#rural Hoosiers are an interesting bunch

[max--phillips]

Another wild thing I saw while at work today:

Got behind a dude in a Pickup Truck™️ who was clearly… y’know. Like That. And one of his stickers said “shoot your local heroin dealer” which. I mean, fair I guess? But the kicker on this was. On a chain around the hitch on the back of his truck were these two very big hex nuts. And it… took me a second to realize that. Like. They’re truck nuts. But they’re hex nuts. And. It was just. Hm.

[bethsteury]

“So, when are you going back?”

I lost count of how many people asked when we planned a return visit to Maine, where our immediate family had marveled in the beauty of an east coast autumn while spending time with the paternal side of my biological family in October of 2018. I found it intriguing that folks didn’t ask if we planned to visit again, but rather when we’d venture that direction again. Could be the phrases that populated our accounts of the vacation—gorgeous views, awesome adventures, a great time with the “new” family—may have encouraged the “when” assumption.

Since my husband and I had taken all of five seconds to sign-on for the big gathering of Grammy Brown’s branch of the family tree planned for July of 2019, the answer was a quick, easy, “Next July for an extended family reunion.”

I loved that a plan for a “next time” had been set in motion. And the potential to meet many more paternal relatives excited me. Another opportunity to explore Maine, to see the beautiful landscape in its summer colors coupled with more “first family” time and connections. July couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Our “Maine in October” adventure had left me immersed in yet another phase of processing. Honestly, it feels like I’ve spent the better part of the last three years in a state of wading through stuff. From the doorstep secret revealed and continuing through every new discovery, each in-person connection, the incredible trips to significant locales, my mind has remained in a near-constant state of sorting through a myriad of mental questions, see-sawing emotions, and potential future scenarios. Factor in the loss of both of my parents in the middle of all these breakthroughs and connections, and it’s a wonder my brain hasn’t turned into a puddle of mush.

With most of my faculties intact, the planning for Maine Adventure #2 commenced. I envisioned the lot of us together—bio dad, Aunt Donna, cousin Honey, brother Alan, and possibly, hopefully two other half-brothers we’d yet to meet. Not to mention the boat load of cousins attending the big family gathering. I was positively giddy.

But my excitement took a hit with the news that Aunt Donna and Honey would be unable to attend. I admit to a fair amount of what I’m sure bordered on badgering, but it was not to be. And then, bio dad confirmed he would not be able to attend either. The realization of how much I’d been looking forward to another in-person encounter with him explained the huge wave of disappointment that surged through me. The youngest of my biological brothers hailing from California admitted his participation would be a last-minute decision, one that looked less likely every day. Sigh . . . But the oldest of my birth father’s children confirmed he and his wife would make the cross-country trek from Washington state. Yes . . . I allowed myself a bit of time to pout and stew and fret. Then I tucked away most of my disappointment and moved on with the arrangements for adventures in Maine round two.

Maine Adventure #2

A super early July 19th flight dropped us in Portland by noon. We skipped from the airport in full vacation sightseeing mode, to take in the sights at Two Lights State Park. Drinking in ocean views never, ever gets old. Especially if you’ve lived your entire life in Indiana.

  We sped north to the now sort-of-familiar Augusta and Waterville area for a nap, hoping to banish the sleepiness leftover from a very short night, and to prepare for an important family dinner.

While older brother Gerald knew the story of how I’d come to be his new little sis, we’d not yet connected in person, by phone or email. I’d already experienced the gamut of newly-discovered sibling responses, resulting in a variety of relationship statuses. From welcome to the family/let’s get to know each other to cordial but with little interest in connecting to an initial welcome that soon disintegrated into distant silence. I loved the close-and-growing-relationships. I understood the little interest one. I mourned the no-longer-a-connection-at-all relationship. I knew what I wanted from this newest sibling introduction. I also knew that I didn’t have the deciding vote.

A dinner date that first night gave us a chance to meet before the next day thrust us into the crowd of reunion attendees. Lots of conversation of the surface level and deeper variety flowed freely over a delicious meal in a cozy, back booth. We swapped stories about our individual families, a total of four sons, three daughters, and five grandchildren between the three half-siblings seated around the table. I sensed a cautious approach from this new older brother—one that I totally understood. He and his wife Furong didn’t know us from the man on the moon despite our shared DNA. But when we parted company, I inwardly declared the evening a success and set my sights on tomorrow’s main event, the Tobey Family Reunion that bio dad’s first cousins had been planning for nine months.

