"The hour of the American barbarian is at hand. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder." — Aimé Césaire
Curves, tunnels, steep ascents, unnerving drops down the mountain when the weight of the train threatens to overrun the engine and send the whole enterprise cascading down into ruin.
Life is like that.
Phoebe, left, and Po look me over and wonder if he can be trusted, this strange man who has taken them into his home. Will we be fed, and loved? Will we be sheltered from life’s storms? Who is this man anyway? Why are we here? (Click the image for an expanded view)
And, fight it or not, there are times when the brakes don’t hold. The cars jump their couplings and somersault ahead, tumbling over the engine in a great squeal of rending metal and the futile cries of our despair.
We’re never prepared.
We’ve always known it was coming. True, we’ve never known the day, the hour, let alone the minute the call would come. But we’ve know it was coming.
And come it does, just as we knew it would, catching us unawares and unready, off balance and out of sorts. Every damn time.
And I know that Phoebe and Po are out of sorts as well. Loved ones — be they four-legged or two — always are at times like these.
We believe we can never know exactly how dogs feel, can never know exactly what they must be thinking, but we should not find that strange. It’s the same with other people. We can never really stand in their shoes either.
The best we can do, I guess, is practice empathy and extend grace — four legs or two.
And that’s what we’re trying now. And on Day 2 it’s going about as badly or as well as you might expect: In other words, we are making it up as we go.
At least Phoebe and Po are easy going and wise in the way 12-year-old dogs can be, and wisdom certainly doesn’t hurt if you’re baking a dish without a recipe — as we are doing.
Stone cabins were less common than log buildings in early Appalachian life, but families made do with what was readily at hand — and there was no shortage of rock.
So I wasn’t surprised when I discovered the remains of a stone cabin in the woods off the road leading to the mountain-top radio towers off Tatham Gap Road. The cabin was about a mile from the fork where the road splits on its route from Andrews, North Carolina, to Robbinsville.
It offered a near perfect example of how families lived in these mountains in the late 1700- and early 1800s.
The remains of the rock cabin and outhouse along Radio-Tower Road are typical of homes from that era.
Remains of a mountain home in the Tatham Gap area of Cherokee County.
They can seem almost impossibly small to us now. It’s a windowless structure, roughly 16 feet by 20 feet — perhaps a bit smaller — but enough back in those days to shelter a full family.
The outhouse or privy sits about 100 feet away, and also is made of stone. The nearest neighbor was likely miles away.
The outhouse for the rock cabin off Tatham Gap Road.
The cabins were known as “pens” for their windowless, solid wall designs. They had a single door and a large fireplace for cooking and heat. The emphasis during construction was on speed of building, and function and durability over comfort.
They were built to last and survive harsh winters and mountain storms. Apart from the roof, this one has survived some 200 years of mountain winters and summers.
Old Forest Service sign at the foot of Tatham Gap Road, the “Old Army Road” through the mountains.
Birds called from the woods, and I put my hand on Hazel’s head to calm her while I squatted on the edge of the ravine and listened. Apart from the birds, the only other sound was the wind breathing through the trees and moving the first green shoots of spring.
All else was quiet atop the mountain.
Hazel and I were alone except for the ghosts of the long dead Cherokee that must haunt these peaks on Tatham Gap Road, or Forest Service Road 423, a section of the 5,000-mile long Trail of Tears that marks one of the early but ongoing efforts by our country to get rid of our non-white residents — to kidnap, imprison, kill or oust them and claim this world of vast spaces for our own, more white, more European kind.
A weathered information station tells the story of the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears. The station is located near 3,800-foot-high Snowbird Mountain, the highest point along the rugged trail.
It is, as I say, an ongoing campaign — this relentless effort to rid ourselves of the other.
And 143 years ago, these woods would have been alive with the cries and tears of the Cherokee, who were corralled in their home valleys and force-marched to more barren lands, less desirable lands in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma.
When it came time to kidnap and imprison the Cherokee, the U.S. Army cleared and widened an ancient Native American path from the Cheoah Valley in Graham County, North Carolina, through Long Creek Valley and over Snowbird Mountain until they reached Pile Ridge in Cherokee County where they would hold the prisoners until they could be driven like cattle to the Oklahoma Territory.
