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A couple of weeks ago I sketched our travels from London, England, to Hampstead, New Hampshire, via Barcelona. As I prepared to publish that post, we were hearing reports of winter conditions predicted for the path of our upcoming train trip home via Boston and Chicago.
As it turned out, we traveled in great comfort (despite being in coach seats the whole three days), but winter weather did cause several delays, particularly west of Chicago. By Malta, Montana, outside temperatures were down to -6 F.
At one time, technical problems and "congestion" got us five hours behind schedule, but we pulled into Portland, Oregon, only four hours late.
I brought an 800-page book with me, and nearly finished it on the train. It was Anne Rivers Siddons's Peachtree Road, a fictionalized social history of 20th-century Atlanta, Georgia, mostly from the point of view of its midcentury elite families. It's a sweeping cultural epic combined with close-up accounts of family dysfunctions and episodes of social failure worthy of Tolstoy. In any case,the book had plenty to keep me occupied.
One moment in Peachtree Road was particularly poignant for me. The author described the impact of President Kennedy's assassination on the idealists in Atlanta's emerging leadership of the early 1960's. I remember the assassination vividly, but at age ten, I had not had any sense of the "Camelot" aura around the Kennedys' White House.
Now, reading the novel, I remembered an incident in my Russian history class at Carleton University. The professor was Carter Elwood, a central figure in Slavic studies in Canada and the world, and an inspiring instructor in the classroom. (And Carleton had no lack of inspiring instructors in Soviet studies—Vladimir Grebenshchikov, Paul Varnai, Halina Stepanovna van de Lagemaat (see last item here), Edward Lee, and others.)
On November 22, 1973, the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Elwood set aside his normal themes. He talked to us about that brief period of new ideals, energy, and elegance, that Kennedy's presidency seemed to bring, and that were ended so cruelly by Oswald's bullets. With tears in his eyes, he contrasted the Kennedys' Camelot with the state of affairs in 1973, Nixon having just gone on television the previous week to tell us he was not a crook.
We have made this particular three-day railroad trip several times before, but it's not the longest train trip we've taken. That happened in 2011, when we spent four days on the train from Moscow, Russia, to Sukhbaatar, Mongolia. Some pictures from that trip are here, and I described the book I read on that trip, Crazy for God, in the following week's post.
One final note on travel. This year I marked the fiftieth anniversaries of two trips that helped shape my life. The first one was to Mississippi, and the second, to Moscow and Leningrad. More on those trips at From Mississippi to Moscow.
The Friends Incubator for Public Ministry presents an online conversation with Windy Cooler and historian Tom Hamm on bold Quaker ministers. It's this Saturday at 11 a.m. Pacific time. Register through the link on this page.
Two Washington Post items on religion in the USA: "A hidden trend" (new fascination with faith among young people); and Senator Warnock's warning to all of us, particularly Democrats of the cost of ignoring faith. (Video of Warnock's presentation available here.)
Is there a moment of truth coming for the USA's NASA and its moon-landing project? Ars Technica's Eric Berger describes a recent congressional hearing in which one credible scientist made his doubts very clear.
Tricia Gates Brown on "the hidden burden of chronic shame."
I cannot, cannot press "publish" on this post without noting the vulgar inhumanity of Trump on Somalia and Somalis. It is a festering scandal that such a man occupies the White House. Words fail me, so I'll link to The Guardian's Moira Donegan.
In keeping with the travel theme, I'm closing this week's post with a classical pianist from London, Nataly Ganina. She began her musical education at age 5 in Riga, Latvia. We first heard her at a lunchtime concert at St. Olave's Hart Street, London, a couple of years ago, and then again at the same place last month. I couldn't find a clip from that location, but here she is at Holy Trinity South Woodford, playing one of my favorite impromptus from Schubert, as she did again a couple of weeks later at St. Olave.
(I've selected the segment that starts with Schubert's fourth impromptu from Op. 90, but if you have the time, listen to the whole concert.)
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