Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. Now the Lorraine Motel is the National Civil Rights Museum and Martin Luther King Jr. has a holiday named after him, but then, in 1968, King was not a popular figure with white people. He was a trouble maker, as Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country.
Sunday afternoon, it feels like a month ago, Michele and I drove from Mountain View Arkansas to Memphis Tennessee. We both were feeling punk, Michele with a head cold and me with a chest cold so we ended up doing not much. This was our third time in Memphis, the first time I didn’t even know about the National Civil Rights Museum, the second time, we didn’t have time, so it was on top of our list this time and we spent most of Monday there. It is not a happy place, partially because it is the site of a murder but more so because it tells the African-American story from the African-American side and that side of the story paints a picture that is not as benign as our whitewashed version.
I’ve written and rewritten these couple of paragraphs several times, mostly talking about the African-American journey and this museum. The journey has been almost impossibly hard and the museum doesn’t try to gloss over that; we are only about a third of the way through the museum when slavery ends and Jim Crow starts. This museum is terrific at reminding us of the astounding journey that African-Americans have taken in a world that has done its damndest to hold them back. I suggest the National Civil Rights Museum to anybody traveling through Memphis.
We went in to see my Cardiologist today and I am in much better shape than I was heretofore told. I am not in Afib!
When I went to my cardiologist, the first thing she did was have me take an EKG. The EKG showed that my heartbeat is normal – and strong – although with a slight additional blip. It is an APC of some sort; APC stands for a group of Atrial Premature Complexes, which doesn’t sound very good to me but, according to Healthline; Premature beats are common and usually harmless. What I think happened is that, after I was shocked, my heart returned to normal, the cardiologist watched my heart on the display for a couple of minutes, she saw that it was normal – with the APC – and went out to the waiting room to tell Michele. She then went back to her office. Back in my room, the computer told the nurse that I was in Afib and, knowing that the trace on the screen wasn’t entirely normal, passed it on to me and my cardiologist. It may not be optimal normal, but my heart is no longer in Afib, apparently, no matter what the computer says.
I’m not going to elaborate because it is dinner time and I want to get this out ASAP. To be continued….
Meanwhile, back in Eureka Springs Arkansas, we have decided to drive about an hour to Branson Missouri. Originally we were going to spend a couple of nights in Eureka Springs and then move on to Branson in Missouri but we liked Eureka Springs and didn’t think we would like Branson so we changed our plans to make Branson a day trip. Driving to Branson, the Ozarks seem subtly different than they had a couple of days earlier, they were are starting to come alive. The trees were starting to bud and, here and there, were blooming white-flowered trees. We were told were wild flowering pears and it seemed almost impossible to capture their vibrant burst of life in a photograph. Going roughly northeast, we dropped out of the mountains, drove across a valley rich with farms and large industrial chicken facilities, then back into the mountains just after we entered Missouri. Usually, on a driving trip, I drive and Michele takes all the photo while we are on the road, on this trip I’m doing all the photography,
Before we got to Branson, Michele, who had been doing her homework the night before, said that our best bet for lunch in Branson wasn’t actually in Branson, she suggested lunch at the College of the Ozarks just outside of town. The College of the Ozarks bills itself as a Christian College and it does not charge tuition, requiring that its students pay for their education through working on campus. One of the things they do is work in, raise and grow the organic food for, and run the restaurant where we had lunch. It was good, not great – they didn’t have tacos but, otherwise, it was pretty standard forward-thinking fare, including roasted Brussel sprouts with crispy kale chips, shredded parmesan, fresh lemon and sweet garlic aioli – but good and the college kids who were doing everything from cooking to waiting were charming. BTW, while this is a Christian School, its courses include BIO 323 – Evolution and Population Biology As an aside, I used to think that, as I have gotten older, all young adults sort of look the same age. I don’t think that anymore, these kids were not the same as a waiter in her/his late 20s. The way they carried themselves, even the way they stood, was different. End aside.
I probably should start by saying that we really didn’t give Branson a fair chance. We drove in past the new Convention Center, parked the car, walked along the river – or lake as they kept calling it, looking it up, I found that it is an abandoned meander, so I guess it is technically an oxbow lake – walked back through a shopping area between the old downtown and the lake, and drove home. We didn’t go to the strip along 76 Country Boulevard or the Titanic Museum or much of anything, really. I looked at one local marquee and didn’t know anybody except The Oak Ridge Boys and we weren’t particularly interested in the Branson Murder Mystery Dinner Show or the Absolutely Country, Definitely Gospel Dinner.
After our stroll around the shopping arcade, we drove back to Eureka Springs for the night. The next day, we spent a bright, sunny, and warm morning at the Diversity Celebration in ES and a dark, rainy, and cold afternoon driving through the Buffalo River Watershed – BTW, the Buffalo River is the first river to be designated a National Wild River and is managed by the National Park Service – to get to Mountain View Arkansas for the night.
