Road to somewhere

The Pilgrim’s Progress, the 1600s John Bunyan allegory of “Christian” picking his way from a City of Destruction to a Celestial City, themes this exploration. A major artifact in the universe of European culture, it remains as useful now for illuminating psychic geography as when I discovered it, at about 9, while in transition from Eugene, Oregon, to a City of Gold in South Africa.

Johannesburg was no paradise, turns out, but merely the first in a series of pit stops on a route pointed toward return to “America”—terrestrial paradise in my preacher dad’s political geography—and, ultimately, a further departure for our final destination and proper home, somewhere in the sky. The blue-bound volume I found in Dad’s library (with the lurid illustrations of “Frederick Barnard and others”) offered a map. As circumstances and reference points changed, I checked it again for bearings. But after returning to the U.S. seven years later, I gradually became aware of a peculiarity in the map: “America” wasn’t quite the paradise advertised. What’s more, the first destination was looking a lot like a second home, now lost. That home, in time, became a destination again. I was repeating.

But there was a theme in the circling, I noticed eventually: The parents, in 1947, had hauled me to South Africa just in time for the formalization of apartheid. Seven years later we had returned to the U.S. South, just in time for the Civil Rights movement. Out of college and given the choice, I took a job as an English teacher in greenest Uganda, itself newly independent—and returned to Los Angeles three years later in a miasma of smog, just in time for the 1960’s cultural wars. A few years later, pining for Africa but unable to return, I fled from the manufactured paradise of “Matterhorn” and “Swiss Family Robinson Tree House” to the forests and mountains of Northern California.

Redding, on the southern edge of “God’s Country,” is no paradise either, though people continue to arrive here thinking so. Yet I have called it home for most of 35 years—a viewing platform, at least, for the Delectable Mountains of somewhere. Newsman, family man, gardener, college instructor, public-relations hack and slacker, I paused here to think about homes, destinations and what separates them.

In 2008 I made a return visit to Johannesburg and other wild spots in South Africa, at a time when the nation is changing its names and its face to align with a new reality and an altered view of the past, the one when I was there before. The perspective of this site is the product of those specific stops and that advantaged time span.

It is the result, equally, of investigation into some history not directly my own but widely shared: My own travels are add-ons to wanderings by ancestors and by people I would not have met had I gone elsewhere:In the 1500s, a Hassenpflug who was a Huguenot fled from France into Hesse-Kassel, Germany. Some 300 years later a descendant, my grandpa, lost a boot in the Red River crossing into north Texas. My mother’s grandfather, meantime, was fleeing western Russia in the late 1800s exodus and diaspora of Russian-German farmers. Her dad then grew up along the emigrant’s trail, from Ohio to sod house in Nebraska to the last Oklahoma land run (for the Cheyenne and Arapaho grant). It was the right pedigree for the parents who met in college and, soon as able, volunteered as Protestant missionaries to Africa.

As a schoolchild in the old Union of South Africa (U.S.A.), I was thrown into a racially segregated society and culture like those I had just left, down to detail: It was created, like today’s U.S.A., by fleeing Calvinist dissenters (including Huguenots), English empire-builders and their descendants. In the process, these settlers had displaced indigenous peoples, killing or humbling them. They had fought over control, then gone on together to build a European-style industrial civilization and join the British Commonwealth of Nations—all of these nations (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and dozens more) being settler creations also, like the American U.S.A.

Back in the U.S., I watched as world race politics then changed. Europe lost its overseas empire. Euro settler populations across Asia and Africa saw themselves increasingly as stranded in a newly strange place. White South Africans declaredindependence, then in 1994 gave up their country to a surging black majority. Today, whites whose families have been in Africa for 200 years are fleeing or adapting to once-despised African social ways, to black culture and a rewritten history.

Worth noticing, I hope: South Africa’s is a story that, with this sea change, diverges from that of the U.S. Those settler-created governments also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Latin America are under increasing pressure from indigenous peoples. And the U.S.A.? The U.S., meantime, has been presenting itself as a model democracy: the model for the world—“a city upon a hill,” in the popular-again phrase of Pilgrim settler preacher John Winthrop (who intended to create a theocracy).

The U.S. has been able to do this, of course, because its settler forefathers virtually wiped out the indigenous peoples—who often enough greeted them with open arms—to get Euro majority rule and because their inheritors today prefer to know almost nothing of this history. The U.S.’ indigenous—still being called “Indians”—have had to fight in court for the land and compensation awarded them in bad-faith treaties hundreds of years old, a story of little interest in the majority culture and weakly reported. At the same time the nation has advanced from a Monroe Doctrine, claiming the Americas, to a “Bush Doctrine” claiming the world, for the U.S. brand of “liberty.” Is anybody out there stirred by this set of circumstances?

My purpose with the site is to open a discussion—to provide a country inn for Pilgrim to warm his hands around the common fire, summon up the demons looming in his darkness and, I hope, exorcise them. Rooms are available inside. Continue to Border crossing for Customs and tourist information. Or enter through The wicket gate.