The Tobey Family Reunion

The next day we traversed roads not completely unknown to us to the rural area where Grammy Brown’s family had lived for decades. A long winding lane led us to a stone-quarry-turned-beautiful-pond property. The property owner/event co-organizer who knew immediately who we were—the new relatives from Indiana—shuttled us from the parking area to the circus-sized white tent shading folks from the blistering 91-degree heat. We donned name tags and set about meeting and greeting our kin.

Thelma Tobey Brown

The next four hours were a whirlwind of conversations, of hearing how much I looked like looked like my Grammy Brown, of being greeted by folks who’d heard my story and were thrilled to welcome us to the family. I leafed through photo albums where I spied pics of my birth father as a teenager. I tracked down Jill, the cousin whose amount of shared DNA nearly ruined the “poster family” status I’d been touting to demonstrate the accuracy of Ancestry’s testing process. Jill’s dad and my Grammy Brown were siblings, making Jill my bio dad’s first cousin and my first cousin once removed (1c1r). But our shared DNA comes in at the very highest level for 1c1r, so high that we could have been first cousins. Of course, I insisted on a picture and Jill graciously agreed. I met other DNA matches–Priscilla and Margaret–chatted with the reunion organizers–Robin and Noreen–swapped tips and techniques with fellow genetic genealogy enthusiasts, all the while scoping out the crowd for family resemblances and scanning name tags for folks from the family tree.

At one point, my head whipped around for a second look at a tall gentleman who looked remarkably like my birth father. Had he popped in at the last minute? Like we’d contemplated might happen? Nope. Just his first cousin who bore a striking resemblance to him. And threaded throughout the afternoon, another round of just-introduced siblings engaging in the odd combination of catching up and getting to know one another all at the same time.

Throughout the afternoon I murmured time and again, “These people really know how to do events . . . ”  My brain had kicked into event-organizing mode the moment we arrived, calculating the time and effort that had obviously been invested in today’s festivities. When the first signs of tear down and clean-up began, I felt prodded to hop up and help. But instead I continued to mingle and visit, pushing aside the guilt for not pitching in. The afternoon came to an end before I got a chance to meet everyone. But I’m counting on a next time.

More sibling time . . .

Sunday found us sharing another sibling/spouses meal with lunch at a favorite local seafood joint. Recollections and stories flowed between Alan and Gerald, prompted by the same box of photos we’d pored over last October. And I again imagined myself as part of their lives as well as them alongside me in my growing up years. Furong had forever captured a moment when, side by side at the reunion, Gerald and I had not only shared the very same expression, but also displayed a remarkable resemblance. I promptly texted the picture to my son and daughter back in Indiana who marveled at the similarity.

We gathered one last time for dinner, a boisterous bunch including Alan’s immediate family, all folks we’d met last October. The family vibe around the long table intensified my extreme dislike for the 1022 miles between us and the Maine bunch and the 1989 miles between our Hoosier home and Spokane, Washington, where Gerald and Furong lived. But we’d made a genuine connection with them leaving no doubt the promised “let’s stay in touch” sentiments would indeed come to fruition. Hugs all around times two left me sad that our time together had come to an end.

More scenic views

While they headed north to take in more of Maine’s beauty, we plotted our three remaining days. Alan joined us on Monday for a full day of Camden State Park and wild blueberries, lighthouses and ocean views, and of course, more seafood.

    On Tuesday we launched from Boothbay Harbor for a four-and-a-half-hour whale and puffin watching excursion. Miles and miles of ocean and blue skies, and yes, we saw a whale. But the highlight of the trip was the stop at Eastern Egg Rock, a seven-acre island located six miles from New Harbor, the world’s first re-established seabird colony, managed by The Puffin Project.

On Wednesday we enjoyed lunch with some relatives on Grampy Brown’s side of the family. Some DNA detective work on Aunt Donna’s part had solved a long-time mystery that led to us lunching with our first cousin twice removed (1c2r)—a first cousin to our Grampy Brown—and her daughter our second cousin once removed (2c1r)—a second cousin to our bio dad. Is that cool or what? Too, too fun. We’d hoped to meet up with a couple of other DNA-matched-cousins from Massachusetts and Georgia but arrangements did not fall into place. “Another time . . . ” we all promised. “Another time.”

