With fireworks bans in place across parts of the Western U.S., it’s going to be another Fourth of July calling for alternative celebratory activities. In Colorado, where I live, we’ve learned to accept this fact, and it doesn’t stop the outdoor revelry.
Picnics and parades are standard July fourth fare, anyway, so if you happen to live in a place suffering from drought or plagued by wildfires, don’t let the lack of fireworks get you down. Instead, find a spark-free way to celebrate our nation’s birth (it also makes for a nice tribute to those victimized by said wildfires). Some suggestions:
Open flame isn’t required for a successful barbecue; use a gas grill instead.
Gather a group for a moonlight hike (this is also a good idea with regard to personal and wildlife safety). Sunset city walks are also fun; end your stroll at a wine bar or brew pub.
Get on the water. Find your nearest reservoir, lake or river, and spend the holiday appreciating this precious resource.
Ride a bike. In Boulder, where I live, Awe-struck Outdoors offers activities like creekside rides that include a bike-to-farm dinner. Get inspired, and organize your own holiday ride.
On a Thursday morning I throw a dozen or so paintings and a couple changes of clothing into the car, load an audiobook version of “Moby Dick” on the iPod and drive west on I-80. I’ve never been to Iowa City. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been to Iowa, even though I live in Chicago, a mere two hours or so from the state line.
A woman named Chris Ameling who follows me on Twitter invites me to come. She wants to turn the front room of the real estate firm where she works into a gallery; the first show there will feature my work. Most artists don’t have the luxury of turning down exhibition opportunities; I know I certainly can’t. The fact that it’s only a few hours’ drive makes the decision a no-brainer.
There are several tiers of prestige in the art world: at the top are museums and other venerated institutions, below that, established galleries, lower down, up-and-coming and not-for-profit exhibition spaces, then, far below those, the walls of bars and restaurants, craft fairs and everything else. It’s a mostly closed system where you have to be part of this or that club to even participate, let alone be celebrated. I’ve never been much of a joiner and have rarely longed to play in those upper echelons. The reason I paint and draw has little to do with gaining approval from the gatekeepers of culture and those gatekeepers have, for the most part, reciprocated by ignoring my work.
A few times a year Iowa City holds an arts walk. A couple dozen businesses put up paintings, photographs and other art in their windows and on their walls. They make a route map, advertise in local publications and print an oversized punch card for people to carry from stop to stop – get your card punched at 10 participating places and you’re entered to win a pair of tickets to a concert at the Englert Theater down the street. The newly named B Gallery – the little front room of Ms. Ameling’s firm, Barker Financial – is on this map.
Queequeg and Ishmael haven’t even boarded the Pequod yet when I get into town. Barker Financial is located on the second floor of a building on College Street – which is a pedestrian mall – so the people walking around and lunching al fresco are a bit put out to see my car creeping carefully along their quiet plaza. It’s the only way to unload my work without running a block back and forth several times. After the task is done and the car is properly parked in a municipal garage around the corner, I take a look around.The second floor of 114 ½ East College Street houses a variety of businesses, each behind a door with an over-sized transom above it. I could imagine a down-at-the-mouth detective hanging his shingle here in bygone days but now it’s home to several art studios, a messenger service, a taxi company, several vacant offices and – directly across from Barker – a tattoo parlor. I spend a couple hours hanging my oil paintings of bookshelves and gouaches of taxis in the little front room, battling the close, humid June air, the intermittent buzzing needles from across the hall providing a backing soundtrack.
A book reading has been set up for me at Prairie Lights bookstore but I’ve got a little time to kill before that so I wander around downtown Iowa City for a bit. Before leaving Chicago I’d asked people for recommendations and was told to go to George’s Buffet. George’s Buffet has no buffet but does have a Hamm’s Beer waterfall sign behind the bar. A woman with a leg in a cast invites me to take the barstool next to hers, finds out the reasons for my being in town and introduces me to her drinking buddies, one of whom is a sullen, aging history student who moonlights as a cabdriver. I order a cheeseburger and my new friend instructs me to ask for horseradish on it (which isn’t listed on the menu). There are a dozen types of potato chips for sides. I ask the bartender what Sterzing’s are like, and she says they’re the local brand and twice as greasy as the major brands, making my decision easy.
After washing down the cheeseburger and chips with Wild Turkey, George’s starts to feel like home, but it’s time to head to the bookstore so I say my goodbyes and walk the few blocks back to Prairie Lights. In the window display they’ve got a bunch of my books and an old photo of me behind the wheel of a taxi, to advertise the reading. A large poster for Dan Brown’s latest provides the backdrop for the whole display.
