The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part four

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

 

Tuesday, August 26

  After polishing off the last of my pizza for breakfast -- always a good start to any day -- we headed up to the Dells for the Boat Tour, hosted by Captain Abby and Emma the Award-Winning Guide, who shares a writer with Jack from the Duck Boats. In fact, she told many of the same jokes, eliciting all the same groans. But she also told some different dad-jokes, and some different puns. But both of them made a fuss about Sherry's and Nancy's crocheted hats, so we like them. And of the two tours, I clearly prefer the Boat Tour, as the time spent bumping around on land in a poorly-sprung vehicle behind a loud smoking diesel had nothing to recommend it, whereas at least the smoothness of the water passage was relaxing, even with the noise of the boat's powerful engine. 

The clear water in Witch's Gulch

 

Stand Rock

 The boat tour stops at two locations in the river, both of which I remember fairly clearly from my previous visit here in 2012, with Kirby: Witch's Gulch, and Stand Rock. The first is a spot where you can walk up a narrow defile to a concession stand near the road that passes through the state park. Then the boat goes just across the water (it's a lake or reservoir, held back by the hydroelectric dam next to downtown Wisconsin Dells, and 17 feet above where it would normally be, but the locals insist on calling it a river, as though it had a natural flow to it) to Stand Rock, a pair of adjacent pillars of sandstone where, in the 1800s, local photographer H.H. Bennett took a famous photograph of his son leaping between the two pillars. It was one of the shots that made the Dells a popular tourist destination back then. Nowadays, though, what with insurance costs, they let a dog make the jump. They employ three, just for that purpose.

 By the end of that tour it was time for lunch, so we repaired to the River's Edge Pub, where we had been for dinner earlier. We hadn't planned that, but it was there and we had started wandering in circles a little bit, looking for inspiration. I had a so-so fish sandwich; I didn't make a note of what anyone else had. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, so it was good enough. And it was there.

Apollo & Slim

 "There," in this instance, means it was just at the end of the road we took to get the Lost Canyon wagon tour. The Lost Canyon is a very narrow crack-in-the-mountain type place where horses pull wagons of up to 14 tourists through the rock's channel. In our case the horses were Slim and Apollo. Slim is a Clydesdale with a mustache worthy of Hercule Poirot; Apollo is a larger American Paint Drafthorse, one with a butt worthy of a Kardashian. (I'm guessing; I don't actually know what a Kardashian looks like, but I picture them all as having huge asses.) 

 After a couple of rearrangements of personnel on the wagon, Sherry and I got to sit up front with the driver, so we had the best view of the tour. There are lots of places where you think there's no way this wagon is going to fit through the crevice ahead, but it opens up just enough as you round the last curve. 

Oncoming traffic

 There's one point where the narrow passage is long enough that you have to be concerned about unseen wagons coming in the other direction. They have a signal light arrangement there, and as it happens we encountered another tour group at that point. 

 I think that of the organized group activities we've been in on this trip, the Lost Canyon tour is my favourite, even though it's fairly short, only about half an hour, and a little bit bumpy; and my preference, it turns out, is unrelated to the cost, which seemed more modest than either the Ducks or Dells tours, but were in the same cost-neighbourhood. The Lost Canyon was just very relaxing and the scenery, seen up close (extremely; I was afraid of hitting my head more than once, and I'm sure Slim's ear brushed the underside of the rocks a few times) was captivating.

Champions all

 Following that, we had to make a choice: miniature golf, or cheese-ball croquet? Jeff pointed out the danger of getting your jaw smashed by a mallet just as you go to bite into your cheese ball, so we opted for mini-golf at a place called Pirate's Cove, which has like seven separate courses. The one on top of its hill is billed as "almost completely accessible," so we picked that one. There were two holes that required climbing half a dozen stairs to get to, which Jeff could have negotiated easily enough by leaving his rolling walker at the bottom, but in the event it wasn't necessary, as he was on a bathroom-break at that point and skipped half a dozen holes, including those two. So he technically Did Not Finish, while the rest of us came in in a fairly tight cluster of scores. I won, with even a hole-in-one, which may have never happened before. 

 We celebrated completion of the Once-A-Year Athletic Club Members' Meeting with drinks and light snacks on the back deck of the Lake House, where we'd heard the fiddler a couple of days earlier: cheese curds (not great), artichoke dip with pita bread (I didn't try it), and soup for two, plus a shrimp salad for Jeff. Nancy and I tried a strawberry-purée mocktail, while the others opted for actual booze, the lushes. The setting was very nice, the conversation was relaxed and as laid-back as the service. We ended the evening at the condo, where there are surprisingly few stars visible despite it seeming very dark out. Stayed up late just talking about this and that.

 

Wednesday, August 27

 Since we were up so late on Tuesday, we were late out of the gate on Wednesday. I, for one, felt tired all day, and I know Jeff did too, but we all seemed to have a good time regardless. Condo week is always like that. I did breakfast at a little local cafe called Denny's Diner (no relation to the chain of lousy restaurants), where I had a couple of fried eggs, a bagel and a schmeer served to me by, I'm guessing, a couple of Romanian kids. (They seem to be everywhere here, all on summer work visas.) It was good, but somehow I expected more, I don't know, charm? As I was driving back to the condo in that embarrassing truck, I got to thinking about how many middle-class families could live in this condo development, with its roughly 175 one- and two-bedroom units and lots of room to build more. This would make a significant dent in the affordability crisis in most major cities if it could be duplicated on a cost-effective basis; but resort rentals bring a higher return, so investment goes to that instead of what people really need. 

All aboard! R&GN Railway

 Back at the condo, we had a long, leisurely discussion of the day's activities, and then set off first to ride the miniature train at the Riverside & Great Northern. This was originally a factory where miniature trains were built, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now it's a volunteer organization of people who like these 15-inch-gauge trains. They have a three-mile ride through the woods to a turntable where the engine is moved to the other end of the train, and you head back on the same line. We sat in a cattle car which had four seats, each facing in a different direction. Other than the difficulty of getting into the car, and the bumpiness of the ride (not unexpected), it was a pleasant journey, even fun. The car could probably have accommodated more than just the four of us, but fortunately we were the entire complement. 

view from the Riverwalk

 After that we went downtown and walked around some, first on the Riverwalk -- a pretty walkway built along the cliffs overlooking the river for about a quarter of a mile -- then on Broadway, checking out all the schlocky tourist places along there. T-shirt shops, fudge shops, ice-cream parlours, and bars seem the dominant elements of the mix, but anything that might soak up a few tourist dollars finds a place along the street. It's fun to see. I was actually hoping to find a reasonably-priced long-sleeve all-cotton T-shirt or sweatshirt, but after stopping in a few of the stores I gave up. Surprisingly, it wasn't price that kept me from buying anything.

