January 2011

A SENSATION OF PARALLEL TIME, of one eye fixed on the present and the other focused on the past, of one ear hearing the moment and the other distant echoes, was there from the beginning of the project. Nuremberg 1945, San Miguel de Allende 1991. The two places might as well have been on different planets. The old colonial town clinging to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental is something of a demiparadise, if the country remains reasonably stable. The other, in 1945, was the city as cemetery, with rubble for monuments and the stench of death in the air. What could link these two places and eras?

William Ferris, fifty-two years old, is a prolific writer in folklore, American literature, fiction, and photography and is co-editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of Southern Culture . Since 1979, he has been the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His establishment is quartered in the recently renovated Barnard Observatory on the beautiful, wooded Ole Miss campus. That notable edifice and the Center itself are emblematically important, for there Ferris and his colleagues have everything in Southern Studies in one place— just as they have in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, an ambitious highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow mosaic.

It is always a bit surprising to be reminded of how compressed our national history is. Robert E. Lee was Light Horse Harry Lee’s son, after all, and there were men around in 1861 who had fought King George’s soldiers to establish the nation that they were seeing fall apart. And certainly our own century, even with a few years yet to run, has contained events enough to fill any number of epochs.

I spent the afternoon of July 20, 1969 with my parents in their bedroom, blinds drawn against the warm, thundery sunlight, watching along with the rest of the world while men edged toward the surface of the Moon. My mother, sitting there next to me, had been born ten days before the Wright boys wired home to Dayton to say that they’d made four successful flights in their machine. The longest had been 852 feet. The particular one we were watching that Sunday afternoon had gone about 400,000 miles so far.

“I’ll be so interested to hear what your father says when they land,” my mother had told me sometime that morning. “He always puts things so well.”

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies. Indeed, the New World Republic was the ultimate island power, with the Atlantic Ocean providing a protective moat nearly a hundred times as wide as the English Channel. The German philosopher Hegel, writing at about the same time as Toque, cited this isolation as one reason “a real State”—a powerful, centralized, European-style state—could never exist in America. Without constant threat, without the necessity of maintaining a standing army, the American republic was doomed to weakness and obscurity.

THE SHRILL RINGING WOKE ME from deep sleep early in the morning of April 12, 1961. I was confused for a moment, but only a moment. I was in my room in the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, Florida.

I reached for the clamoring telephone.

“What?”

The voice at the other end was soft, polite. Considerate. “Commander Shepard?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah, this is Shepard.”

“Have you heard?”

I was awake now. I didn’t like those words. “Heard what?”

“The Russians have put a man in orbit.”

I sat straight up. “They what?”

“They’ve put a man in orbit.”

In April 1961 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a Soviet air force major, became the first man to travel in space. That July, the Soviet cosmonaut made a triumphant visit to Cuba and landed at José Martí Airport, outside Havana.

The day before, I had left Miami International Airport en route to Mexico City; I worked for Eastern Air Lines and was to do a routine audit of aircraft parts at our Mexican facility. Half-way to Tampa the aircraft did a 180-degree turn: a disgruntled Miami Beach waiter, a Hispanic, had the pilot at pistol point and made us head south, to Cuba. There were thirty-seven of us aboard including crew and passengers.

Friday, July 11, 1969, found our family excitedly preparing for our annual vacation trip. I was in the back yard of our Cold Spring, Kentucky, house, with my two sons, thirteen-year-old Steven and eleven-year-old Mark. We were storing rods, reels, and tackle boxes in the station wagon, strapping luggage on the roof and preparing for an early Saturday-morning start. My wife, Pat, was busy in the house with our two daughters, Margie, who was eight, and Jeannie, five. They were busy packing clothes, beachwear, games, and snacks.

This would be our twelfth consecutive trek to the Sands Motel, on the beach at Treasure Island, near St. Petersburg, Florida. It didn’t matter that it took us two 10-hour days of driving with a stopover in Atlanta to get there; we were looking at ten days at the beach!

The Wyoming Travel Commission (800-225-5996) and Tracks Across Wyoming (307-789-9690) will provide information on all the communities that make up this project. Cheyenne is a good place to start a trip, with its highly decorative Capitol building, which dates from territorial times, and its excellent Wyoming State Museum. Although the tracks described in this article lead inevitably into the towns, there is no forgetting the landscape that holds it all together. The roads may be straighter here than in the state’s mountainous northwest corner, and the grade milder, but the sight of an expansive, sage-strewn high prairie is haunting in its own right, and at the distant margins—north and south of Interstate 80—rise the implacable crests of the Snowy Range Pass, the Front Range, and the Uintas.

Traveling west on the Wyoming stretch of Interstate 80 (which extends from New York to San Francisco), I found that the headline of what might be the most floridly evocative ad ever written kept sounding in my mind. “Somewhere west of Laramie,” starts this sales pitch for a 1920s automobile, the Jordan Playboy, “there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl.” Of course, she drives the Jordan, “a sassy pony that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits.” On an afternoon in mid-June I, too, was headed somewhere west of Laramie, but not exactly into the romantic “red horizon of a Wyoming twilight” promised by the ad. Instead, I was trying out a concept thought up and named Tracks Across Wyoming by the business and tourism interests of a half-dozen towns along the state’s southern tier. This itinerary is meant to slow down the driver who simply wants to get from here to there—to speed through the seemingly drab fourhundred-mile run of highway, stopping nowhere, except, perhaps, to veer north at its western edge to follow the crowds to the scenic glories of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

Korea is in the news again, and it’s ugly news. North Korea may or may not have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s aging dictator, Kim Il Sung, is unwilling to let international inspectors find out. The United Nations is talking of sanctions. The United States is pointedly scheduling military maneuvers with the army of the Republic of South Korea. Some of the media’s self-chosen secretaries of state summon us, from their word processors, to sturdy firmness. Others warn that the unpredictable Kim should not be cornered, lest he provoke a second Korean War.

I don’t know if that last is an impossible scenario. But the mere idea gives me the feeling of being trapped in a rerun. Nearly five years after the Cold War ended, we are talking about possible renewed hostilities with a chief character from its early phases. Kim is the oldest surviving Communist boss. He goes back beyond an era already ancient—the days of Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh—to an almost paleolithic time when World War II strongmen like Truman, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek still walked the stage.