The reading, while sparsely attended, goes well. The University of Iowa is between semesters, so the students whose attendance at readings is practically mandatory, aren’t around. All you can ask for is for people to listen and to ask good questions, and I get both, so there’s nothing to complain about. Afterwards my hosts take me out for more drinks. They’re buying, so I order a bourbon a notch above Turkey. It feels good to be the guest and to have the bill taken care of because they’re happy to have me in their town. It doesn’t happen that often but I could certainly learn to get used to it.
***
Friday starts with breakfast at the Bluebird Diner. The host is an exasperated-looking David Cross type, all the waitresses have tattoos and most of the waiters are very obviously gay. Maybe it’s big-city prejudice but I’ve been struck since getting to town with the very prominent gay/lesbian presence in this little place. My hosts tell me that the lesbians paved the way and that Iowa’s early passage of gay marriage has a lot to do with it. Having spent some time in the restaurant racket, the vibe of the Bluebird feels very familiar, almost nostalgic to me. The art walk doesn’t start until 5 p.m. so I have a few hours to wander and see what else there is to see.
It turns out that this art walk I’m part of is a kind of add-on to a larger art fair. Several of the streets on the main drag are blocked off and a music stage and rows of booths are being assembled as I amble around without any particular destination in mind. Vendors unpack plastic bins and cardboard boxes full of jewelry, ceramics, macramé, paintings and all manner of crafts and creations all around. Street fairs always bring on a low-level malaise. Thinking of all these people doing so much work for so little reward, the sheer volume of handmade products is overwhelming and dispiriting. I keep walking, thankful not to really be part of it. The selling and showing of artwork has always been my least favorite part of the whole process, be it in a pristine white-walled gallery or a temporary tent down the street from where they sell the corndogs.
I get back to the B Gallery a little before 5 p.m. Chris is putting out strawberries, cheesecake bites and mini bottles of water in the back room for the prospective art walkers. The tattoo shop isn’t part of the festivities but stays open for business anyway. The daughter of one of the tattooists wanders about listlessly, cradling a very real-looking bloody, bandaged leg, waiting, apparently, for the evening to end so she can go home. David Barker – whose firm is hosting my show – comes by with his family and buys one of the cab paintings. It reminds him of his time at the University of Chicago. His purchase makes this whole two-day out-of-town trip worthwhile. A couple dozen other visitors come through as well. Most are bent on getting their cards punched and only give cursory attention to the artwork. The ones that do linger get a look of recognition on their faces as they examine the cluttered bookshelves and parked taxis that populate my pictures. That look tells me that what I’m doing is worthwhile and valued, even if it’s not valued enough to crack a checkbook open very often. As for the rest, the ones that start stretching out punch cards to be attended to before even coming all the way into the room, I do my part to make their stay as brief and painless as possible. I stand holding the hole-puncher, ready to dispatch them on to their next stop with a smile on my face. The ones that figure out that I’m also responsible for the artwork pause a moment or two and glance around politely before lowering their eyes and moving on.
I buy a breaded tenderloin sandwich from one of the vendors around the corner from the parking garage around 9:15 p.m., get in my car and turn “Moby Dick” back on. Ishmael and Queequeg are still negotiating the terms of their employment and haven’t even met Captain Ahab yet as I pull into my garage back home in Chicago some three and a half hours later.
Whenever I need a little escape but can’t get out of town, I fire up an episode or two of “Globe Trekker” so I can live vicariously through the adventures of travelers like Megan McCormick. Since she started hosting the show in 1997, she’s taken viewers to the Greek Islands, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Micronesia, India, the Silk Road and a host of other exotic locales.
“Globe Trekker,” shown in the U.S. on PBS, is my favorite travel show because it focuses on real travelers experiencing slices of local cultures, not sightseeing. McCormick is my kind of traveler. Her enthusiasm for the places she visits is infectious and you can’t help but conclude that she’d be a fun person to travel with. She got the travel bug in college and has found a way to make a living out of her wanderlust.
McCormick has lived in three U.S. states plus Argentina, Japan, Spain and the U.K., but says she’s now settling down in New York. We spoke to her this week about her favorite places, how she balances family life with her nomadic lifestyle and how she landed her dream job.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Ohio but I was mostly raised in Florida. I first came to New York when I was 12 and I remember feeling this tremendous sigh of relief because I didn’t really fit in in Florida. I was this gawky, ballet-dancing geek who never went in the sun.
Were you a traveler growing up?
I grew up with a giant map of the world and a subscription to National Geographic. That was my mom’s influence. She had this wonderful wanderlust but we didn’t have the resources to travel very much. I studied abroad in France and after I graduated (with a degree from Boston University in philosophy and political science), I taught English in Japan through the JET program. And that was my first foray into traveling independently.