 We interrupted our Broadway Schlep with a couple of errands (post office and drugstore), then returned to see the Root Beer Museum. Nancy got a flight of root beers that we all tasted before selecting one to use in root beer floats while she debated charging us for the samples we'd had ... by which point it was really too late and we just refused to pay her. The floats were delicious, of course, and the museum was quirky and entertaining, a good way to pass the best part of an hour. The guy operating the place -- remarkably, not the owner -- was unbelievably enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject. 

 We were pretty drained from a week of activity after that, so we went to a local park, parked by the side of the road, and tried to nap for about an hour. I don't think I managed to sleep at all; not sure if Jeff did; Nancy and Sherry sat contentedly in the back seat, knitting. (They do that everywhere. I'm sure if you google "women knitting in Wisconsin Dells" you'll see random people's vacay Tik Tok videos.) When the clock at the nearby church chimed six o'clock, we fired up our oversized truck and meandered down the road to the Legacy Dinner Theater, where we had tickets for Sneaky Pete's Wild West Show, a local production written by the theater owner featuring an all-you-can-eat meal of carbohydrates and fried food: a cream vegetable soup that seemed to be pure cream; dinner rolls; a pewter bucket of almost-cold fried chicken, which fortunately was not also greasy (it wasn't really bad except that it should have been warmer), and all the basic forms of foods my doctor has told me to steer clear of: mashed potatoes (which felt like they were made from flakes), corn on the cob (which I managed to avoid entirely), macaroni and (soi-disant) cheese, and baked beans (which were actually pretty tasty). Dessert choices were a fudge brownie or an apple turnover. I had the turnover, which wasn't bad, while everyone else had the brownie, which wasn't particularly good by brownie standards, which are high. Bad as the food was, I still ate too much of it, and felt bloated and ill the rest of the night. (The kind of feeling where I wake up, remember my heart attacks, and wonder if this is the Big One.)

  And then came the show. We were seated at a "bad guy" table, so we were supposed to boo the hero and cheer the villain. I did neither; I'm sorry, but this show struck me from overture to closing credits as a heavy-handed commercial for all the largest local tourist traps, but geared for second graders; and I assume all those tourist traps mentioned in the show were the ones willing to pay a promotional fee to the writers of the show. It really brought home the crass commercial aspect of this resort town, and in a most unpleasant way that I'm sure my table-mates didn't note or care about, as they were fairly uniform in their mild praise of the evening's entertainment. It was, I will admit, not as bad as the usual local production (probably at least in part because the local high school has a strong performing arts program, including a Performing Arts Center that dwarfs the rest of the the school's buildings). The performers could carry a tune for the most part (though the star of the show seemed to be just the slightest bit off on a lot of her higher notes) and the musicians were more than competent. The music consisted of re-worked familiar tunes with the words changed to tell a ridiculous local story of how the town came to be called Wisconsin Dells instead of Kilbourn, the former name (until 1931). I did not enjoy the evening. I am tired of "family-oriented" entertainment, for which read kiddie shows. I am ready for some adult themes in my show selections.

 I slept very poorly Wednesday night. 

The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part three

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

Sunday, August 24

 I forgot to mention that after dinner at the River's Edge, we had ice cream at a place called Avazza (maybe), which was right next to a restaurant & bar called the Lake House, which had live music out back on their dance floor at the water's edge, so we could also hear it. (They may be owned by the same people.) And we went back to the condo and played Password with a game set the Nancy and Sherry had borrowed from the office while I was doing laundry. 

 Today began with a Premier League match on TV, with Everton christening their new stadium by beating Brighton and Hove Albion 3:0, and then the start of the Fulham:Man U match until everyone was ready to go. We drove up to a village called Warrens, which is the center of the Wisconsin cranberry industry. We got to the Discover Cranberries Cafe just in time to be almost their final customers ever: today is their last day in business, unless they can find a new space to relocate into. The menu looked like a Department of Justice document detailing President Trump's dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, all redacted to reflect the fact that there was just about nothing left to serve. I got a cheeseburger (no lettuce, no tomato, no pickle, no onion); others got variations on grilled cheese sandwiches. They also had a small selection of t-shirts and hoodies for sale at 80% off; Sherry got a short-sleeve t-shirt, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a hoodie for about $15 total. I got three amusing wall signs for about a dollar each: "We're more than a family; we're like a small gang"; "I think my gene pool was one of those above-ground things"; and "Leftovers are for quitters."

Sand to be spread on the bogs

 In the basement of the cafe building is the Cranberry Museum, which was interesting enough for us to spend better than an hour in, seeing the history of cranberry farming in the area. We were down there long enough that they thought they could close, and turned the lights out on us. And then we took a self-guided tour around the cranberry bogs before we headed back to the Dells (after a stop at a Yarn Shop in Warrens, which involved long discussions of Sherry's wardrobe, all of which is knitted or crocheted, and of the recent floods in Texas, which were of surprising interest to the Wisconsin locals, as were earthquakes in South Texas; go figure).  

cranberry bogs provide habitat for sandhill cranes

 I have to say that, after two days, I'm not very impressed with the elaborate electronics on the Yukon. I mean, besides having so many buttons of unknown function with indecipherable heiroglyphics on them, the ones we have figured out don't seem to work. I have my phone paired to the car. It will start up, then quit, then start up, then quit, and so on. I had a couple of podcasts downloaded for our trip today, and that aspect of it seemed to work alright, but the GPS got us to within 20 miles of our destination, then stopped working entirely. It never came back up the rest of the way to Warrens, and never came up at all on the return trip; although the GPS on the phone (and on Sherry's phone, and on Nancy's phone) worked perfectly well. The car's GPS is still lost out there, looking for the intersection of Main Street and Oakdale Road. Very frustrating, and completely useless if you're relying on it to get you where you're going. (It got lost again on the way home from dinner. It's not my phone; it's the car.)

 Back at the condo, we made a general plan for the rest of our week here, trying to fit in a number of competing activities. Then we went to dinner at a sort of sports tavern/restaurant; good, but unremarkable. 

