Post 194 - September 21, 2020

Day 194…

I am sitting in my mother’s living room, barely awake, and she has already been up for hours.

The night before last, I stayed in Charleston, South Carolina, a place I’d always wanted to visit. There wasn’t a lot of time to explore it, but I was able to take a good long walk the evening I arrived and another one the following morning to give me at least a sense of where I was.

Compared to many other places I have been, there were a fair amount of people out and about on Saturday night in Charleston. Some with masks. Some of the rowdier ones without.

Jersey Boys played in North Charleston last year, but I wasn’t with it when we did. I’d never been to Charleston before. It is well off the interstate, so it is a place that you have to plan to visit. It’s been on my bucket list for a long time.

The main population corridor in the northeast stretches from Boston down to Washington D.C. The area that encompasses is largely urban and suburban. Boston, New York and Washington are the three big cultural centers that anchor it but there are plenty of others within that area, such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, that are almost as big.

That sphere of influence overflows south of D.C. into Richmond a bit, but when you leave Richmond and head further south, you have well and truly left that largely liberal northeast corridor.

The first thing that you notice driving along the interstate below Richmond is that they start naming the swamps.

Signs for places selling peanuts start appearing. Then pecans. As you get into the lower part of North Carolina and into South Carolina, signs for peaches start appearing and then once you’ve hit Florida, it’s citrus - oranges and grapefruit.

Interstate 95 runs pretty much up and down the entire eastern side of the country parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It begins at the border crossing into New Brunswick, Canada in Northern Main and runs all the way down to Miami at the bottom of Florida.

I don’t remember being on it as a kid, but we must have been as construction started on it before I was born. The final leg of it, in central New Jersey was only officially completed in 2018.

It is the longest north-south interstate in the country and passes through more states than any other in the system - 15 plus parts of the District of Columbia. Only five of the 96 counties it passes through are completely rural. It serves about 110 million people or roughly 1/3 of our total population and facilitates, by estimates, about 40% of the gross domestic product of the country.

While 95 is certainly efficient, it’s not particularly interesting.

As William Least Heat-Moon wrote in his book, Blue Highways, “Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”

You’re not allowed to stop along the interstate. There are no shops or market stalls. There are rest areas every so often where you can pull off and take a bathroom break, but that’s it. To actually experience where you are, you need to take the exit and drive along some back roads.

On long drives, I try and figure out places to stop every two hours or so. A friend of mine recently reminded me of an app called Roadside America that lets you look at a specific area and see what strange and odd things might be there - the world’s largest or smallest or oldest or tallest whatever.

The thing that is on the top of that particular bucket list for me is Carhenge which is somewhere in western Nebraska. Someone recreated England’s Stonehenge monument using wrecked cars. Someday.

Between Richmond and Charleston, at the suggestion of Roadside America, I stopped in the town of Wilson, North Carolina. In the center of the historic center of town is an area called the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park.

Vollis Simpson was a farm machinery repairman who lived on his family’s farm about 11 miles outside of Wilson. When he retired he started making whirligigs.

Simply put, a whirligig is an object that spins or whirls. Often it will have a fan-like part that catches the breeze and, as it spins, causes something else to move. A person sawing logs is a common theme. Steam trains with working wheels is another. People would put them on their roofs or on their mailboxes. Made of wood and wire, they’ve become collectors’ pieces in the folk-art world.

Vollis Simpson’s whirligigs are different.

He constructed them from metal and they are huge. Some of them are fifty feet tall.

He made and installed them on his farm right up until he passed away in 2013 at the age of 94. Before he died, he entered into an agreement that his work would be moved into downtown Wilson and be maintained in perpetuity by the town. Thirty of his kinetic sculptures are now arranged in one central area.

They are magical.

Happily, there was a breeze while I was there the day before yesterday, so they were all moving. As you walk through the park, all around and above you, everything is in motion. Wheels turn, pinwheels spin, and yes logs are sawn and trains chug. Some are abstract, some are based on something real, but they are all breathtaking. The constant whirring makes the air sound as if it’s full of bumblebees.

