Road Trip USA with Mike Pohlen - Part 1
by Lorine Parks
See that dark blue passport with all the red ink stamps and the pictures pasted in it?
No, it’s not a U. S. Passport, issued by the State Department. That one now costs $110 and calls for two pictures and your birth certificate. This one is a National Parks document, issued by the Department of the Interior, and it’s been in existence for years. And originally it didn’t cost a red cent or a thin dime. Now there’s a $10 fee, but it’s worth it.
Mike Pohlen, who had only fifteen minutes and could give us just half of his fascinating program on his motor home drive in June across the United States, has had his “passport” for 38 years and it is bulging with proof of his travels. In fact he has had several, because he has collected over 350 destinations.
Ultra slim and compact enough to fit in pocket or backpack, a must-have for your inner explorer, this “passport” was the first surprise, at least to this reporter and former travel agent, that Mike showed us. The second was the mind-boggling number of places to visit, which your tax dollars have preserved and groomed for you to see. Beside National Parks and Monuments, there are National Historic Sites, Military Battle Grounds, Seashores and Cemeteries. Mike managed to show us the first twenty places he visited, before time ran out.
The meeting had run late because there was important business to take care of, including inducting two new members. And Rotary is known for ending its meetings promptly on time, so members can go back to whatever it is they do.
So, when Roger Brossmer, Program Chairman, came up to conclude the day’s showing, he thanked Mike and asked for the club to let Mike know if they wanted to see more – another time - and the applause was confirmation.
Mike came prepared with a big map of the United States on an easel showing his route, and “only 300 of the 3,000 pictures my wife Chris took on the trip,” as Mike put it. The story began with an “on the road” picture of the opening day’s drive to Phoenix, the long black ribbon of highway stretching out in front of the car’s windshield and a light lunch laid out for Mike the driver on the console in front, so no time need be lost in stopping. “We always ate well,” Mike said, and knowing Chris, we could count on that.
Let’s jump in and go along with Mike, with some additional details supplied by research by this reporter.
On this particular trip Mike took the southern route across the continent, and chose as his first major stop Carlsbad Caverns Natural Park. These subterranean caves go as deep as 1,000 feet and Mike and Chris started at the bottom by taking an elevator down. The Caves are famous firstly for the zillions of bats which emerge each evening at twilight, clouding the sky. But they also have amazing stalactite and stalagmite formations. Carlsbad was the 20th Park out of over 350 to be established, designated in 1923.
Next we drove through the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, in the vast Chihuahuan Desert of western Texas. It’s known for its bright-white Salt Basin Dunes, wildlife-rich grassland and fossilized reef mountains. We’re on our way to the River Walk in San Antonio, Texas.
No, the River Walk is not a National anything, but a pleasant place to sit and be refreshed and collect your thoughts before going on to the real shrine here in San Antonio – the Alamo. Mission, fortress, battleground, it’s a National Historic Park where brave men are celebrated for defending this outpost in the War for Texas Independence in 1836. It’s a complex story, often told in movies and well explained by the National Park Service rangers and markers when you are there. Household names you might not connect with the battle, died here: real life heroes, Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett, and John Wayne playing Davey Crocket in the 1960 movie version of “The Alamo”!
Close by is the Lyndon Baynes Johnson National Park, in Johnson City Texas, where LBJ grew up as a kid and started married life with Lady Bird. Next is another presidential stop, as we head north and a little to the east, The President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site in Hope, Arkansas. This is one of the newer monuments.
This leads to a sojourn at the Hot Springs National Park. From prehistoric natives forward, people have been using the thermal hot springs for therapeutic baths, and a thriving city grew up around the soothing thermal waters. The rare natural features of Hot Springs National Park were first protected when Congress declared the area a reservation in 1832, around 40 years before Yellowstone received the title as the nation’s first national park in 1872. Hot Springs Reservation was designated Hot Springs National Park in 1921 and is now known as the oldest protected area in the National Park System.
To replace earlier wooden structures susceptible to fire, a row of luxurious stone and masonry bathhouses was constructed in the early 1900s along Central Avenue. “ Bathhouse Row” shows off the “opulence and luxury of America” in the early 1900’s. The gingerbread carpentry houses here are a treasure in themselves, and people collect miniature wooden cutouts of them, with a little key hidden in the painted scenery.
Before we leave Arkansas we stop at the Arkansas Post National Memorial, which had been a French trading post 1686, a fort in the 1700’s and the site of an important Civil War battle in 1863. The battle, as well as the rest of Arkansas Post's rich history, is interpreted at the park museum.
Next, Poverty Point National Memorial, Louisiana, is a little known tribute to Native American life in the mid-west. From 1100 to 1700 the Mound Builders flourished here. Relatively little is known about the Poverty Point society, but because of the quality, diversity, and quantity of jewelry and other objects found at Poverty Point, some speculate that it may have been a capital for an entire ancient culture. What makes Poverty Point remarkable is that it is unusual that a mobile society of hunter-gatherers could build the complex system of mounds at Poverty Point.