Mountain View looked like a nice town but it was Sunday and everything was closed which we sort of expected when we made plans to layover there on our way to Memphis. Mountain View is also the home of The Ozark Folk Center State Park which has daily Ozark Folk Music shows and, while we knew we would be there a week before it officially opened, we hoped we might find some music in a local tavern. It turns out that Mountain View is in a dry county so there are no local taverns where local musicians play, which was fine as neither one of us was feeling great. As an aside, one of my favorite groups during the mid-70s was The Ozark Mountain Daredevils who I discovered through Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman and is a welcome addition to anybody’s road music collection. End aside.
One thing we did miss, however, was The Urban Forge which, looking through the windows of the closed store, looked like the most sophisticated store we had seen on our entire trip and would have been a great place to see local folk art. We were still five hours from Memphis and our trip was winding down so maybe we were better off not having a place to spend an extra hour. So we moved on to Memphis…to be continued.
Yesterday morning I went into the hospital for a cardioversion which I now know is the name given to the procedure in which they stop somebody’s heart – in this case, mine – so that it can restart with a normal rhythm. For me, it is a relatively easy procedure. I show up at Sequoia Hospital with Michele who will drive me home – and took the above picture on her iPhone – check-in, get escorted to an empty Intensive Care Room, take my shirt off and lie down on a bed.
For the nurses and doctors, it’s more difficult. First, the nurse installs? gives me? hooks me up to an IV (even though IV has become a pretty common abbreviation for intravenous – which is medical Latin for into a vein – I’m not sure how to hook it up to a verb). The IV is used to start me on a saline drip because I haven’t had any water in about eight hours and they want me hydrated. Then a dozen, more or less, electrodes are placed around my chest, arms, and legs. About that time, my cardiologist comes in, and after some brief pleasantries, attaches a plate to my chest and one to my back. The anesthesiologist gives me a sort of mouthpiece to bite on – hard plastic with a hole in it – and then gives me an injection through my IV. He tells me that the anesthetic is fast acting both in sedating me and in only lasting a short time after which I will wake up. I feel a slight fluttering – which is way not accurate, maybe tingling is better, maybe just a slight altering of my conscience.
I only know what happens when I am out by hearsay or listening to YouTube videos so this may not be completely accurate. My cardiologist fishes a sonar-type device down my throat to get a better echocardiogram reading of my heart, especially the upper atrium. She is looking for blood clots that could cause a stroke, although I shouldn’t have any because of my blood thinner. Then she stops my heart, hoping that, when it starts, it will be in regular rhythm. It is, but a couple of minutes later, the Afib rhythm comes back.
Then I am awake and everybody is gone except for the nurse. I have no sense of time having past, I could’ve been out for ten seconds or ten hours. The nurse asks me how I feel and tells me that I am still in Afib (in a more caring and connected way than that sentence makes it sound). About then, Michele is let back into the ICU room, all the hospital umbilical cords are taken off, I put my shirt back on, the nurse walks us to the car, and we go home. It’s like nothing happened except I have a sore throat. While I was dubious about the cardioversion working, I now realize that I had a big emotional investment in the cardioversion and it not working has left me feeling down and disorientated enough to post a gratuitous picture.
My next step is an Atrial Fibrillation Ablation which worked for more than six years the last time I had it done so I am very hopeful…to be continued.
Somewhere around Eureka Springs, both Michele and I caught colds – or the same cold – that took much of the happiness out of the trip, although any trip like this was never going to be very happy in the first place. Now I am home and the blog is stalled in the Ozarks, most of the time with gray skies that fit our gray mood. In other times, coming here for another reason, the Ozarks, with its wild rivers, seems like a great place to explore.
Collectively, the Ozarks are a very old mountain chain – now worn down to about 2,500 at its highest – in Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri. It was probably lifted up – very roughly – 300 million years ago. To put that in perspective, the center of the Sierras uplifted about 10 million years ago. Most of the time we were there, the light was flat and everything looked dead but it still had an almost Zen-like beauty.
In Eureka Springs, we stayed in an old auto court, Sherwood Court, that had just been taken over by new owners. The rooms were cute and clean and the owners were enthusiastically helpful.
On the outskirts of Eureka Springs is a small chapel designed by E. Fay Jones who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. It is not a building I’d ever heard of before but it is on the AIA’s short list of great 20th Century buildings.
The Ozarks and the small city of Eureka Springs remind me of the California Gold Rush Country, partially because the landscape of low hills and scrub oaks are similar and partially because the buildings have the same feel.
Often, when I ramble on about the country being more liberal than our politicians, I’m told that I live in a bubble in the Bay Area and the rest of the country isn’t like that. The bubble part is true but the country has a lot more bubbles than many people acknowledge and Eureka Springs is a good example. The weekend we left, was a weekend of Diversity Celebration and there were rainbow flags everywhere. The weekend after Easter will be the Earth Celebration weekend and will feature, among other things, an Universal Service with Rev. Melissa Clair, a Buddhist Study group, and a Sufi guided meditation to connect to dolphins and whales.
One of the points of interest we were told not to miss, was the Carnegie Library which was donated to the city by Andrew Carnegie. I was impressed until I found out that a total of 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929 and both San Francisco and San Jose have one. On the other hand, what Eureka Springs does have that neither San Francisco nor San Jose has is natural springs.