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland has a piece of his called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” on permanent display. It is 55 feet tall and 45 feet wide and in constant motion. His work is also in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.

These sculptures became his life’s work and now they are giving new life to this tiny North Carolina town.

Wilson was once an important tobacco growing center. In the nineteenth century it was known as “the World’s Greatest Tobacco Market.” Before Mr. Simpson’s work was installed, however, downtown Wilson was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. It has now become a model for what is termed ‘creative placemaking’.

Much has been made of the enormous financial impact of the Performing Arts on our nation’s gross domestic product. In talking about Broadway, I’ve mentioned several times that New York’s theatre brings in more revenue to the city than all of its sports teams combined.

That same idea can hold true for a tiny town like Wilson. Vollis Simpson’s visionary and decidedly quirky work has the potential to draw people to Wilson where they will possibly spend some money.

You can see that it is already beginning to happen there.

Right across the street from the park, a brand-new brewery called 217 Brew works opened earlier this year. The day before yesterday, its outdoor tables were filled with people who all looked like they had come or were going to the sculpture park. A museum and restaurant are being constructed along another side of the park.

Downtown, which is rife with empty buildings there are a few art galleries occupying store fronts. An art studio, teaching classes was open down the block. There was a class in session as I walked by.

The National Endowment for the Arts describes the creative placemaking process like this: “In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, nonprofit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, tribe, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structure and streetscapes, improves business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”

Our President, from the beginning of his administration, has done everything he can to try and eliminate the entire budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants their funding cut. He wants them gone.

Betsy Devos, the Education Secretary has also done everything she can to eliminate funding for Arts education in our schools.

This incredibly short-sighted systematic attack on the Arts by the current Republican administration simply doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever. The Arts are a thriving, productive and, yes, lucrative part of our economy. Do away with our arts program and you start to cripple our economy.

Americans for the Arts is an organization dedicated to establishing arts-friendly public policy through engaging citizens to advocate for the arts and arts education.

Its CEO, Robert L. Lynch said this:

The arts empower. The arts give a voice to the voiceless. The arts help transform American communities and, as I often say, the result can be a better child, a better town, a better nation and certainly a better world. Let’s champion our arts action heroes, emulate them and make our communities everything we want them to be.”

The Creative City Network of Canada said this:

“Arts and culture make considerable and necessary contributions to the well-being of communities. Arts and culture are powerful tools with which to engage communities in various levels of change. They are a means to public dialogue, contribute to the development of a community’s creative learning, create healthy communities capable of action, provide a powerful tool for community mobilization and activism, and help build community capacity and leadership.”

And President John F. Kennedy said this:

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him… We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

You can see the effect of the Arts on a small town like Wilson just as easily as you can see their effect on a major city like New York.

Every aspect of our lives is hopelessly interconnected with every other aspect. Unless all sectors are equally healthy, the body as a whole cannot hope to survive. You cannot start chipping away at one sector like the Arts and think that it isn’t going to undermine all of the rest of it.

There is so much at stake in this coming election.

The full out battle for the now vacant Supreme Court seat is well underway.

Hurricane Sally and the fires raging out west are hammering home the need for immediate attention to be paid to the mounting climate change that is happening all around us.

And, yes, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic. More than half of all states are reporting fresh surges in new cases as our national death toll approaches 200,000.

We are well overdue for some effective leadership.

I am now going to set up the iPad that I’ve brought my mother so that she can Facetime and Zoom with my sister and me. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to do that ages ago.

Earlier this morning, we took her dog for a walk up the street and chatted with some of the neighbors. Mom pointed out which of them like the President and which don’t. We will have some wine and cheese on the lanai and order in some dinner from one of the restaurants along the beach.

My mother keeps asking me if I have posted this yet so that she can read it. We’ve got the day fully planned, so I really should just post this so that we can get on with it.

It's good to be here with my mother.

After taking three days to get here by car, I should probably think twice before complaining again about being delayed a few minutes by JetBlue.

Much like the Interstate, though, you don't really see anything much from a plane.