 

Monday, August 25

 I went to breakfast by myself, as Nancy and Sherry always have oatmeal together and Jeff doesn't get up until late, and has some frozen stuff like Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches that he likes but I don't. I went to a place in Lake Delton (the town we're actually in, south of the town of Wisconsin Dells) called BJ's Restaurant, based just on the musings of reviewers on Google Maps. It was rated at 4.3 stars, but there is, I've learned, a huge difference between 4.3 stars and 4.5 stars. The food was just so-so: a quesadilla filled with small chunks of steak and cheese and vaguely Mexican-themed veggies, along with undercooked hashbrowns from a freezer bag. The sour cream and salsa made the quesadilla bearable. At least the coffee and service were pretty good. 

sculpture of a crane taking off

 I was back in time for our 9AM departure to the International Crane Foundation facility a few miles south, toward Baraboo. It proved pretty interesting, though I wasn't thrilled with the docent-intern who guided us around a few of the exhibits. She seemed to have memorized her presentation, and every time she was asked a question she seemed to be doing a term search in her mind. It was kind of like being guided by AI. The theme of her tour was "cranes in myth and legend", which is probably why only three of the fifteen species of cranes were part of the tour.

whooping cranes

 They have all fifteen species of cranes in the world on display, and thousands more specimens out of public sight at a complex they call Crane City. That's where they do their breeding programs aimed at preserving each species. Sandhill cranes, one of two North American species, are the only type of crane not in some danger of extinction, and that is a success story in itself, given that at one point only a few decades ago that species came close to disappearing. Now there are about a million of them, and their habitats seem fairly secure. 

 Whooping cranes are the closest to extinction, but their numbers have increased slowly from 21 birds to almost 900, and this organization claims a large part of the credit for that. Most of Crane City is given over to breeding whooping cranes.

on the Duck Boat

 After the crane foundation, we went for lunch at a local winery. I got a small pizza and took half of it back to the condo. We also got a cheese plate that attracted a variety of bees, wasps and flies. Jeff, who may be allergic, got his lip stung when he bit into a piece of food on which a bee or wasp was dining, and ended up going back to the condo while the rest of us rode the Duck Boat in the Dells. (It might've been the wine, too: he had a flight all to himself, while Sherry and Nancy split one; I drank water. Pardon me a moment while I polish my halo.) (Jeff survived and his lip, which was swollen, is back to normal.)

 I wanted to ask the boat driver "Jack" if he wrote his own material -- the now-standard collection of puns and bad jokes -- but I thought it'd be like one of those queries where you come to an intersection with two people, one who always tells lies and one who always tells the truth. I didn't want to work through that.

 I had some leftover pizza for dinner and we all went out to see the Rick Wilcox Magic Show in the Dells. It was a theater that held maybe 200 people, almost full, and Wilcox put on a very enjoyable comedy-magic show. He started off with what I'd call "traditional" magic tricks, where doves and things appear and disappear. I know I've seen these tricks a hundred times in my life, but I still don't understand how they can work. I mean, I'm sitting five rows back, dead center, and I see the handkerchief waving and he runs his hand down its length and there's nothing in it, then suddenly he's holding a live bird and no handkerchief!. It's still such an amazing thing. 

The whole show is like that: amazing. A little corny, sure, because it's very family-oriented, but it's even more amazing when you see it live than it is on television. These things just seem to be impossible, even though you know there's some sleight-of-hand and that Penn and Teller have probably explained it all before. Definitely a show to go back to if we ever come to the Dells again. 

 We followed up the show with a dose of ice cream at Huckleberry's in the Dells' downtown area, which had kind of a 1950s-Las-Vegas-without-the-casinos feel to it. I just went with mint chocolate chip because none of the "local" flavours grabbed my imagination. It was still good. And there were lots of people out wandering around in the area, which also hosted a down-home mix of tourist spots (fudge! boba tea! souvenirs!) and local attractions (bar! restaurant! bar! bar! tavern! bar!). It felt like a nice place.

 I've realized that my GPS works perfectly well in this beast of a vehicle if I don't used the Android Auto program. The phone is paired to the car, and the audio comes through clearly, but the map doesn't show on the giant screen. Luckily I have the map on the phone, which I can see if I look down, but I don't need to because the heads-up display shows upcoming turns and distances. If I use Android Auto, it gets lost and freezes up, but without that it works well enough. I've figured out a couple of the thirty-two thousand buttons, too, and don't really much care about the rest. Although it might've been nice to know how to make the beast parallel-park itself, I wasn't about to experiment with that on a busy street. 

The 2025 Condo Trip, part two

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

Thursday, August 21

 I used Rewards points for our stay in Austin, Minnesota at the AmericInn, a Wyndham brand that I'd never heard of. At a guess, I'd say maybe they started this chain of slightly-nicer motels to try to recover some of the reputational damage they've suffered from their cheapening of several of their other brands over the last dozen years or so; like La Quinta and Days Inn, both of which used to be reliably nice two- or three-star motels, but now are all over the map and are not reliably anything. I could be wrong: like I said, I've never heard of this AmericInn brand before, and this might be the chain's only decent example.

 As it is, it was clean and comfortable, and the desk clerk was particularly pleasant. 

 We went to breakfast at a little cafe across the street from the Hormel plant, where local farmer-types at the next table talked weather the entire time we were there. I learned that Spring Valley, Wisconsin, where my friend Kirby lived, had some kind of heavy-weather event. "Did you hear about Spring Valley?" said one to the others; "That was some kind of rain they had!" I wanted to ask him more about it, but didn't want them to know I'd been eavesdropping.

Admit it: you always wondered

 Then we went to the Spam Museum, on the town's main street. I think we spent close to two hours in there, learning all about the product's success around the world. I knew the stuff was popular in Hawaii: I didn't know it was popular in Asia and Europe. I bought cans of two of their best selling flavours (out of a choice of about 135); a couple of days later, at the condo, I fried up a batch of Tocino flavour Spam for breakfast -- the word means "bacon" in Spanish but it just tastes to me like Spam with sugar on it; Nancy thought it tasted of maple syrup. The other one, a Korean flavour I can't pronounce, will probably get cooked up in a day or two.

 Next came a stop in Decorah, Iowa, at Vesterheim, a Norwegian heritage museum. It takes up most of a city block and includes a four-story museum, a number of old buildings brought on site from other places, and a gift shop and gallery. It told the usual story of immigration to this country: the hardship and lack of opportunity in the Old Country; the success of most immigrants; how some went back, either because they'd saved enough money for the life they wanted back home, or because they'd been disillusioned by the hard life they found here. The Vesterheim ("western home") Foundation has been at this business of preserving and celebrating Norwegian heritage for a long time now, apparently very successfully, but maybe too successfully. To my mind, their heritage center was too clean-cut and packaged; not as down-to-earth as the Norsekedalen heritage center I'd been through a number of years ago, not far away in Wisconsin. (Though that view might only reflect the fact that a friend of mine was our docent at Norskedalen, so we got a lot more gossip on that visit.)