The terrain along the trail is steep and unforgiving. It was much rougher in the 1830s when the U.S. Army herded Cherokee over the mountains like cattle. Hazel takes a cautious look down the mountainside.
Some 17,000 were forced from their homes in North Carolina and surrounding states, with more than 4,000 of them dying along the way. The old, the young and the feeble were first to go, and then many of the healthy — all ravaged by cold, rain, heat or snow, and weakened by shock, abuse, mistreatment, indifference and hunger.
It was as American as America today where masked and heavily armed troops have been sicced by a vile federal administration on “alien” immigrants in communities from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New Iberia, Louisiana, from California to Connecticut.
Like the Cherokee of old, the new unwanted are being housed in pop-up prisons designed for cruelty and callousness, managed by private, for-profit Gestapos — the CEO Group, CoreCivic and others that are running these charnel houses of capitalist evil — the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, the Karnes County Detention Center in Texas, the South Florida Detention Center, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” in the cypress swamps of south Florida, and others.
It’s almost as if is 1838 all over again.
The U.S. Forest Service was working this week on the gravel road over the mountains. The steep and rugged road runs about 8 miles from Andrews to Robbinsville.
It’s older than America, of course, and probably is as old as our species. Riots broke out in London in 1517 as anger over immigrant workers boiled over, eventually making their way into a play credited to William Shakespeare.
This speech from the play is delivered to the angry crowd by London Sheriff Thomas More. He asks the rioters to imagine that they themselves are the immigrants being attacked:
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England; Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silent by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed; What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled; and by this pattern Not one of you should live an agèd man, For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With self same hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another.”
A few Cherokee, of course, didn’t make the trip at all. They hid out in the mountains along the Trail of Tears and avoided the interloping new-comers for years, rebuilding their society and lives day by day until they reassembled the rudiments of a nation.
Today the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina controls approximately 57,000 acres of land, primarily the Qualla Boundary near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
But the stink of what we did as a nation has endured and will endure long after the deaths of all of us complaining about the hoards of immigrants supposedly taking our jobs, raping our daughters and buying up all the homes in our lands.
Eating our pets, I hear.
How easily we forget our history. How easily we neglect to live by the precepts taught us as children. How easily we sell our souls.
Five New York newspapers gave birth to The Associated Press in 1846 when they pooled their resources to share the cost of reporting on the Mexican-American War.
And for the 180 years since then, the wire service has served newspapers all over the world.
No more, at least not as a core part of its business.
Today it announced buyout offers it has made to more than 100 of its journalists and said it is pivoting away from newspapers and shifting to visual reports, and will be trying to develop new revenue sources through companies investing in artificial intelligence.
It’s a bow to the realities of today’s media landscape. Newspapers now make up just 10 percent of the AP’s income.
But even in today’s news world, the announcement is something of a stunner: Journalists of my generation grew up on the AP, where the click, clatter and chiming “ding” of an Associated Press teletype was the background hum of our newsrooms.
“The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual” was one of the first things an aspiring newspaperman bought — usually with his first paycheck if he or she didn’t already own a copy.
“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, told the AP’s own David Bauder.
Gannett and McClatchy, two of the U.S.’s largest newspaper companies, stopped publishing AP wire content in 2024, contributing to a 25 percent decline in The Associated Press’ newspaper revenue in the past four years.
According to Bauder’s article, the AP had also learned that Lee Enterprises, yet another large newspaper publisher and AP client, was looking for a way out of a contract that is set to expire at the end of this year.
Pace told Bauder that whether or not the company conducts layoffs will depend on how many people take the buyout.
Still, Pace said, “The AP is not in trouble…We’re making these changes from a position of strength but we’re doing so now to recognize our changing customer base.”
The AP will be upping its video teams, as well as adding journalists to beats “on topics of known customer interest.” It will also still have journalists in all 50 states.
Lately, the AP has been looking to tech companies for revenue (and says its revenue from such deals has grown by 200 percent over the last four years. It’s made deals with Google and OpenAI, and in March announced a deal to provide election data to the prediction market Kalshi. Elections in particular are a big money-maker for the AP; last year ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all signed up for its service providing election data.
