Riverside, Iowa: future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk

We're going to Iowa!



It had rained the night before.



At the Great Sauk Trail rest area -- so this is still an Illinois bug.



I-80, westbound.



Will it look the same in the 23rd century?



Summer farm fields.



Not too far across the river (there's only one) is this sign.



Westbound toward Iowa City, take the exit going south on Route 218. Drive a while. After driving a while, we weren't sure whether we had missed the turnoff for Riverside, and so we pulled into a general store in Hills, Iowa, to ask directions. There is a purple marten house in the parking lot. These are them.



Ah hah. (Riverside is another five miles south of Hills.)



Park here. Say, you could rent space in the very same building.



Once you park, the Enterprise -- excuse me, the Riverside -- is just to your left. It's on a trailer because they have parades, and it's in them.



The entrance is next to the American flag. At the far left, notice the shuttlecraft.



You have entered the portal. There are maps of the U.S. and the world, filled with pins marking where the Trekkers come from. We added ours to the thickly filled Chicago to Riverside corridor.



Why yes, that's a tricorder and a communicator, behind glass. Don't laugh -- doesn't it look like your cell phone?



Sixties space fashions. In only one episode, "Where no man has gone before," did the women wear slacks and shirts, and plain hairstyles. Remember Sally Kellerman? She was the main girl.



Oh yes. You've arrived. What are all those messages written on the sign?



Here's one of them. The rest of us can't add any -- the sign is behind a velvet rope and under glass.



And you can't sit in Mr. Shatner's chair, either. It's behind a velvet rope, too.



Look closely and you'll see that Himself has been here, once.



When you re-emerge, you see the shuttlecraft, just near a rather pretty neighboring garden.



You've got to get one last picture, to give you an idea of the scale of the thing.

There is more to see in Riverside -- the sign outside town, announcing this is "Where the trek begins," another marker, in a bucolic park area, that looks unsettlingly grave-like -- but when you are on your way to a family reunion, sometimes you hurry on. Besides, you can revisit next year. Trekfest always takes place on the last Saturday in June. My local cousins say Route 218 southbound is backed up for a mile then.

Besides, you've got your souvenirs.



Your new mouse pad.



Your "Kirk dirt" -- actual soil from Riverside. The nice elderly lady who sold me this for $3.00 was a one-day volunteer, replacing a regular volunteer who was ill. She kind of made a disbelieving noise as she took the package out of the display case, but I didn't care. No, je ne regrette rien.

And you've got your memories.
July 31, 2009

The Tudor Year: August

Theme: war



The boar badge of King Richard III flies over the probable site of Bosworth Field, in Leicestershire. (Image, no longer available on the web, originally from www.24hourmuseum.org.uk.)


August 1: Lammas Day
August 8: Marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine Howard, 1540
August 9: Elizabeth's "Armada" speech, Tilbury, 1588
August 22: Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485

For farmers, August was the month of the corn harvest. Lammas day, or ancient origin, was a quarterly rent-paying day and also a day for fairs and for re-opening enclosed fields so that sheep could graze freely until the next spring. August was also a month of war. Tudor history begins with Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. A century later, Henry's granddaughter Queen Elizabeth would defy the Spanish Armada in her famous speech to the troops at Tilbury on August 9, 1588 -- the fact that the Armada had already been decisively defeated and scattered two weeks earlier was not yet fully appreciated. Tudor soldiers served in France, Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, and helped put down rebellions at home. They were often enough rebellious themselves, especially over late pay.

Sources:

Emmison, F. G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, and Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 145.

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 29.

Ibid., p. 115

Philips, Gervase. "To cry, 'Home! Home!': Mutiny, Morale, and Indiscipline in Tudor Armies," The Journal of Military History, Vol 65, No. 2 (April, 2001), p. 319

Road trip

The road to Iowa: Queen Anne's lace, corn, and sky





Yes, this is Riverside, Iowa, future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. An enterprising (!ha ha) city councilman, in 1985, had the bright idea of asking the series' creator, Gene Roddenberry, whether Riverside couldn't call itself the "small town in Iowa" loosely designated as Kirk's birthplace. Roddenberry agreed because he felt "the first town that had volunteered ought to have it." Judging by the pace of events outlined on the Certificate of Authenticity which comes with every vial of "Kirk dirt" -- actual Riverside soil -- one may purchase at the Riverside Historical Center, approval came swiftly. The city councilman made the motion on March 25th, Roddenberry replied on the 28th and the city council passed the appropriate resolution on April 8th.