 I think we skipped lunch that day. I don't remember stopping for anything to eat, but we did go for ice cream at a little shop down the street from the heritage center, and a little local shop that had all kinds of interesting flavours unfamiliar to me. Sherry had a scoop of Zanzibar chocolate and one of Hunka Hunka Chunka, which had banana and peanut butter and something else in it. I had one of salted caramel with chocolate chunks, and one of a butterscotch and peanut butter mix. They were all really good.

 We had no idea how far we'd get on the road toward Milwaukee, so I didn't make a motel reservation at that time. We drove across the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, and down to the Wisconsin River, then took a designated Scenic Drive east along that river. (It was, of course, a beautiful drive.) I finally decided we would get to Sauk City, so when I had a signal I tried to make a reservation there. Couldn't find any motels in that town, so reserved a room in a place called Lodi, some ten or fifteen miles east of that. It was a little hunters' lodge, very basic and very inexpensive, with no amenities to speak of. It also had no wifi signal and no phone service, so I couldn't update this blog or deal with the pressing issue of prescriptions until the next day. We found a late dinner at a local tavern where a volleyball tournament was going on -- all of Lodi was there -- then retired for the night. 

  

Friday, August 22

 We couldn't get a signal for Google Maps in the morning on leaving Lodi, so I just had to kind of guess which way to go. My paper map didn't show any of the local roads, but I took a wild guess and headed east on a county road. It wasn't a bad guess. It got us, eventually, to the freeway, although probably 10 or 12 miles further back than a better guess would have done. No matter. It was a pretty drive

 We stopped for breakfast at a place called the Pine Cone Restaurant and Bakery, which we'd seen a billboard for. It seems to have undergone some kind of trauma, possibly relating to the road construction that blocked the main entrance; there was no bakery and the restaurant was poorly attended. The food was okay, no better: Sherry's french toast was so bland she actually added syrup to it, something I've never seen her do before; my fried egg sandwich was a little better than that, but my eggs weren't fried hard, as I'd ordered, they were scrambled. I chose not to complain. Also, my sourdough was Texas toast. I chose not to complain about that either. I was distracted at the time by the fact that, for the third time in five years, the cheap plastic register that controls the passenger-side rear window on the convertible had broken, and the window won't go up all the way. 

 I am not fixing it again. I am giving that car to the British Transportation Museum when I get back home. (I'd started to do that last year, but they didn't have their tax-exempt status in order. Now I've learned that it doesn't matter to me; we won't get any tax savings out of it anyway.) Anyway, I'm really getting too old for the kind of back-road wandering I like to do in it; and I'm just about out of new counties to go to anyway.

In Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

 So we cruised into Milwaukee, after stopping to see the pink elephant at a gas station, and the start of the Yellow Brick Road in a little town with a long Indian name. The movie, the Wizard of Oz, had had one of its premieres there in 1939. The town celebrates its moment of fame with Oz Plaza, containing the Yellow Brick Road and statues of the major cast members. 

 We're thinking of creating a travel game called Chaos Bingo, with cards showing all the things that can go wrong. What prompted this is the discovery that the minivan we reserved for our Condo Week trip was at Dane County Airport, in Madison, not Milwaukee. After several hours of frustration, at an additional cost of about $600, we finally got a big enough vehicle for all the stuff we have: a new GMC Yukon Denali, a Suburban-sized SUV that looks like a Secret Service vehicle. (Nancy: "It'll pass anything but a gas station.") We spent a long, long time trying to figure out how to get Google Maps onto the huge video screen in the car, then drove up to Tamarack Resort in Wisconsin Dells, stopping along the way for an early dinner at an Iowa-based chain of family restaurants on the model of Cracker Barrel. Good service, good food, very relaxing after all that had gone before. 

 

Saturday, August 23

 One of the first things we discovered on arriving at our condo was that the oxygen machine Nancy had gotten for Jeff (a) didn't have a long enough air tube, and (b) it didn't work right. So while we sat around waiting for the repair guy, we watched Arsenal beat the crap out of Leeds, then I did laundry in the condominium complex, and talked to my sister on the phone for an hour, which must be a new personal record. While I was talking to her, I looked up to see a moose driving by on the roof of a PT Cruiser. Turns out to be a delivery vehicle for a local pizza restaurant, but it was a surprising thing to see. Once the machine was fixed, we started planning our week in the Dells, then went to dinner at River's Edge, a nice bar and restaurant a couple of miles away. I got the big prime rib, ate half, brought the rest back to the condo and had half of the leftovers for breakfast Sunday morning. It was still a lot of food.

  

  

The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part one

This is the first post of a series; you should read 'em in order, I think.

All the pictures for this and subsequent posts relating to this trip can be seen here.

 
 I'm five days into this trip and this is the first opportunity I've had to sit down and write about it. Kind of ironic: when I was planning the trip, it was to begin last Sunday, and was to have included a five-hour detour just to go to McPherson County, Nebraska. In the event, it began a day early, and I no longer needed to go to McPherson County by then. (I had gone through there a few weeks before, after meeting my sister in Valentine, Nebraska; it was only a 20 minute detour on that trip instead of five hours.)

 So you would think I'd have plenty of time. Even more so because so many of the places I'd included for sightseeing stops got left out: we got there too late; they were closed that day; we opted for a different route, we decided not to bother.... There are always a lot of things like that, it's part of our devil-may-care attitude about travel plans. But every evening we arrive at a hotel in Wherever, America, and if I'm lucky I just have time to upload the day's pictures (assuming there are any) and maybe do something with them. Until now, I haven't had time or energy to write. 

 The theme of the trip so far, until today at least, has been Summer Heat. It's been absolutely draining, and so I"ve been less reticent than usual to drive with the top up, even on small roads. (At freeway speeds, with trucks and cars passing all the time, you can't hear an audiobook with the top down anyway.)

Yes, it's a tourist attraction

 We've only been on freeways for mostly short stretches so far: a few miles in Wichita Falls; that dull bit from OKC to the Kansas State Line; up I-135 from Wichita to Salina, Kansas; a dozen accidental miles around Kearney, Nebraska, and the stretch from the Middle of Nowhere to Austin, Minnesota; that last bit made necessary by the presence of a splotch of gold paint on the freeway that found its way into my list of sights to see. (Be patient, I'll get to it.)

