Okay, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Can anyone out there beat the following for the ultimate American experience on Independence Day?
Here’s our plan: We’re going to start out in the birthplace of Elvis. We’re going to pilot our house on wheels along a classic roadway, a trail first traversed by Native Americans. We’re going to find our way to a gem of a town. We’re going to watch the national pastime in its purest form. And we’re going to close the day by watching a masterpiece in the nighttime sky.
And here are the details: We’re going to wake up at our campground at Tupelo, Mississippi, and then we’ll spend much of the day driving 200 miles along the Natchez Trace Parkway, one of the most scenic and historic highways in America. Among the stops along the way: Tupelo National Battlefield and the Mississippi Crafts Center.
We’re going to make our way to the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi – to the town of Pearl (that’s the gem) and to Trustmark Park, home of the Mississippi Braves. We’ll watch minor league baseball, rooting for the home team because Mississippi happens to be our home for these few days. Afterwards, the fireworks show, Fourth of July-style.
We already cruised through 160 miles of the Natchez Trace today, stopping to pay homage to an American icon forever associated with the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. We visited the tomb of Meriwether Lewis. Appointed by Jefferson to lead the Corps of Discovery (with William Clark), Lewis embarked on the ultimate American road trip (well, river trip), then returned to serve as governor of the Louisiana Territory. But his life and death are a reminder of the complexity of expectations. Lewis died (most likely at his own hand) in the Mississippi outback at the age of 35.
But that was today – July 3rd. The Fourth of July, for me, is always a reminder of something else – freedom. And by that I mean, the freedom of a road trip.
I love the fact that we find ourselves in a unique and unexpected place every time Independence Day rolls around. Four years ago, it was Scarsdale, New York. Three years ago, it was Savannah. Two years ago, a minor league game in Great Falls, Montana. Last year, Pike’s Peak and Colorado Springs.
So this year, it’s going to be a place called Pearl. The world is our oyster.
I met an Olympic gold medalist today.
Here we were, parked at a TV station in Chattanooga, preparing to show off our one-of-a-kind hybrid Winnebago, when a guy named Joe walked up. “Hey,” he said, “I do a little webcast for something I call 'Gold to Green.' This would be perfect.” So he interviewed me for about six minutes, a webcast (GoldtoGreenTV.com) that he describes as “highlighting Chattanooga’s stories about living better through smarter environmental choices.”
Joe knows environmental choices. He’s “a paddler,” as he called himself, and he boasted that the whitewater events at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics were held about an hour from his hometown. What it took a little digging to discover is this: In Barcelona in 1992, Joe Jacobi won America’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in whitewater canoe slalom.
Never heard of whitewater canoe slalom? Does it matter? Joe was the BEST IN THE WORLD at something. How many people can say that?
But Jacobi, who was a member of the Olympic team again in 2004 in Athens, has now turned his athletic glory into this eco-trumpeting initiative, and I think that’s the most impressive thing about him. “Paddling with a purpose” is how he characterizes it.
And isn’t that really what it’s all about? You work hard. You battle raging rivers (usually metaphorically). If you succeed, you create a platform for yourself. Then you use that platform to contribute to the greater good. It’s why my athletic heroes are people like Arthur Ashe and Jackie Robinson. It’s why I (grudgingly) admire guys like George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Um, and Angelina Jolie.
I’m no gold medalist. (I mean, I did teach canoeing at summer camp when I was a teenager. But I don’t recall much whitewater on placid Lake Nebagamon.) However, I have managed to cobble together a bit of a platform. So I’m grateful for the opportunity to drive the hybrid RV this summer and to talk about both my children’s book about protecting the planet and the eco-friendly lessons we learn from our road trips.
But Joe inspires me. And Chattanooga does, too. Tomorrow, my son Jesse and I are going to ride the Incline Railway up a big hill plateau known as Lookout Mountain. It’s touted as the steepest railway in the world – a nearly 73-degree incline toward the end of the journey. Yikes.
But my gold-medal lesson for today is this: It’s what you do once you’re at the top that counts. And I learned it from a guy named Joe.
We drove past Graceland yesterday. And I’m writing from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis’s birthplace. But this post isn’t about the King. It’s about Martin Luther King, Jr.
The name of this blog is YOU ARE HERE, and that may be what I love most about these summer RV trips – the fact that we get to go THERE. We get to travel to places dripping with history and symbolism. We get to apply whatever we’ve learned about those places in the past to the experience of actually exploring them in the present. We immerse ourselves in a place and gain a greater understanding of its majesty, its profundity, its power.
The Civil Rights Museum in Memphis is one of those places.
You want powerful? How about a museum about a cause. And how about placing that museum at the very location where the man most responsible for the success of that movement was gunned down. That’s soul-touching stuff.
You’ve seen the pictures, the ones where Jesse Jackson and a few others are pointing from a balcony while their fatally injured friend and mentor lies crumpled at their feet. That’s the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The motel’s façade is still there, and there are even cars from the era parked in front. There, too, is Dr. King’s Room 306, his last respite before James Earl Ray shot him from across the street that day in April 1968.
But the rest of the motel has been gutted and reborn – as a museum, a place for people to recall and celebrate the tragedies and triumphs of the civil rights movement.
You walk into the building, and you’re first invited to sit for a ten-minute introductory video about the civil rights movement. One of the heroic figures featured in the video is a woman named Carolyn Goodman. It was her son, Andy – along with his friends Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney – who was murdered in Mississippi in 1964 while trying to help African-Americans register to vote. You may know it as the Mississippi Burning story. Andy was 20 years old. It was his second day in Mississippi.
Carolyn Goodman devoted the rest of her life to assuring that her son didn’t die in vain. She became a civil rights icon herself, and I came to know her very well. In fact, she asked me to co-write her memoirs with her. So we spent hours discussing some of the most intimate and horrifying moments of her life. The book, which we called My Mantelpiece, is due out soon, published by the Andrew Goodman Foundation.
Unfortunately, Carolyn died last August. I went to her memorial service in New York. Mayor Bloomberg spoke at the ceremony. So did Harry Belafonte. A gospel choir sang “We Shall Overcome.” It was then that I fully realized how the most significant players of the civil rights era are aging and fading away – and how grateful I was that Carolyn and I were able to create something that immortalized her perspective of the movement.
It’s another reason to love the Civil Rights Museum. After the introductory film, you’re led on a chronological journey through the people, places and events that became touchstones of the cause. Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. Frederick Douglas. Montgomery. Greensboro. Birmingham. Selma. Boycotts. Sit-ins. Marches. Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Epithets. Fire hoses. Nooses. Jackie Robinson. Thurgood Marshall. Rosa Parks.
And then you make your way to 1968, to Memphis, to the Lorraine Motel. Which is when you arrive at Room 306. And somehow, despite the weight of the loss of a great man at that very spot, you still feel rather buoyed by a sense of all that he and his colleagues managed to accomplish.
I first visited the museum 13 years ago, and I couldn’t wait to return. But this time around, there was something new across the street – a second building, this one covering the aftermath of the assassination, the investigation, the conspiracy theories, and the achievements of many others in the decades that followed.
You want powerful? How about staring out the same bathroom window through which James Earl Ray aimed his rifle. Yes, it’s that building.
The day before his assassination, Dr. King told a crowd that he had seen the mountaintop, the brass ring of racial equality, but he added eerily, “I may not get there with you…”
That’s why it’s so important to go THERE.