A quick stop in Belfast left us once again in awe of the beauty Mainers enjoy all year round. Literally at the water’s edge, we spotted a three-sided structure that housed of all things, a library. I immediately envisioned myself enjoying a good read under sun drenched blue skies surrounded by the ocean.

The day ended with a farewell seafood feast at Alan’s. When we couldn’t eat another bite, we leaned back to give our stuffed stomachs a bit more room. Conversation lulled for a moment before Alan’s tone turned serious with a pointed question. “When are you coming back?”

I reminded him we had journeyed to Maine twice since his visit to Indiana. He reminded us we’d barely scratched the surface of all that Maine had to offer–a fact we knew well. “We’ll come back someday, I’m sure . . . ”

“But probably not next year.”

“No, probably not.”

With no specific plans in place for a “next time,” this last-in-a-series of goodbyes was tough. But we would be back. We will visit again.

And the processing continues. I’m beginning to realize it will probably never end. This week marks the 3rd anniversary of Aunt Donna popping up on our DNA results. Within hours, the mystery was solved, opening the door to so many people and experiences and relationships that, now,  I honestly can’t imagine not being part of our lives. I’m so looking forward to what year four has in store.

If this is your first introduction to my story, check out the beginning here.

      Meeting the Bio Family: Chapter 10 – Another Big Bro and Cousins Galore “So, when are you going back?” I lost count of how many people asked when we planned a return visit to Maine, where our immediate family had marveled in the beauty of an east coast autumn while spending time with the paternal side of my biological family in October of 2018.

[tamboradventure]

Here Lies America: An Interview With Jason Cochran

Posted: 01/27/2020 | January 27th, 2020

In 2010, I decided to spend the summer in NYC. I was two years into blogging and was making enough where I could afford a few months here. Still new to the industry, NYC was where all the legends of writing lived and I wanted to start making connections with my peers.

It was that summer I met Jason Cochran, a guidebook writer from Frommers, editor, and the man I would consider my mentor.

Though we never had any formal mentor/mentee relationship, Jason’s writing philosophy, advice, and feedback, especially on my first book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, has been instrumental in shaping me as a writer. Much of his philosophy has become mine and I don’t think I would have grown to where I am without him.

Last year, he finally published the book he’d been working on about tourism in America, called Here Lies America. (We featured it on our best books of 2019 list).

Today, we’re going to go behind the scenes of the book and talk to Jason on what does lie in America!

Nomadic Matt: Tell everyone about yourself. Jason Cochran: I’ve been a travel writer for longer than I’ve felt like an adult. In the mid-‘90s, I kept a very early form of a travel blog on a two-year backpacking trip around the world. That blog became a career. I’ve written for more publications than I can count, including for a prime-time game show.

These days I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com, where I also write two of its annual guidebooks, and I co-host a weekly radio show with Pauline Frommer on WABC. For me, history is always my way into a new place. In many ways, time is a form of travel, and understanding the past flexes a lot of the same intellectual muscles as understanding cultural differences.

So I have come to call myself a travel writer and a pop historian. That last term is something I just made up. Dan Rather made fun of me once for it. “Whatever that is,” he said. But it seems to fit. I like uncovering everyday history in ways that are funny, revealing, and casual, the way Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell do.

What made you want to write this book? Before I began researching, I just thought it would be funny. You know, sarcastic and ironic, about Americans going to graveyards and places of suffering just to buy lots of tacky souvenirs, eat ice cream, and wear dumb t-shirts. And, that’s still in there, for sure. We’re Americans and we like those things. Key chains will happen.

But that changed fast. For one, that would have become a very tired joke. It wouldn’t carry for three hundred pages. Things clicked for me early on, on the first of several cross-country research drives I took. I went to a place that I wasn’t taught about at school, and it clicked. I was at Andersonville in rural Georgia, where 13,000 out of 45,000 Civil War prisoners died in just 14 months. It was flat-out a concentration camp.