 The kennel where our dog Carly vacations opens at 9AM on Saturdays. I don't know why, but I'd originally planned to take her to the kennel, then spend the rest of Saturday packing and, I don't know, watching the first weekend of the Premier League season? And we would leave on Sunday. But an unexpected burst of common sense smacked me upside the head in the preceding week, and we decided to just go ahead and leave on Saturday. I had done some careful, albeit meaningless planning regarding what is open when -- I know it's meaningless when I do it, but I still do it every trip -- and all that planning was completely out the window because we had an extra day's drive, nearly, right at the outset. We didn't care, because we knew how meaningless my plans always are. I just like to plan things.

 

Saturday, August 16 

 I figured on grabbing a quick breakfast and coffee somewhere along the way out of town. There was no place readily accessible for a quick breakfast. The first place we stopped is out of business; beyond that are only reprehensible fast-food outlets encased in urban sprawl. In the end I settled for a "taco" from a familiar mom-&-pop ice house in Spring Branch, which was better than expected but still not very good. It was sufficient, though, and almost as effective as a Snickers bar would have been. It got us to lunch at Marble Falls, at Real New Orleans, a restaurant opened at some point since 2005 by Katrina refugees. (For Texans, those people are the silver lining of that particular dark cloud.) I had their red beans and rice, which is seasoned better than my red beans and rice, but isn't as creamy and needs more rice in it. Sherry had crawfish étoufée, which is pretty good by any Louisiana standard. The service was excellent, and the prices were good. The only down-side is that someone had already asked to have the TV tuned to the pointy-ball match, so we didn't get to watch the real football that was on.

 The first stop I'd planned was something called the Hanna Springs Sculpture Garden in Lampasas, Texas. This turned out to be quite a large city park, with dozens of sculptures created mostly by local and regional artists. Most of it is the kind of stuff you think, Well that's not too bad, or I hope they didn't over-pay for that; almost none of it acknowledges, much less adheres to, classical ideas of beauty and proportion, even in passing. Yet overall the garden is worth the time required to walk around it and view the works at a leisurely pace (though next time it'll be a much cooler day, I guarantee!). It also includes what appears to be one of the more successful butterfly gardens I've ever seen (or maybe it's just that time of year).

  The next planned stop, we skipped. It was to have lunch and a slice of pie at the Koffee Kup Cafe in Hico. In my entire life, driving up and down US 281 from San Antonio to the rest of the world, I have NEVER not stopped at the Koffee Kup for pie. Until this trip. Something like seventy years of tradition out the window. Oh, well, that's what traditions are for, I guess, in this Modern Age of the New Commodus. (I guess maybe Real New Orleans is the new traditional stop, except they don't have thirty kinds of pie.) And the stop after that, at the so-called National Vietnam War Museum, didn't happen because it closes at 1PM on most days. But we did stop at the Home of Crazy in Mineral Wells. 

the whole town's raison d'être

When I was much younger, I used to pass through Mineral Wells, Texas all the time on the way to Possum Kingdom and points west. (Mostly just to Possum Kingdom; there wasn't much of interest to me in the terra incognita farther west, back then.) In all that time I never heard of Crazy Water, but in preparing for this trip I found a reference to it somewhere, and so we stopped and got some. It's the mineral water for which the town was named some hundred and twenty years ago. Who knew? We got two litres of the highest-concentration mineral water, and when we get to our condo in a few days we plan to put it to the medicinal test and just see if it does cure all ailments, as they used to claim. Fingers crossed. (I'd be happy if it alleviates one ailment.)

 From there, we saw the World's Largest Shovel and the World's Smallest Skyscraper, both located in Wichita Falls, Texas. We tried to go see the Falls for which the town is named, but it was getting dark and they were a mile's hike in hot, buggy weather, so we decided to try that in the morning when it was cooler. Besides, the Falls are fake and everybody knows it. The real falls were destroyed ages ago, and the city only built "new" falls for the tourism value.

 Dinner turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Sherry found a place called the Hibiscus Cafe, operated by a Greek family. The food was excellent (4.5 jalapeños), the service exceptional (5 jalapeños), the ambience pleasant (4.5 jalapeños) and the value high (4 jalapeños). The menu, despite not being all that extensive, had a number of dishes unknown to us, so I'm almost ashamed to say I only had a Greek salad; but even that mundane dish was done with a certain exceptional aplomb. Sherry had a transcendent little dish called, demurely, chicken crepes, and then we shared a slice of bougatsa, a semolina cake that I had first heard of only a week or two before, so I took its presence on the menu as a Sign. It was wunnerful. From some of the reviews I've seen of the place since, I know I'm not alone in thinking this is the best Greek food available in Texas. It's certainly better than at any of the restaurants I've tried in San Antonio.

 And on the down-side, we spent that first night at the Days Inn on Maurine Avenue. There's a Motel 6 around the corner where we should have gone instead: we'd have gotten the same quality room for about $20 less, and probably the desk clerk would have been a little more cheerful. 

 

Sunday, August 17

The Falls

 So we got up and went to see the Falls in a light fog. Turns out you don't have to hike 20 minutes from Lucy Park, though you can; turns out you can see the Falls from the frontage road of the freeway leading into downtown, and that's what we did. They were pretty, in an artificial way, but we didn't spend too much time gawking at them.  

 Breakfast was a quick thing featuring kolaches and coffee at Tommy's Donuts and Fried Rice (!), and off we went on our excursion. We started a new audiobook called A Heart in Winter, a “savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana”. We'll never know.

The story begins with an Irish immigrant with a foul mouth telling about various things we couldn't understand: even with the top up (on the freeway that morning) we could barely hear the audiobook's reader, as he'd decided, apparently for artistic reasons, to read the whole book in a sort of stage whisper; and the only words we could clearly make out through his thick accent, presumably genuine, were of the four-letter variety. We got through maybe 20 or 30 minutes of this before we switched to something less literary: a "new" Hercule Poirot mystery, the first of five written since Agatha Christie's death. It was easy to understand in a moving car and did not use the word "fuck" a single time in eleven hours.

Cochise

 At Anadarko, Oklahoma, we visited the Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians. This features busts of Indian leaders of the past 450 years arranged in a park-like setting. Most of them are people I'd heard of, like Sitting Bull, Cochise, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, Will Rogers, Sacagawea, Pocahontas, Satanta, Massasoit. I was also surprised at some of the omissions: there was no Crazy Horse, no Red Cloud, no Wovoka ... so obviously mere fame doesn't get you in. The membership of this hall of fame seems skewed toward the Plains Indians that now have reservations in Oklahoma. There are a few familiar names from the Eastern tribes: Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk. And one or two from tribes of the far West -- Shoshone, Nez Perce, and I think one Navajo. But mostly its made up of Native Americans whose fame arises from their tribes' conflict with European Americans. As if they have no history of their own, apart from the Whites.

