January 2011

Atop a half-mile-high mountain deep in the heart of the A Shau Valley in central Vietnam, a poisonous worm snake winds itself onto the edge of a spade. After a fleeting glance, the U.S. sergeant holding the spade, Tammi Reeder, 34, flicks her wrist and flings the vermilion serpent into the double-canopy jungle surrounding this mountaintop enclave. It is the fourth such snake in an hour ,and about the millionth over the past several weeks, so this group of 10 U.S. military personnel, two civilian anthropologists, and more than 70 Vietnamese workers have developed a resigned tolerance for reptiles.

We are in a cloud forest, three miles from the Laotian border in the A Luoi District, an hour’s helicopter ride from anything. Verdant trees—banana, banyan, traveler’s palm, and cassia—are rooted in curried mud. A wet layer of humidity wilts the jungle. The group’s mission is to find and repatriate a warrant officer whose Huey helicopter went down in May of 1967 with three other crew members. Those three were rescued within 48 hours. In the days afterward, several attempts were made to retrieve him, too, but heavy enemy fire made it impossible.

The Year 2005 contains two major anniversaries in American popular music. It marks 50 years since 1955, when rock ’n’ roll first conquered the pop singles chart, and also what would have been the seventieth birthday of Elvis Presley (who was so young when he made his initial breakthrough that his father had to co-sign his first contract with RCA Records for him). For Elvis, the timing was perfect. However, in terms of my own appreciation of both occurrences, the timing was completely off.

For information on lodging and a calendar of events, call the Mississippi Development Authority Division of Tourism (601-359-3297) or visit its Web site at www.visitmississippi.org. I found Steve Cheseborough’s book Blues Traveling (University Press of Mississippi) an indispensable guide, full of detailed historical and cultural information as well as driving directions to out-of-the-way sites.

CELEBRATE THE BLUES AT STARBUCKS! proclaimed the sign at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. I was catching a plane to Memphis, then driving south to Greenville, Mississippi, for the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival, the second oldest of its kind in the country. I was going to explore the Delta, the wedge-shaped region in the north of the state between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. If I’d had a laptop with a wireless portal, I could have just stayed at the airport Starbucks, sipping a five-dollar cappuccino and singing along with Precious Bryant: “I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime.”

Robert Johnson, the Devil, and Me to Plan a Trip

Just when it seemed we’d heard—and seen—everything there is to know about one of America’s most prolific and portrayed Presidents, two vital, long-lost relics from his past, one verbal and one visual, have unexpectedly surfaced.

For years scholars have known that Lincoln penned some sort of letter in the fall of 1859 to the Ohio orator and Republican senator Thomas Corwin. Two surviving Corwin letters to Lincoln neatly bracket, and indisputably attest to, the missing communication. In the first, Corwin chides Lincoln for allegedly saying in a Cincinnati speech that a moderate Republican presidential candidate would lose Illinois by 50,000 votes in 1860. In the second, written nearly a month later, Corwin notes, “I have red [received] your explanation,” adding: “Six months hence we shall see more clearly what at this time must remain only in conjecture.”

It’s a mystery shrouded in an enigma wrapped in a cookie. Today’s prepackaged meal-ending prophecy has Asian antecedents that go back to the thirteenth century, when anti-Mongol rebels in China passed secret messages in cakes. Beginning in the 1870s, Chinese railroad workers in America baked holiday greetings inside biscuits. But the fortune cookie in its present form, with a cheerful prediction or affirmation folded inside a brittle beige carapace carefully prepared to simulate the flavor of Styrofoam, is known to have originated in California early in the twentieth century. The only question is where.

Rookwood is pictured in many books, but get one that illustrates its marks, such as Kovels’ American Art Pottery: The Collector’s Guide to Makers, Marks, and Factory Histories , by Ralph and Terry Kovel. Just Art Pottery sells Rookwood on the Internet ( www.justartpottery.com ), and you can preview examples up for auction at Cincinnati Art Galleries and Craftsmen Auctions ( www.cincinnatiartgalleries.com ; www.craftsman-auctions.com ).

This is American art pottery at its most beautiful. Pieces frequently boast floral motifs, lush landscapes, or seascapes rivaling those that contemporaneous artists painted on canvas. Even modest items with glazes untouched by Rookwood’s talented decorators can boast subtle color gradations—as when the pink body of a vase fades gradually into an apple green rim.