The AP News Guild, the union representing AP staff, has said 120 people were offered buyouts. The union also said that the AP ignored a union request to bargain over artificial intelligence.
“AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence” the union said in its statement, “ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists,” the Guild said.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Thus spoke U.S. President Donald Trump on his Truth Social social media on Easter Sunday.
You don’t even need to let that sink in. It will of its own accord: Easter Sunday.
So, yes, it really has come to this: Our nation’s foreign affairs are being conducted by the equivalent of inebriated Uncle Rufus from his seat at the American Legion bar outside Toad Suck, Arkansas.
What a crazy old bastard.
What’s especially unnerving and odious is that my generation elected this potty-mouthed ignoramus, serial liar, draft-dodger, narcissist, convicted rapist, and an overseer of six bankrupt businesses. Six.
And not once have we elected him, but twice — to the highest office in the land.
It should be clear to everyone by now that my generation has woefully failed in its civic duties, and a depressingly large percentage of my group is either too dumb, too deluded, too self-centered or too altogether out of touch to have an inkling of the damage they have done to themselves, their children, their grandchildren and the nation.
We’ve screwed up.
And the thing is, as far as I know, there’s still no rehab for stupidity.
We gotta live with this shit and I’ve no clue how to do it. So I hope you haven’t come here looking for advice. I got nothing but despair.
But even I know that despair is a loser’s game.
“No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.”
Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, made that remark several months back while urging teachers to avoid adopting “an unbearable bleakness” in their classrooms.
Optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue.
Yet optimism is something in this day and age that seems to be its own category of rare earth mineral, but it’s out there, and it must be dug from the soil and championed.
Perhaps the only streak of optimism to be found in Trump’s disgraceful Easter Sunday post is that it opens yet another window to his soul that should make it easy to see through for all but the most deranged of his supporters: This is a man off his meds and off his rocker.
This is a man woefully unfit to lead, a man so morally and mentally stunted that questions about his sanity are not only apt they are essential.
Wherever you are on this spectrum of certainty and doubt, it’s okay to start small.
Let’s not join our old high school friends in re-posting ICE-friendly AI smut films; let’s not lean into that pot-like buzz of indulging in quick anger on our social media feeds.
When they go low, we go high really wasn’t bad advice. The air is cleaner and clearer above the clouds.
The view is better, different. It’s true, of course, that our technologies have made it easier for so many of us to see so much more of the world, but never before have so many of us seen so much without understanding what we are seeing.
Take time to understand the world. At the very least, take time to try.
Time may well be running out for there’s no dodging the fact that the USA has become a rouge nation where war crimes and the delight of bombing another nation “back to the stone age” are dangerously close to being normalized.
Before he died, he wrote songs. Good ones. He wrote “No Deeper Blue,” “I’ll be Here in the Morning,” “Be Here to Love Me,” “If I Needed You,” Pancho & Lefty,” and a whole lot more. He wrote “Rex’s Blues.”
Haunted throughout his life, he wrote songs to help keep the visitants at bay. He sang the good songs. He wrote better ones. He sang those songs too.
And on New Year’s Day, 1997, Townes Van Zandt died from cardiac arrhythmia aggravated by years of drug and alcohol addiction.
He was 52 years old.
“He sang about how precious it was to be alive yet spent a good deal of his life killing himself with drugs and alcohol.” — Michael Hall, Texas Monthly
He came from money, from an old Texas family that has a county named for them — Van Zandt County, about fifty miles east of Dallas. Townes Hall, the main building at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, is named for his great-grandfather on his mother’s side.
But Van Zandt didn’t care for money. He lived much of his life on the open road. If he came into any money along the way, he usually gambled it away; He preferred the company of outcasts, outlaws and the poor.
“You were living a lie if you sang the blues and hadn’t lived them,” he once told his first wife, Fran.
He lived them.