And when people come to visit, the nice volunteers ask them to put a pin in the map to show where they are from. The map of the United States is most thickly crowded with pins along a sort of Chicago-to-Riverside corridor. And the map of the world has its share. As my niece (who loathes William Shatner, for some obscure reason) put it when she saw this photo -- "holy crap."



The point of our trip, really: visiting with relatives.



A walk in the woods, Hickory Hills Park, Iowa City. "Here are the species remembered from the picnic ground, schoolhouse grove, the woodlot -- the forest preserve. Through the Northeast, across the Midwest, deciduous forest is where the people are -- or where they spent their childhood." Robert O. Petty, Deciduous Forest, 1974.



Eastbound, route 74, approaching the Mississippi. Called, always and only, the River.



That truck stop again. I-80, eastbound.



I keep waiting for the day when I am totally cool and comfortable driving the expressway. Some people actually get sleepy. I don't. If it's true that a society's greatest madness seems sane to itself, then I wonder if someday people will look back and gasp that we all considered it normal, that we made it necessary for modern life, to sit inside and maneuver large steel machines at terrifically high speeds simultaneously but orderly-like, on often crowded roads, in order to go from point A to point B in as short a time as possible. It's an exercise in sheer faith, trust in one's fellow man, that future historians will perhaps judge as far more cementing (!ha ha) to the whole society than any lessons in civics or any traditional political activity.

Physically, it's the sense of entrapment that bothers me. Next rest area, 68 miles. No way out, but more speed.



Going home.



... and say it was good.

From Riseholme to Tilling

"... and I fully expect I shall settle here for good."

Mio giardino segreto has moved here. Everything will be just the same, only more so ("Angel!" said Irene).





























Most photos above from the Blossoms for Books garden walk, Evergreen Park, IL, July 19; homeowners' permissions for photographs were obtained.

Bugs

Look closely, to spot the monarch butterfly resting in the mulberry tree.


He's resting on a spike of lavender.

Another grand day out

The beauty of "Big Education," as Rush terms it, is that by its commands and arrogant arrogating of your time, it does force you to take the train into your own city and see things while your child is off attending an eight-hour "orientation." (Pretty boring, she said.)

Memo to readers, and even to you, my first and one subscriber, bless you: I've been busy writing for eHow and sundry people who actually pay money up front for content. Crazy. I'd like to finish that essay on how publishing has come full circle from the days of the eighteenth century, with today's revenue-share, web content providers taking the place of the London streetcorner booksellers who bought an author's copyright for a relative pittance but, as a consolation, printed just about anyone literate. I say I'd like to. But thumping out things on actual paper and submitting those actual things through the mail into a magazine's slush pile seems so ... well, it just takes forever.

Still. I haven't forgotten.

The Tudor year: July

Theme: survival



Lady Jane Grey's prayerbook, believed to be the one she carried to the scaffold. The pale writing at the bottom is a farewell message in her own hand to the lieutenant of the Tower, adjuring him to obey God's laws. (Image from the British Library online gallery.)

July 6: execution of Thomas More, 1535; death of Edward VI, 1553
July 10: proclamation of Jane Grey queen, 1553
July 12: Divorce of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, 1540; marriage of Henry to Catherine Parr, 1543
July 19: Proclamation of Mary Tudor queen, 1553
July 26: Marriage of Queen Mary to King Philip of Spain, 1554
July 29: Defeat of the Spanish armada, 1588

Political events moved quickly in an age when royalty -- and its henchmen -- still governed by divine right. Lady Jane Grey's famous nine days as Queen (she was a scion of the Tudor family through her descent from one of Henry VIII's sisters) sped by in mid-July, 1553, after the death of the teenaged king, Henry's long sought son, Edward. In quieter times July would be a month for the royal court to begin its summer progresses to freshly cleaned rural mansions. Smallpox, the plague, and the mysterious "Sweat" were the scourges of the season, especially in London. Filth, sickness, vermin, and bad teeth were a part of all people's lives to an extent that we can hardly imagine. So was hunger and the fear of hunger. In the country, a supply of beef and mutton would already have been slaughtered at midsummer, and would have to last, salted, till winter. St. Swithin's Day, July 15th, was a day for the farmer to look at the sky with apprehension: rain on this day was thought to mean a rainy summer and possibly a spoiled harvest.

Sources:

Emmison, F.G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961) p. 239

Ibid, p. 253

Fussell, George Edwin. The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing, and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975 (originally published by the Batchworth Press, London, 1949), p. 27.

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 28.