 Obviously, some of the busts are speculative: many of these people lived before photography was common, and we only have drawings or descriptions of them, but that's beside the point. Overall, the Hall of Fame was an interesting stop, though I will admit that the sun's position in the sky made it difficult to get decent photographs of many of the busts. Sherry did better with her picture of the bear guarding its cub from a pack of wolves.

  The map I'd looked at (the paper map) showed a scenic route out of Anadarko that went about halfway to Oklahoma City; this turned out to be a drive through the Wichita Mountains, which truly is a very pretty drive, even if the name is aspirational. Even in the mounting heat it was an enjoyable drive, but it did dump us back onto the freeway. 

The little chairs choke me up

 A Sunday in August is not the time to visit many of the favourite sights of OKC. The Bricktown Canal, the local knock-off version of the Paseo del Rio, is dead and parking is still expensive. I'd guess that in the coming years it'll get tattier and tattier until the area's fancy hotels and overpriced restaurants complain. We skipped it entirely and went instead to the Federal Building Memorial in the middle of downtown. That was a worthwhile thing to see, especially on a Sunday when few people were there. It's a moving and beautiful memorial.

 We left the car there and, despite the heat, walked a few blocks for lunch to a Mediterranean place called Zamzam.  It's located in a trendy gentrifying area called Automobile Alley (which used to be home to car dealerships and repair shops). The food was very good, although the service wasn't as good as they seem to think it is. We ordered chicken shawarma but got chicken kebab. We ate it anyway, thinking they did a kind of odd shawarma there. (We also ordered a kofta wrap, which was as it should have been, and was very good.) The young man who, for reasons unknown, took over our table for the later stages of our visit seemed exceedingly nervous, like we were going to say something to make him cry. (We didn't, of course, but it wouldn't have taken much.) And, of course, as is always the case in trendy neighbourhoods, it was overpriced. At least it was air conditioned. 

 We swung by the Beacon of Hope for a picture (there was nowhere to park, because of construction, so I kept the car running while Sherry jumped out and got a picture), then went to see the Round Barn and Pop's Soda Ranch on Route 66: a shop selling what seems like every kind of soda pop you can imagine. Hundreds of varieties, most of which we'd never heard of. We didn't buy any -- they were almost all in glass bottles, which is not something we wanted to try and transport cross-country in a small, tightly-packed car. We went on to Wichita. (I was so tired that we stopped at a truck-stop diner so I could take a nap in an air-conditioned setting. They had Boston cream pie, so it was worth the stop on every level.)

 The overnight in Wichita was in a seedy-ish Motel 6 in a really seedy part of town. The kind of Motel 6 that gave the chain its awful reputation: half-assed maintenance and housekeeping, The pool was like a stagnant pond, green and slimy. There was a guy yelling to himself in the street out front of the motel when we arrived, and he was still there a couple of hours later when we got back from a really good dinner at Gabby's, a Peruvian restaurant, and a quick visit to the Keeper of the Plains, a sculpture at the confluence of two branches of the Arkansas River. (We also went looking for the Wichita Troll, but didn't find it that night.) What stamina the man had! He should have been a TV preacher.

 

Monday, August 18

 In the morning, we went back to the Keeper of the Plains. This time, in the daylight, we found a large parking area and found that, had we been there ten minutes later the night before, we'd have seen the nightly light show that goes off at 9PM every night. And if we'd walked a hundred yards or so farther down the riverside path, we'd have found the Wichita Troll, which is really best seen at night. Sherry managed to get a couple of good pictures of it anyway, though I could barely see it through the grating over it. (It's underground.) 

 We found breakfast in yet another trendy area, this one called Old Town, a spread of old warehouses converted into clubs and restaurants and shops that cater to a much younger crowd than us. The restaurant we chose was called Egg Cetera, and was mostly good, though of course the coffee was barely drinkable (more the Starbucks type than the what we older folks prefer; I for one like my spoon to come out intact after a quick stir). The service was kind of pretentious and the prices were five-star though the food was only four-star. Avocado toast with two eggs for Sherry, chilaquiles con pollo en salsa verde for me, $43. (For comparison, I get the same dish in San Antonio, in larger quantity and higher quality, for about the same price as what this place charges.) No wonder young people can't afford to buy a house these days. Turns out it is the avocado toast and expensive coffee.

 Having filled ourselves up, we trundled across town to the Chisholm Creek Nature Center, where we spent a pleasant hour or so wandering through native plants and watching the wildlife in the air and the water, until the heat grew unpleasant. Sherry managed to get her ten thousand steps this day.

boulders at Rock City

  We drove up the freeway to Newton for a quick stop at a place called Blue Sky. I wasn't willing to walk across the lawn to the sculpture -- it's tick season -- but Sherry was. Then we drove farther up the road to a place called Rock City, outside Minneapolis, Kansas, where glaciers dropped a profusion of really unusual sandstone boulders at the end of the last Ice Age. We spent maybe an hour and a half there, wandering around the weird rock formations. 

 We had decided to spend the night in Kearney, Nebraska, because when Sherry's sister Nancy and her daughter Ali went there some years ago, they were particularly impressed with the Archway, a building built across the Interstate near there. Sherry and I had been there before, but not in time to actually see it. We were determined to, this trip. So we drove the back roads of Kansas and up to Kearney -- there were two planned stops along the way that we bypassed, one because it was already closed, and the other because it was some miles down a gravel road and not that interesting to begin with. And dinner was a late lunch at a local barbecue restaurant next to a gas stop,  We got to Kearney and checked into a better-variant Motel 6, a new one with a slightly quirky bath arrangement that only needed a cheerful clerk to make it a pretty good place to stay.  

 

Tuesday, August 19

  There's a cookbook publishing company in Kearney that has a bookstore selling all its products. That opens at 8AM, according to sources; the Archway doesn't open until nine. So the plan, if it can be called that, was to grab a quick breakfast, run by the bookstore, then be at the arch when it opened. 

 This intended arrangement of activities collapsed immediately on discovering that the bookstore isn't where it showed on my sources; it's miles to the east, out the highway along the railroad track. And the somewhat trendy breakfast spot we chose (Kitt's Kitchen, in another Old Town neighbourhood) doesn't do "quick." We were celebrating our 36th wedding anniversary all day, so we were more determined than usual to kind of chill. The coffee was as horrid to me as any Grande, and the $17 bagel with salmon and a schmeer was so far from the glorious lox-and-bagels of New York that I had to look in another direction, lest my tears oversalt the thing. The lemon-blueberry "buckle" (a type of muffin or big cupcake) that we split made up for most of the failings of the place. 