That was in the mid-’90s after I graduated from college. Then I stayed in Asia and backpacked around the region for almost a year and then I moved to New York. I saved a lot of money teaching in Japan and my dad said I should save that money and come home, but I didn’t do that dad, I didn’t! It’s been very hard for me to grow up and settle down.
Do you have a family?
I do. I’m married with kids now so that’s changed a lot. I have an 8-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son.
My daughter traveled with me when she was really little and I just kept doing the show. My husband is in television as well, so we would alternate jobs to keep traveling. Then about two years ago, we alighted in Brooklyn and decided to put down roots here for a little while.
What does that mean?
I don’t know. It means we’ve stopped being peripatetic and moving from place to place. When “Globe Trekker” sent me to a location, especially in the early years, I was so excited; I would just stay. The crew would move on after we finished taping but I would stay. I was consistently away. In 2001, I was based in Barcelona and I thought I was missing too many moments in people’s lives, so I moved back to New York. Then I was in Argentina in 2008 for three years.
Waita minute. I’m lost. Now you’re in Argentina? Your resume might be even more of a mess than mine.
I more or less backpacked most of the year until 2004 when my daughter was born, but I kept traveling for the first few years. In 2008, we went on vacation to Argentina for six weeks, but decided to stay. We ended up staying (in Mendoza) for three years but that wasn’t really the plan. That’s the beauty of working for yourself.
So how did you transition from backpacker to “Globe Trekker” host?
I had just moved back to New York and I was applying to grad schools for East Asian studies. I was a production assistant for “The News with Brian Williams.” I had some high level duties such as photocopying, ordering supplies and sending faxes. The whole time I was scheming to get out of there. I had a friend who was an actor and he saw this ad in an actor’s magazine announcing an audition for someone who loved to travel.
I’d never been on camera and had never been an actress, so instead of sending a headshot, I sent a collage of photos, kind of like an 8th grade book report. And I wrote a poetic, it’s-the-journey-that-matters kind of thing on the back of it. The director said she had never received a collage before and gave me an audition.
The first audition was great, but on the second one everything went wrong. We were wandering around Chinatown. A cat peed on me. I knocked over a fruit bin. I stumbled across a guy who was painting and he shouted at me like a crazy person and said I was stealing his soul.
It was a disaster but they called and said, “If you can leave in ten days, you’ll have one show and it’s in India.” This was in 1997. I think I’ve done 30-35 shows since then.
Do you know how many countries you’ve been to?
I should know that. My husband and I have a competition to see who’s been to more countries.
Who won?
He’s slightly ahead. He had some hard-to-get-to ones, which was very annoying. He did this great trip from Morocco to Mauritania, down to Nigeria. But I’ve done shows on six continents.
Howlong do you spend in-country when you’re filming?
We used to shoot for nearly three and a half weeks. But times have changed and budgets have changed. Travel has gotten easier. Now, depending on location, it might be two to three weeks.
And you take your family with you?
My daughter traveled with me until she was older. I’ve only done a few shows since my son was born. My husband would watch the kids while I was working but now he has a grown up job, so the kids stay here. Now that my daughter is in school the nomadic lifestyle is a little more challenging but I still go away every summer. I can’t stay still in the summer.
On the show, you stay in a mix of places. Sometimes it’s a $5 per night hostel, other times you’re in a really nice place, right?
It depends on the location. Generally we try to find unique places to stay that are affordable for most people. And those are usually the places that have the most character.
Tell me about one of the dodgier places you’ve stayed in?
A bed is a bed as long as there is nothing crawling in the mattress. I travel with a silk sleeping bag liner, just in case. But I did stay in a very strange, concrete hostel in the middle of nowhere in Inner Mongolia. The bathroom was outside and I went to find it in the middle of the night and I had to dodge two sheep and the bathroom was a hole in the ground over some pigs. There were pigs underneath; there were pigs! That was not a pleasant experience at all.
What are thecountries you’re most passionate about?
I love Lebanon so much. And I’m also a big fan of Colombia.
What places do you recommend in Colombia?
I love cities, so I would check out Bogota and Cartagena. And from there, I would go to Santa Marta and then inland up into the mountains. If you like hiking, there is a five- or six-day hike into La Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City. You’re into the jungle and there are indigenous people there who are incredible. And then there’s a beautiful island called Providencia, just off the coast with great beaches.
When you get bad weather do you wait it out or keep shooting?
