cars with strangers. 

Boomers received the same warnings but thousands of us ignored them as we hit the road to see America and Canada and the rest of the Americas and Europe too. My sister-in-law hitched around Europe with a woman friend in the '70s. My brother Dan hitched around Florida and the East Coast before he got a haircut and joined the USAF. My wife Chris ignored all warnings as a teen and hitched A1A from her house way north in Ormond Beach to party with friends in Ormond and Daytona. 

It was a great way to get around especially if you had no car or motorcycle. Go to Dean's podcast and check it out.

Daytona Bike Week has passed but we all have motorcycle memories

Daytona Bike Week goes for ten days each March. It’s an extravaganza for motorcycle buffs from all over North America and even all over the world. It’s a loud week, Harleys in full roar beginning in late morning t about noon and lasting well past midnight. 

You get the full treatment along Main Street in Daytona and out by the speedway where the races, concerts, and big-time vendors are. Chris and I ended up surrounded by bikers on Thursday when we went to lunch after a medical appointment and wandered by a famous tattoo business on U.S. 1 that hosts beer and autograph sessions with Playboy models, strippers, and assorted women in skimpy outfits despite the un-Florida chill. If you go further north on U.S. 1, you pass biker bars aplenty.

For us Ormond-by-the-Sea dwellers, we hear bikes all day and night. We’re located between Hwy. A1A which promoters now call the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway and John Anderson Drive which locals call the street where the rich people live. The bikers ride A1A along the coast to Ormond, Flagler, and St. Augustine. They can find nice beaches if they want to dismount but more likely will end up at one of the many saloons and tourist attractions that line the way. Bikers also use that route to go to the Highbridge Exit which will take them to the Tomoka Loop, a favorite winding tree-lined route. John Anderson also takes you to Tomoka along a winding tree-lined route by riverside houses you can't afford.

BTW, you do have to have some cash and credit worthiness to buy a new motorcycle. They start at about $25,000 and goes up to $40,000. You also need a good pickup and a trailer to haul the bikes that once zoomed freely on I-95 in the 1970s and now old bones and joints need a little assistance to get to the hoopla. There’s still lodging and food and such to buy. And don’t forget your two- or three- wheeled vehicle's maintenance costs. 

Guys like my old Wyoming neighbor worked on his own Harley. He had the technical skill, tools. and big garage to do the work. One night he blasted down the street before he rolled to his driveway. Then came a knock on our door. My neighbor needed my help. I walked with him to behold the downed bike. He seemed embarrassed that his Harley was this helpless thing lying powerless on his driveway. Drunk and high, he needed my aging muscles to get the machine upright. I helped of course, the neighborly thing to do.

I have plenty of friends with motorcycles and many that used to have motorcycles. When attending Daytona Beach Community College in 1973, I shared a house in Holly Hill with a roommate who fled the north country to Florida. He helped me rebuild the engine in my 1950 Ford truck. He was a biker without a motorcycle which he had to leave behind for a reason he wouldn't talk about. He did talk motorcycle. He dressed biker too. Probably dreamed it. He moved to Orlando and the last I heard, he was riding again. 

My brother Dan rode a Harley until leukemia took him away. An air traffic controller, he ran an Internet biker-oriented side business, Daytona Gear. He loved his motorcycle. When he and our friend Blake trailered their bikes to Sturgis, Dan invited me up to ride bitch on his bike and I did. Our daughter Annie has a treasured Biketoberfest photo with her and her Uncle Dan on his Harley. She even bought me a Biketoberfest T-shirt which I wore proudly around Wyoming and I often was asked how I liked Biketoberfest and said, “Just fine, I liked it just fine.” I had Sturgis T-shirts too.

In the 1960s and '70s, I rode dirt bikes through the Florida woods and on the beaches. They belonged to friends, little Hondas and Yamahas and Husqvarnas. I covered motocross races as a correspondent for the Denver Post. A girlfriend once dumped me for her old boyfriend, a motocross racer. I responded by mailing her a verse about love and longing that I pulled from Kahlil Gibran. Didn’t make me feel any better but I hoped she read it and thought about me for a little while.

I guess we’re all motorcycle people in America. Daytona has a special claim on big motorcycles so I guess I can claim a little slice of that. Still, I like the quiet.

I wasn't able to say this when I lived in Wyoming, but Liz Cheney now speaks for me

I'm a life-long Democrat who has voted against Liz Cheney and for her. And, yes, I was a Wyoming resident at the time. I voted against her when she successfully ran for Wyoming's lone House seat. She was considered an outsider (resident of Virginia), despite her name. And her name -- Cheney -- was an issue. She is daughter of Wyoming warmonger Dick and Uber-patriot Lynne who writes books glorifying America and neglecting its faults. Lynne once chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities and then worked with GOP colleagues to try and dismantle it (which Trump & Co. are doing now). When serving on the Equality State Book Festival planning committee, I voted against Lynne Cheney as keynote speaker for our first event. That led to me and my colleague L (you know who you are) being labeled "liberal twits" by the Casper College librarian. Liberal Twit is my handle on the site formerly called Twitter.

But Liz speaks out about Trump, especially his idiocy when he and Vance and the Trump Corps of Bullies ambushed Ukraine President Zelenskyy. Here's what Liz posted on Facebook (reposted by wonderful novelist Connie May Fowler):

All I can say is "Right on, Liz." I know, a term from long ago when we used to say "Right On" only for cool rebels. Now Ms. Cheney is the kind of rebel we need. I know that the Cheney name carries with it a heavy weight. But one also has to acknowledge that Dick Cheney has influence in GOP politics and the energy biz. Wyoming buildings at UW and in his hometown of Casper carry his name. The Natrona County High School football field carries his name (the field but not the stadium). Dick and Lynne are both NCHS grads. The energy sector powers Wyoming. Cheney was chair of Halliburton, for goodness sake. I traveled throughout the state for my job and if I didn't see a Halliburton truck on the road, I might think I was somewhere else.

Republicans in Wyoming have a rich tradition of mainstream conservatism. They have recently abandoned that for what's called the "Freedom Caucus" in the State Legislature, a body of right-wing wackos who spend more time banning books and pronouns than they do caring for Wyoming's people. I am scared for the state because I lived, worked, and retired there before moving to Florida. Florida, of course, has its own crew of wackos led by its blustering governor. I'll find time for them in later posts. 

Meanwhile, I have to ask: where are the Democrats? Why aren't our former presidents and legislators speaking out? This is no time for timidity, no time to contemplate your legacies. There will be no legacy if Trump is not stopped.