 Oh, well. We choked down another $40 breakfast and went to the Archway.

 I knew the Archway crosses Interstate 80; that's kind of its signature attribute. And on the way into town Monday evening, I'd seen a sign pointing me toward the Archway. I remembered from our previous visit that it had its own exit from the freeway. So I thought I knew where it was.  I got on I-80 and headed west ... for ten miles, to the next exit, by which time Sherry had looked it up on Google Maps and found that it was three miles east of Kearney. So, back we went, thirteen miles to the Archway.

 Everything we'd heard or read about the Archway Museum says most people spend about 45 minutes there. Fine, we only had to get to Sioux City, Iowa that day, and frankly that destination was only because we figured there'd be no place to stay in the miniscule burgs we'd pass through on the way there. (It was to be a county-counting day.) We puttered through the gift shop, buying a souvenir fridge magnet that we don't have room for, and chit-chatting with the shop clerk for a while, then started up the escalator to the museum.

 It's laid out on two floors, the first going south across the freeway and telling the story of the local area before the coming of the railroad. The floor above takes you north, back across the freeway, and tells the story of the area after the coming of the railroad and into the modern (automobile) age. It's kind of a hagiography of America, where all the people are honest and fair and adventurous and strong and know how to tie all kinds of knots and obey their parents. We spent two and a half hours, creeping slowly through all this, and enjoyed every minute of it. I tried my best not to argue with the audio presentation about the more obvious whitewashing of things, and mostly succeeded. A morning well spent.

 From there we drove up to Loup City for lunch at a cafe chosen not for its quality but for the fact that it was the only one we could find. It was in the first of the destination counties for the day's driving, Sherman County, and that is all it has to recommend it. From there, we drove north through Valley and Garfield counties, the east. We'd decided to skip the chalk mine, since the prospect of spending time underground looking at soft rock didn't really interest either of us. I was more interested in visiting the Ashfall Fossil Bed, but that was down seven and a half miles of gravel road (each way) and maybe someday we'll come back in the Subaru? So we continued our drive, through Pierce and Cuming counties and voila! I'm done with Nebraska. We got into Sioux City, Iowa around dinner time and, it being, as I said, our anniversary, we went for a nice relaxing dinner at an almost-fancy Italian place in the central part of the city. It reminded me of Caparelli's, our neighbourood Italian place back home, because of the Dean Martin and Perry Como music on the PA system. (Caparelli's doesn't have that, but they do have Dean Martin and Perry Como likenesses painted on the walls along with a host of other familiar Italians and Italian-Americans. That's good enough for my memory.) I had scallops sardignole, which was very good, while Sherry had chicken alla oggi, nicely done in sauce over lots of vegetables. I even had a glass of wine to honour the special occasion (our anniversary, not finishing with Nebraska). 

 Our hotel that night was the Cottonwood Inn and Conference Center, back on the Nebraska side of the river. It turned out to be the best hotel deal we've found so far on this trip. It was only $47 plus tax ($54 total, I think) and very nicely appointed. The headboard on the beds was almost manorial, everything in the room worked right, there was plenty of lighting and outlets everywhere you might want one, nice absorbent towels in a bathroom that worked in predictable ways, like back in the days when plumbing was functional rather than decorative, and comfortable places to sit in the room. They even had actual ceramic mugs for your coffee in the morning. It was great. Too bad it's not in Deming or Amarillo, where we'd get to use it several times a year instead of just this once.

 I took not one single picture in all of Nebraska. Not that it wasn't pretty in places, just that there was really nothing to take pictures of. It's not for everyone....

 

Wednesday, August 20

 There were a number of sites to visit in Sioux City, Iowa. We didn't go to any of them. (The only one I regret not having remembered to go to was the Jolly Time Popcorn Museum, which we'd talked about checking out and were a little bit excited about. Too bad I didn't look at the list before we left town, to see what we were skipping, because I'm pretty sure we'd have gone for that first.) Instead we woke up and took a stroll along the banks of the Missouri River, in Riverside Park, and then went for breakfast in a little shop near the trattoria where we'd had dinner, a place called Brekky's that had a wonderful breakfast sandwich with some kind of delicious sauce, egg, cheese and sausage on foccacia. This is the kind of breakfast I like: tasty, artisanal, and inexpensive ($8 each), and with good ol' americano coffee. We really only went there because the converted railway car I'd planned on going to, Archie's Diner, turns out only to be open on Saturdays and Sundays. I think I was happier with Brekky's. From there we set out across Iowa, listening to an audiobook called Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett, an amusing story about a former actress who stumbles into a criminal case because she needs the reward. "I don't think so, Boo."

 The best thing about Wednesday was that the heat finally broke. We had the top down almost the whole day and it never got above 82 degrees; but I did get frustrated by the boring straight roads with stop signs every couple of miles. It reminded me of a trip across Indiana many years ago, the one where I decided that life was too short for that kind of travelling. I was also frustrated by road closures and construction not reflected on Google Maps, and by unpaved roads that show up as paved on the GPS app. Our only stop that day was at the Grotto of the Redemption, a Catholic shrine in West Bend that was honestly impressive. It's built mainly of quartz and coloured stones of all kinds. It's presented as the work of one dedicated German-born priest, but I don't think anyone lives long enough to do all that by himself. He must have had help, and not of the divine variety.  

 There was nowhere to eat lunch in the little towns we passed through in Iowa, so we dug into our ice chest for apples and carrots, and cruised up to Minnesota to see the Golden Stripe. See photo at top. It's actually a splash of gold paint on the surface of Interstate 90 just west of the Blue Earth exit, at the point where the country's longest road was finished in the 1970s, with a little celebration that did its best to evoke the importance of the completion of the transcontinental railroad a hundred years before. They keep the stripe painted, but you really can't see it from the rest area there. Maybe they should build a little platform a dozen steps high, so you can actually tell there's a golden stripe across the road.

 A stone's throw from there is the Jolly Green Giant, of commercial fame, and next to that is a restaurant called the Farmer's Daughter that provided an early supper (or a really late lunch) while we decided where to spend the night. It was too late to get to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota before it closed for the day, but we both are interested in seeing it, so we made a reservation in Austin and spent the night there. That's where I am now. And having finally caught up with my blogging for this trip, we can now go explore the history of shoulder pork and ham, then toodle across Wisconsin and be at Milwaukee Mitchell Airport in time for Nancy and Jeff's arrival on Friday. We have a whole day of, frankly, gorgeous weather to do that in, and the most interesting sight along the way is the Museum of Unremarkable Objects (seriously!). Luckily, the scenery in southern Wisconsin is very nice, as I recall, and the roads are inviting. I'm looking forward to a nice drive.