If I Needed You
If I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain? If you needed me, I would come to you I’d swim the seas for to ease your pain
Well, in the night forlorn, oh, the morning’s born And the morning shines with the lights of love And you will miss sunrise if you close your eyes And that would break my heart in two
The lady’s with me now since I showed her how To lay her lily hand in mine Loop and Lil agree, she’s a sight to see A treasure for the poor to find
Well, if I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain? If you needed me, I would come to you I would swim the seas for to ease your pain
Georgia State Road 197 intersects U.S. 76 between Hiawassee and Clayton, Georgia, plunging south through Moccasin Creek State Park and the mountains of the Chattahoochee National Forest until it dumps Helen-bound motorcyclists onto Georgia State Road 356.
From there you’ll follow the scenic, twisting two-lane through the valleys and mountains, past Unicoi State Park, and into Helen, a Bavarian-style, wannabe Alpine tourist trap cut through by the picturesque Chattahoochee River.
Outside Unicoi State Park in north central Georgia.
Weekend seasonal traffic is always bumper to bumper through Helen — it’s less than 100 miles from Atlanta, after all — but it’s a tiny village and being stuck in slow-moving traffic for five or six blocks can afford some prime people watching as folks parade by on the nearby sidewalks. So, relax.
Customer at a fast food stop in Helen, Georgia, with a “Jesus is My Big Homie” T-shirt. Probably a Southern thing. I didn’t ask. The front of her shirt said, “Godgang.” I got the picture.
If you’re on a motorcycle you’ll have plenty of two-wheel company. At one main-drag beer joint I passed on Sunday, March 22, there seemed to be 90- to 100 Harleys (mostly) jockeying for a parking space, and another 70 or so already parked.
Lots of motorcycles.
But if you happen to live like a teetotaling frickin’ monk, as I have been these past 10 years or so, you won’t be tempted by beer anyway, so keep going.
At the Hogpen Gap overlook on the Russell Scenic Highway in Georgia.
From my cabin, following the route I took on this trip, it’s possible to make a pleasant 140 mile loop through Helen and onto the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway — often praised as one of the most beautiful drives in north Georgia — and back to Cherokee County, North Carolina, without seeing the same scenery twice.
It’s an enjoyable bike ride, and the mid- to high- 70-degree weather we had Sunday made it a real pleasure.
Russell, by the way, was a racist Georgia governor and U.S. Senator who was one of the key figures in filibustering civil rights legislation in the 1960s, along with Mississippi’s John Cornelius Stennis, James Oliver Eastland, and a host of other bigoted, duck-dicked, discriminatory throwbacks to a Rebel yesteryear that is, sadly, enjoying something of an injudicious revival among numb-nuts on the far-right of American and other nation’s politics — a revival sparked in no small part by Donald The Dickless Duck Trump.
A selfie at the Hogpen Gap overlook. The Appalachian Trial crosses the road at this point.
Speaking of dicks and Trump, it’s easy to imagine he has a wee detachable penis similar to the orb spider, and, also, similarly, to imagine he was left a eunuch a few years back — as are all mating male orb spiders — when reportedly attempting to force his tiny member into the mouth of a 13 year old, who (again, reportedly) bit him on his little thingamajig, prompting the indignant U.S. president to slug her in the head.
This is mentioned in the Epstein Files. Just something we’ve all heard about President Jackass, an ignorant rotted snotball of a man.
Makes one wonder about those who voted for this amoral manchild creature — many of whom voted for him twice. Twice. Dear god. Think about that. Twice.
Dear Lord Odin, our beloved Allfather, guide us from this wicked, wanton, wallowing, witless wilderness, we humbly pray in thy exalted name. Now, damnit. Get us out now! Amen.
News arrived this morning that Trump’s misshapen Department of Justice has dropped the prosecution of an Arden, North Carolina, man who pointed out the illegality of a Trump so-called executive order designed to make it illegal to burn an American flag.
Flag-burning as a form of protest has been settled U.S. law for more than 30 years. The Supreme Court ruled in June 1989 in Texas vs. Johnson that flag burning is a form of legally protected speech under the First Amendment.
The high court ruling came after the 1984 arrest of Gregory Lee Johnson, who burned a flag during the Republican National Convention in Dallas.
The court found that the government cannot ban the expression of an idea just because society finds it offensive, and when Congress attempted to pass the Flag Protection Act of 1989 the Supreme Court reaffirmed that federal laws against flag burning were also unconstitutional.
So as I say, settled law.