Yes, it turns out that concentration camps are as American as apple pie. The man who ran it was the only Confederate officer who was executed after the war. Southerners feared the victors would hang their leaders by the dozen, but that vengeance never materialized. Not for Jefferson Davis, not for Robert E. Lee—the guy who ran this camp poorly got the only public hanging. And he wasn’t even a born American. He was Swiss!

But that’s how important this place was at the time. Yet most of us have never even heard of it, except for a really bad low-budget movie on TNT in the ‘90s in which all the characters bellowed inspirational monologues as if they thought they were remaking Hoosiers.

So just getting my head around the full insanity of Andersonville’s existence was a big light bulb—our history is constantly undergoing whitewashing. Americans are always willfully trying to forget how violent and awful we can be to each other.

And Andersonville wasn’t even the only concentration camp in that war. There were a bunch in both the North and the South, and most of them had survival rates that were just as dismal. So that was another light bulb: There’s a story in why our society decided to preserve Andersonville but forget about a place like Chicago’s Camp Douglas, which was really just as nasty, except now it’s a high-rise housing project and there’s a Taco Bell and a frozen custard place where its gate once stood.

And did you know that the remains of 12,000 people from another Revolutionary War concentration camp are in a forgotten grave smack in the middle of Brooklyn? We think our major historic sites are sacred and that they are the pillars of our proud American story, but actually, how accurate can our sites be if they’re not even fairly chosen?

What was one of the most surprising things you learned from your research? In almost no instance was a plaque, statue, or sign placed right after the historic event in question. Most of the monuments were actually installed many decades after the event. In the case of the Civil War, most of the memorials were erected in a boom that came a half-century after the last bullet was fired.

If you really get close to the plaques and read past the poetic inscriptions, it quickly becomes clear that our most beloved historic sites aren’t sanctified with artifacts but with propaganda placed there by people who weren’t even witnesses to the event. There was a vast network of women’s clubs that would help you order a statue for your own town out of a catalog, and they commissioned European sculptors who cashed the checks but privately grumbled about the poor taste of the tacky kitsch they were installing all over America.

We’re still dealing with what they did today. It’s what Charlottesville was about. But most people don’t realize these statues weren’t put there anywhere near the time of the war, or that they were the product of an orchestrated public relations machine. By powerful women!

I wrote a line in the book: “Having a Southern heritage is like having herpes—you can forget you have it, you can deny it, but it inevitably bubbles up and requires attention.” These issues aren’t going away.

Places we think of as holy ground, like Arlington National Cemetery, often have some pretty shocking origin stories. Arlington started because some guy got pissed off at Robert E. Lee and started buying corpses in his rose garden to get back at him! That’s our hallowed national burial ground: a nasty practical joke, like the Burn Book from Mean Girls. Dig a little and you find more revolting secrets, like how the incredible number of people buried under the wrong headstone, or the time the government put the remains of a Vietnam soldier in the Tomb of the Unknowns. They pretty much knew his identity, but Ronald Reagan really wanted a TV photo op. So they sealed all the soldier’s belongings in the coffin with him so that no one would figure it out.

They eventually had to admit they’d lied and gave the soldier’s body back to his mom. But if a thing like that happens in a place like Arlington, can the rest of our supposedly sacred sites be taken at face value at all?

It goes a lot deeper. At Ford’s Theatre and the surrender house at Appomattox, the site we visit isn’t even real. They’re fakes! The original buildings are long gone but visitors are rarely told that. The tale’s moral is what’s valued, not the authenticity.

What can visiting these sites teach us about how we remember our past? Once you realize that all historic sites have been cultivated by someone who wanted to define your understanding of it, you learn how to use critical thinking as a traveler. All it takes is asking questions. One of the most fun threads in the book kicks off when I go to Oakland, a historic but touristy cemetery in Atlanta. I spot an ignored gravestone that piqued my interest. I’d never heard of the name of the woman: Orelia Key Bell. The info desk didn’t have her listed among the notable graves. She was born around the 1860s, which was a very eventful time in Atlanta.

So I took out my phone and right there on her grave, I Googled her. I researched her whole life so I could appreciate what I was seeing. It turned out she was a major poet of her time. I stood there reading PDFs of her books at her feet. Granted, her stuff was dreary, painfully old-fashioned. I wrote that her style of writing didn’t fall out of fashion so much as it was yanked down and clubbed by Hemingway.