Still with us? That was stop number 10 on the Pohlen Hit Parade.
We cross the Mississippi to see the imposing Vicksburg National Military Park. A decisive turning point in the American Civil War came when Grant took Vicksburg in the same long three days in July 1863 that the Union Army stared down Pickett’s charge in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, stopping Lee’s march north at his “high water mark.” The fall of Vicksburg and the control of the Mississippi River severed the trans-Mississippi Confederacy from east of the Mississippi River and opened the river to Northern traffic along its entire length. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Now we embark on the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 444-mile long beauty of a scenic road from Natchez, Miss. to Nashville, Tenn. Created and used for centuries by Native Americans, and later used by early European and American explorers, traders, and emigrants in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it largely follows a geologic ridge line where prehistoric animals followed the dry ground of the Trace to distant grazing lands, the salt licks of today's central Tennessee, and to the Mississippi River.
Native Americans used many early footpaths created by the foraging of bison, deer, and other large game that could break paths through the dense undergrowth. In the case of the Trace, bison traveled north to find salt licks in the Nashville area. [Called a “Trace” because according to the dictionary that refers to surviving “marks, signs, or evidence of the former existence,” the Natchez Trace could be a two-week vacation spot all by itself. No commercial vehicles are allowed, and Mike was limited to a speed of 50 mph, the better to see the countryside. Tupelo National Battlefield is along the Trace.
On we go to Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, Alabama, that is the site of the last battle of the Creek War. On March 27, 1814, General Andrew Jackson's Tennessee militia, aided by the 39th U.S. Infantry Regiment and Cherokee and Lower Creek allies, finally crushed Upper Creek Red Stick resistance during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend at this site on the Tallapoosa River. Jackson's decisive victory at Horseshoe Bend broke the power of the Creek Nation.
Andrew Jackson took a major step into American history when he defeated the "Red Stick" faction. For Jackson, Horseshoe Bend was the first step to the White House. For the Creeks, it was the first step on the Trail of Tears.
We swing into the twentieth century at the Tuskegee National Historical Site, where Afro-American soldiers trained during World War II. For the first time, black men were allowed to pilot planes in the Army Air Corps (today’s Air Force), and they trained here. To show everyone who they were, they painted the nose and tail of each P47 bright red. Known and feared as the “red tail angels,” they fought in Europe against a hostile Nazi enemy and against extreme discrimination at home.
The Tuskegee Airmen’s 332nd Fighter Group became part of the 15th Air Force, escorting American bombers as they flew over Italy. As escorts, flying P-47s and later P-51s, they were responsible for protecting larger bombers from German fighter planes. Both George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington are associated with this Park.
Cruising along toward the East Coast faster than Mike and Chris did, we get to glimpse the Andersonville National Historic Cemetery in Georgia. Begun as a stockade built about 18 months before the end of the U.S. Civil War, to hold Union Army prisoners captured by Confederate soldiers, it is located deep behind Confederate lines. Designed for a maximum of 10,000, at its most crowded, it held more than 32,000 men, many of them wounded and starving, in horrific conditions. It is still an operating cemetery and also holds the National Prisoner of War Museum, which opened in 1998 to honor all U.S. prisoners of war in all wars.
Now we’re at the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site and Preservation District in Plains, Georgia, which includes the farm where he spent his boyhood, the Plains High School he attended, and the train depot that served as headquarters for his 1976 presidential campaign, and a number of other buildings that are associated with the peanut farmer turned president (The president’s papers are kept in Atlanta, in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum). Carter, 39th president of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and wife Rosalyn still live here in Plains and, Mike assures us, Jimmy at age 91 teaches Bible classes every Sunday at his church.
“Hot, muggy, stormy” reads the caption on the projector screen. We’re in Florida, about to touch the Atlantic coastline, and “it’s wicked weather,” Mike says, at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, in extremely northern Florida. For some, America begins here. The monument built of coquina, a type of shell stone indigenous to the area, was constructed as a fort by the Spanish between 1672 and 1695. The tiny garrison had been attacked in 12586 by Sir Francis Drake, whose fleet of twenty ships and two thousand men sacked and burned the town.
In 1900 it was made a national monument after serving under six flags over 205 years: the Spanish (1695 - 1763); the British (1763 - 1784);, the Spanish again (1784 - 1821); the United States of America (1821 - 1861); the Confederate States of America (1861 - March of 1862); and finally the United States of America again (1862 - 1900). Amazingly, the Castillo was never taken by force.
Heading back north into Georgia again we see a National Seashore at Cumberland Island, with its wild horses, ruins and beaches, and then Ft. Frederica National Monument where Georgia's fate was decided in 1742 when Spanish and British forces clashed on St. Simons Island. But at this point the clock said 1:30 pm back in the real world, and “I ran out of time,” Mike said.