Sometimes we wait 5-6 days for it to stop raining; other times, we work around it. Ian Wright was in Ireland recently and he said it rained 24 hours a day for days, but they just kept going though. I was in Myanmar for the show about three weeks ago. It’s an amazing country that’s in transition. The people are so lovely. We were there for Burmese New Year. They celebrate by shutting down the country for five days. They have a water festival, where they spray people with water or dump buckets of water on people. You have to have rain gear on because you’re going to get wet.
How many hours a day is the camera trained on you when you’re traveling?
It’s not a reality show so the camera isn’t on me all day long. But we film from sun up to sun down.
Have they ever asked you to wear something or do something that was a little too hokey?
Yes! I would say the entire Southeastern United States program. I think I wore more embarrassing outfits there than everywhere else but it was fun. I was decked out in an antebellum gown walking down some stairs, a Civil War dress, and I was in a cotillion dress dancing with a 16-year-old.
What’s on the horizon for you?
I’m going to Hokkaido in Japan for “Globe Trekker” and I also tried to make my own program, “Sea Nation.” We had a 12-part series where we gave up our normal lives in New York to live on a boat sailing around the Caribbean. It was incredible! We went to 25 different islands and met people from all walks of life. It was 2008, right at the beginning of the economic downturn, and we explored the idea – what can make you happy besides all the things we think will make us happy.
Youdid this with your kids?
With my daughter, she was 4 at the time. She loved it! My son wasn’t born yet. We were at sea for about four months.
The show was on the Discovery Channel in Asia and a few places in Europe but it never found a home in the U.S. It’s with a sales agent now, so maybe something will happen with it. But there are 11 episodes available online or you can buy the DVD.
Do you consider your job a dream job?
If someone is organizing an opportunity for me to travel and paying me a small amount of money, I will never, ever complain about that. It’s been such a gift. Even the worst days, the day when they made a left instead of a right and we had to stay in the car in a desert for 14 hours, you still get funny stories. I can’t argue with anyone who says it’s a dream job.
Now that summer is officially here, the National Park Foundation is opening up its Summer Scrapbook and they’re asking us to help them fill it. The NPF is inviting the public to share their favorite photos, videos and travel tips from America’s national parks and in exchange, they’re giving us a chance to win one of two trips to two of the country’s most iconic national parks.
The contest is a simple one. All you need to do is visit the Summer Scrapbook page and share your photos in one of several categories that includes such subjects as sunrise/sunset, wildlife, history and culture and more. There is also a category for short videos and one for posting helpful tips for visiting the parks. You can enter as many as ten items between now and Sept. 8 with each entry increasing your chance to win. On Sept. 10, the Park Foundation will announce ten finalist in each category and the general public will be asked to vote for their favorites. Voting closes on Sept. 30 and everyone who casts a vote will be automatically entered to win a trip through the Grand Canyon by train.
The person who wins the overall popular vote for the best photo, video or travel tip will also win a trip to Yosemite National Park, one of the most spectacular destinations in the entire U.S. park system. Meanwhile, the individual winners of each of the categories will also receive a National Park Explorer Pack that includes outdoor gear from L.L. Bean and Marmot, as well as gifts from the National Park Foundation and several of the parks themselves.
So, if you’ve got some great park photos in your collection, add them to the Scrapbook and see if you can’t win a trip to make even more great national park memories.
We were locked out of the humble home where country music legend Loretta Lynn grew up and were about to leave Butcher Hollow when someone pulled up in silver Chevy Silverado pickup truck. A trim man with neatly parted gray hair wearing a pair of jeans and a red-checked shirt stepped out of the truck and introduced himself.
“I’m Herman Webb,” he said, shaking my hand.
It took me a minute to realize that this was the brother of country music stars Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gale. But how did he know that we wanted to tour the home they grew up in?
“You were just down at the grocery shop,” he explained, sensing my confusion. “They called and said there was someone here to see the house. I live just 500 feet down the road there, so here I am.”I like old school country music but I’m not so hardcore that I would ordinarily seek out the childhood homes of well-known country music artists. Loretta Lynn, however, is another story. Even if you don’t like country music, you have to love her life story.
The daughter of a coal miner, she was the second of eight children who grew up poor in a place called Butcher Hollow in Van Lear, Kentucky. (It’s pronounced and sometimes spelled Butcher Holler and is named after her mother’s family whose surname was Butcher.) She got married at 15 and had three children by the time she was 19. At 29, she was already a grandmother. Not exactly a textbook formula for success, but after moving out west she was discovered at a talent show in Tacoma and went on to record 16 number one hits, winning four Grammy awards and countless other accolades along the way.