Yet here we were, on Friday, with the wayward Justice Department having to dismiss charges against Jan “Jay” Carey, 55, a military combat veteran from Arden near Asheville who set the flag on fire in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, in August, the day that President Donald Trump signed a presidential order to crack down on flag burning.
“I’m burning this flag as a protest to that illegal fascist president that sits in that house,” Carey shouted to onlookers as he set fire to the flag. He was somewhat promptly arrested by police.
The justice department didn’t explain its decision to drop the case against Carey, who served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan and earned, among other decorations, the Bronze Star during his years in the military.
The move came just days before a deadline set on Monday for prosecutors to respond to claims by Carey’s lawyers that he had been the subject of an unwarranted attempt to curtail his first amendment rights, which include freedom of speech.
“This is a very significant victory for not only the first amendment rights of Mr Carey but the rights of all Americans to stand up and speak out on issues that they care about without being targeted for punishment by the justice department,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer for Carey, told NBC.
Verheyden-Hilliard, who is representing Carey pro bono, said that her client had been prosecuted “at the whims and the directives of a president who has said that he disfavors a particular viewpoint”.
Trump had ordered his lapdog of an attorney general, Pam Bondi, to “vigorously prosecute” those who burn the flag, arguing that the action could spur violence.
“It is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our nation – the clearest possible expression of opposition to the political union that preserves our rights, liberty, and security,” the order read. “Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot.”
Following his arrest, Carey said he felt compelled to act in response to the executive order.
“This was a direct protest about an illegal order that President Trump tried to put in place,” he said. “I did not do this just for myself, but for everyone who believes in the constitution and the protections for all that it provides.
Six days after the launch of Spring 2025 the feelings of unremitting illness molted like an outgrown snake skin and fell from me long enough, at least, for me to take the motorcycle out for the first time in two months, maybe three.
Who can remember? Winter and sickness are alike in being oppressive to the spirit as well as the memory.
On Thursday, the 27th, I rode to Blairsville, Georgia. But on Friday, I took the bike through the Nantahala Gorge, which I’ve seen described — accurately — as one of the more scenic drives in the country, and then on through Asheville to Fletcher, North Carolina.
Once again I was astonished at the still present damage left throughout the Asheville region by Hurricane Helene when it came through North Carolina in late September. The storm flattened huge swaths of forest at Fletcher, Asheville and elsewhere as it barreled through on its way to Tennessee and beyond.
Homes and businesses in that section of Appalachia will take years to recover, the forest decades; those who lost family and friends will never fully recover.
In spite of the damage and what it represented, though, the unremitting early spring sun had a way of burning off the loss — at least for me, unscathed by Helen like most everyone in the Murphy area. The damaging center of the storm moved east of us.
The upholstery shop where I was dropping off my stock seat to have recovered had been swept away by the storm, but Diana, the proprietor, had salvaged enough to continue her small business out of her home, which — higher up a nearby hill — had escaped much of the damaging floods from Helene.
On the way back I rode through downtown Asheville, past wrecked and gutted businesses along the creeks — almost all of which were turned into deadly raging rivers by the hurricane.
And then it was back home again — 287 miles later — where I marveled for the umpteenth time how a peaceful motorcycle ride can so easily reset one’s compass bearings.
All has become a boggy black bitterness thick with infectious insect swarms: the headlines, the subheads, the first graf and the last. All of it.
The smirking vice president at the Kennedy Center amid boos. The head of Homeland Security in western boots, tight jeans, dark mascara and a scornful frown.
All of it.
The under bridges and the viaducts awash in the unhoused, forgotten and forfeited to the forward march of crypto and trinkets of tin from the 5 and dime. Shun the rhyme. Take your time.
None is left anyway.
All has become black bitterness.
Fear is a password to freedom, we’re told. Take it or leave America behind. Your country or mine. Who knows anymore? We receive the news as it is created, without thought, reflection or introspection.
Without bitterness.
Insects swarm in the swamps of stinking sinking subdivisions where we feast on bologna sandwiches and the muscular, thick meat of chopped tongues conversing in glossolalia.
All has become a boggy black bitterness thick with infectious insect swarms: the headlines, the subheads, the first graf and the last. All of it.