But reading her writing at her grave made me feel wildly connected to the past. We almost never go to old places and look deeper. We usually let things remain dead. We accept what’s on the sign or the plaque as gospel, and I’m telling you, almost nothing ever reaches us in a state of purity.

I figured that if I was going to probe all these strangers, I had to be fair and probe someone I knew. I decided to look into an untimely death in my own family, a great-grandfather who had died in a train wreck in 1909. That was the beginning and the end of the tale in my family: “Your great-great grandfather died in a train wreck up in Toccoa.”

But almost as soon as I started looking deeper, I discovered something truly shocking—he had been murdered. Two young Black men were accused in rural South Carolina for sabotaging his train and killing him. You’d think at least someone in my family would have known this! But no one had ever looked into it before!

Here Lies America follows their trail. Who were these guys? Why would they want to kill him? I went to where their village used to be, I started digging into court documents from their murder trial. Let me tell you, the shockers came flooding. Like, I found they may have killed him because they wanted to protect a sacred old Cherokee burial mound from destruction. There was this crazy, larger-than-life forgotten story happening in my own damn family.

My experience with that poet’s grave has a happy coda. Last week, someone told me that Orelia Key Bell and her companion are now officially part of the guided tour of Oakland. The simple act of looking deeper had revived a forgotten life and put her back on the record. That’s what visiting these sites can do—but you have to look behind the veneer, the way I do with dozens of attractions in my book. This is the essence of travel, isn’t it? Getting to a core understanding of the truth of a place.

A lot of what you wrote showed how whitewashed many of these historical sites are. How do we as travelers dig deeper to get to the real history? Remember that pretty much everything you see at a historic site or museum was intentionally placed there or left there by someone. Ask yourself why. Ask who. And definitely ask when, because the climate of later years often twists interpretation of the past. It’s basic content analysis, really, which is something we’re really bad at in a consumer society.

Americans have it drilled into them to never question the tropes of our patriotism. If we learned about in grade school, we assume it’s a settled matter, and if you press it, you’re somehow an insurgent. Now, more than any other time in history, it’s easier than ever to call up primary sources about any era you want. If you want to go back to what our society really is, if you want to try to figure out how we wandered into the shattered shambles we’re in today, you have to be honest about the forces that created the image that, until recently, many of us believed we really were.

Do you think Americans have a problem talking about their history? If so, why is that? There’s a phrase, and I forget who said it—maybe James Baldwin?-but it goes, “Americans are better at thinking with their feelings than about them.” We go by feels, not so much by facts. We do love to cling to a tidy mythology of how free and wonderful our country always was. It reassures us. We probably need it. After all, in America, where we all come from different places, our national self-belief is our main cultural glue. So we can’t resist prettying up the horrible things we do.

But make no mistake: Violence was the foundation of power in the 1800s, and violence is still a foundation of our values and entertainment today. We have yet to come to terms with that. Our way of dealing with violence is usually to convince ourselves it’s noble.

And if we can’t make pain noble, we try to erase it. It’s why the place where McKinley was shot, in Buffalo, lies under a road now. That was intentional so that it would be forgotten by anarchists. McKinley was given no significant pilgrimage spot where he died, but right after that death, his fans paid for a monument by Burnside’s Bridge in Antietam, because as a youth, he once served coffee to soldiers.

That’s the reason: “personally and without orders served hot coffee,” it reads—it’s hilarious. That is our national mythmaking in a nutshell: Don’t pay attention to the place that raises tough questions about imperialism and economic disparity, but put up an expensive tribute to a barista.

What is the main takeaway you’d like readers to take away from your book? You may not know where you came from as well as you think you do. And we as a society definitely haven’t asked enough questions about who shaped the information we grew up with. Americans are finally ready to hear some truth.

Jason Cochran is the author of Here Lies America: Buried Agendas and Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went Down. He’s been a writer since mid-1990s, a commentator on CBS and AOL, and works today as editor-in-chief of Frommers.com and as co-host of the Frommer Travel Show on WABC. Jason was twice awarded “Guide Book of the Year” by the Lowell Thomas Awards and the North American Travel Journalists Association.

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