Three of her siblings, sisters Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue, and brother Jay Lee Webb, also pursued careers in country music, though none were as successful as she was. But despite her fame she never forgot her humble roots. Indeed her most recent album is called Van Lear Rose and her best-known hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” is all about growing up in the Van Lear coal mines area.
Butcher Hollow is a destination, not a place you just happen to pass through. We were on our way back to Chicago after touring Hatfield-McCoy country in West Virginia and Kentucky and I convinced my wife that an excursion to Lynn’s childhood home was a worthy detour.
We got hopelessly lost but with a little help from some friendly locals we finally found Millers Creek Road, which meanders down to Butcher Hollow. It’s a narrow road that passes through this isolated community of trailers and modest homes. We passed a number of abandoned or burned out homes and shops, and in some ways, it almost seemed like a ghost town until we stopped into Webb Grocery, a small shop filled with Loretta Lynn memorabilia owned by Herman.
The narrow road leading down to the house is overgrown in places, and I kept stopping to get out and look at things that caught my eye: an old white school bus with “Kentucky” written in cursive script and a multicolored flag serving as someone’s curtains; a modest home with a cluttered front porch and a “God Bless America” sign; and a small home that was dwarfed by three huge satellite dishes. The nearest Starbucks, I later confirmed, is an hour and 20 minutes to the north in Huntington, West Virginia. Butcher Hollow is about as off the grid as you can get east of the Mississippi.
After a few minutes of small talk with Herman, 78, on the front porch of the old wooden cabin the family moved to when Loretta was a toddler, he put on one of his sister’s albums and we stepped into the house. The first floor has just two rooms, both with double beds, and a kitchen. (The attic bedrooms are off limits to visitors.) I was immediately struck by how tiny the place is, especially for a huge family, and by the fact that there was graffiti all over the walls.
“I can’t control what they do when they get ahead of you,” Herman explained.
The home is perched on a hilltop and is filled with period antiques the family actually used. Every inch of wall space that isn’t filled with family photos or memorabilia is covered in graffiti – people have signed their names and the date they visited the place or written other messages, like “Welcome to Butcher Holler” to mark their visit.
A trio of teenage girls turned up and Herman led us around the home, telling stories and pointing out the significance of various items on display.
“This is the best piece of furniture I got,” he said in his raspy, Kentucky twang, made horse by a lifetime of work in factories as a painter and welder, grasping a swing positioned in what was once his parent’s bedroom. “This swing was on the porch when I was a little kid.”
He pointed to a photo of his parents and said, “That’s mommy and daddy sittin’ in this swing in nineteen and fifty one. My dad died in 1959, at 52. Mommy remarried but she never did have no more kids.”
Herman told us that the town fell on hard times after the Van Lear coal mine closed in 1948.
“This used to be a thriving town,” he said. “We had plenty of stores, even a stoplight.”
The family moved to Wabash, Indiana, in 1955. Loretta and her husband didn’t care for Indiana so they gravitated west to Washington State where she was discovered. Herman said he returned to Van Lear for good in 1975.
“I don’t know why,” he joked. “Guess I was just homesick.”
A cousin lived in the place into the 70s and Herman started fixing it up, so he could open it to the public in 1986. The house had no electricity or running water, and everyone had to use an outhouse out back when nature called.
“We didn’t have much money,” Herman said. “But neither did anyone else we knew and there was always something to eat.”
He said that they learned how to forage for edible plants and berries on hikes around the surrounding hills. Herman played in a band called the Country Nighthawks; he played the “git-TAR,” but was never able to quit his day job.
“We played a lot of gigs but I could never go too far, because I couldn’t quit my job and we needed the money,” he explained. “But I still play now and again.”
His sisters still come back to Butcher Hollow for visits, and he enjoys visiting with tourists who come to see the place, especially since his wife died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease seven years back.
“This old stove, tea kettle and cabinets here are all the original things we had,” Herman said, leading us through the tiny kitchen. “That churn behind you – I’ve churned buttermilk in that, beat butter, I’ve done it all.”
He showed us a moonshine container, his dad’s coal mining helmet and a host of other items and after showing us around the living room, took a seat on a couch. As much as I enjoyed seeing the house and this unique little forgotten corner of the country, the real treasure in visiting Butcher Hollow was having a chance to meet Herman, who seemed to be in no hurry to go home.
After a nice long chat, we said our goodbyes and on the way back out of town I saw a bumper sticker on a parked car down at the grocery shop that read, “Y’all Been to Butcher Hollow?” I’ve traveled all around the world in the last four decades but I can’t remember ever getting a richer, more authentic slice of a fast vanishing culture than what we experienced in this forgotten little hamlet in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Hell yeah, I’ve been to Butcher Hollow and I plan to come back around someday too. Hope to see you there.