On Alex Haley and the Autobiography of Malcolm X: Three Small Points

 A philosophy-centered email blast that I subscribe to, Aeon Weekly, included an essay on August 1 by one Alex White, identified as a historian based in Kampala, Uganda. His essay is a critique of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written by Alex Haley (of Roots fame), in which his main point is that Haley skewed his presentation of Malcolm's thoughts and beliefs by selectively omitting ideas developed mostly in the last few years before Malcolm's death, and by using "plagiarism and invention to fill gaps in the narrative." 

 To support these points, White provides a number of examples noted by a number of critics who have studied the Autobiography in recent years, along with some documents that were unavailable at the time of its writing; and he goes into great detail to show how the selective omission of ideas occurred.

 Let me say first that I am by no means a scholar on Malcolm X or Alex Haley. I haven't read widely on either man; I have, in fact, never read Malcolm X's Autobiography, and the only thing I know of Haley's is his novel, Roots. I read it in a two-volume book club edition when it was new, and like most Americans, I think, I watched the television miniseries that came about a year or two later. I enjoyed it, but I knew it was fiction. My interest in these men is entirely down to the fact that a few of my friends take a greater interest than I in both Haley and Malcolm, and that's the only reason I read Mr White's essay at all. My greater interest is in preserving and supporting editorial standards in general and intellectual honesty in particular.

 Certainly some of the examples of "plagiarism and invention" that White brings up are damning. They seem to be honestly presented and accurately quoted. But I have particular qualms about two of those examples, one of which I consider intellectually dishonest on White's part, and the other somewhat disingenuous on both Haley's and White's part.

  White makes reference to a criticism of Haley by another historian, saying "Haley seems to have re-used material from his previous writing. Malcolm’s comments on the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in Chapter 15, notes the historian Garrett Felber, were lifted directly from Haley’s article on Jackson for Reader’s Digest," published a couple of years earlier. In the following paragraph, he says that Haley "also plagiarised the work of another author...". The implication is that Haley plagiarised himself. This is not possible.

 Plagiarism is the use of another person's thoughts or writings without attribution. Alex Haley can write a sentence twice, in two different places, and not give an attribution to himself without committing an intellectual offense. It may not be transparent, but it is not wrong or even unethical to do so. (Though I have to admit, if it were me I would preface the second use of the thought with something like, "As I said so eloquently and insightfully in my manifestly perfect and unassailable article in such-and-such a publication...". But that's vanity, not intellectual necessity, at work.)

 I think this is a minor point at best, one made no smaller by the possibility that what Haley did was reuse not his own words but the words of Malcolm X, quoted in the earlier article. But the Autobiography was to be presented as written by Malcolm. One of them said it, and so neither of them is plagiarising by saying it again; and I would not even write this critique were it not for the fact that this is the second occasion on which I've seen it suggested that there is something plagiaristic about re-using one's own thoughts. I don't remember the first example, only that it occurred fairly recently and that at the time I thought, "This writer doesn't know what 'plagiarism' is, and neither does their editor." At the time I put it down to the increasing sloppiness of writing in the Internet Age, but now I begin to suspect something more nefarious: an attempt to label as wrong something that is not wrong, an attempt to broaden the scope of a long-standing offense so as to be able to more easily attack people who have not behaved improperly. 

 It also serves to add undeserved weight to White's other examples of Haley's failings as a writer. If Alex White intended his example to serve that purpose here, that would be intellectual dishonesty on White's part at worst, and sloppiness at best.

  Another of White's examples is that Haley lifted sections of text from a letter written about Malcolm's visit to Africa by Alice Windom, a woman who was among his hosts during that time.  After Malcolm visited Accra, Ghana, in 1964, "[s]he then wrote a six-page letter about the visit for friends back home, hoping to counteract any negative coverage of Malcolm’s tour in the US press. ‘It is not for publication,’ Windom wrote in the letter, ‘but use it any other way you wish.’" White states that 56 sentences from that letter appear verbatim in the Autobiography, and that others were altered in minor ways. 

 This is a more serious charge against Haley's honesty, but without at least the assertion that Haley had the entire Windom letter in his possession, you can't rule out the possibility that Windom's friends, to whom she sent the letter, and who were theoretically aware that Windom did not want the letter published, felt differently about the content, and provided Haley with excerpts or partial photocopies along with the injunction that the letter's writer did not wish to be identified. A weak argument, possibly, but given everything else that was going on in the creation of the Autobiography, it remains a possibility. At the very least, before such an accusation is made, the possibility that friends who received Windom's letters may not have had the same purity of motive regarding the publication of the letter, or may have misinterpreted Windom's reluctance to have the letter published. Or, possibly, they interpreted her permission to "use [the letter] any way you wish" very broadly. 

 My final quibble with Alex White's essay is his imputation that Haley intentionally and dishonestly omitted late alterations in Malcolm's philosophical thought. On the surface, this appears to be true. But in reading White's essay, I am struck by the timing and import of those changes; and I, at least, can see the possibility that it was Haley's intention to close up the eventually-published Autobiography as a sort of "Part I" in a remarkable story, with the possibility of a continuation with the new ideas fully hashed out in a further volume. That would seem to me to be, artistically, an excellent path to choose: the stark changes in Malcolm's thought, just at the time the book was being put together, would almost demand such a bifurcation, otherwise the scope of the new ideas could not be thoroughly given over to full expostulation. Could it have been in Haley's mind at all, or in his editor's? I don't know. Given the depth of the change, the newness of the development in Malcolm's ideas, and Haley's own need to get the book done, as White describes, it would certainly have seemed a sound way to move ahead to me. The timing would have made for a neat break between the Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and the Malcolm X who came after his break with that group. 

 In any case, something significant happened that would moot the concept. Malcolm X died by assassination just days after Haley completed the first draft for his review. The publisher "Doubleday announced that they had dropped the book, fearing violent reprisals at their bookstores and offices." Any ideas anyone might have had about the subject likely would have died with him. 

 Alex White's essay contains numerous examples of intellectual failings on the part of Alex Haley, most of which are fairly unassailable, if true (and they seem to my inexpert eye to be true). Most convincing to me are the allegations that arise from analyses of recorded interviews and records released after both co-writers were dead. (Haley died in 1992.) But White's own failings, minor though they may be, must lead to some questioning of the accuracy and faithfulness of his critique of Haley's work on the Autobiography.