The First Road Trip

In the time since the last post I've done quite a bit of driving and seen lots of very cool things, both in Mississippi and elsewhere.

A quick arithmetic briefing before I get into details:
American Military Bases Count: nonzero
Sate Count: +1 (current total: 38, though maybe up to 40.)
State Capitals Count: +1 (current total: 15, plus maybe one or two more?)
Synagogue Count: +3 (current total: I have no idea. Probably >100)

The first few pictures are pre-trip:

Last weekend there was a neighborhood picnic in the park around the corner from my house, the park where the community garden is. Pretty much the only foods there that were vegetarian-friendly were the desserts, which was fine by me. Apple pie, brownies, cookies, raspberry tortes, watermelon...yum! Then I stayed at the park for a while reading In the Time of the Butterflies (Julia Alvarez) in my hammock. I'd seen the movie in Spanish class in high school, but missed most of it because we weren't allowed to have the subtitles on. 

I went back for more figs, I couldn't help it! They're so deliciously sweet.

The art museum has a hexagonal display of hexagonal mirrors at slightly different angles such that the above effect is achieved. Pretty cool.

The Natchez Trace runs from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN (440 miles), including a stretch through Jackson. The trace consists both of a parkway and of a walking/biking trail, and a couple weeks ago I decided to check it out, as it's the closest thing to hiking in this part of the state. (Actually, in most of the state: Woodall "Mountain" in Tishomingo State Park--in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains--is the highest point in Mississippi and is a whopping 807 feet. But it's so far north it's practically Tennessee).
I think it could be really cool to bike the entirety of the Trace when I finish my two years here.

When I saw the sun setting I realized I should probably head back to the car, but I stayed to watch just a bit longer. One thing I've noticed in Mississippi is that there's so much sky here! There aren't really any tall buildings (the tallest in the state is 348 feet and it's in Biloxi; the tallest in Jackson is 318 feet, and it's the only one over 300 feet), so there's nothing really to break up views of long stretches of the sky.

Sunset at the Trace.

More from the Trace

On my drive back from the Trace I pulled into a parking lot to watch the end of sunset because it was just as beautiful there.

On Tuesday morning of this past week, two of my coworkers picked me up in our rental car so we could hit the road for our first community visit road trip of the summer. Summer visits are designed to take advantage of geography, so the three of us went together to hit the northeastern part of the Florida panhandle and southwestern Alabama in Dothan (my community).

We looked at our driving route and saw that I-98 bumped right up against De Soto National Forest and decided that would be a nice lunch spot on our way out of Mississippi. Only when we drove into the park and followed what looked like a sign for a trailhead, it turned out that somehow we'd entered Camp Shelby, a joint-forces military training camp in use since World War I. Oops. We're not sure why the Arabic (?) is there--maybe to help the soldiers acclimate to what they'll see when they're deployed?

This is who we were sharing the road with. Nobody told us to leave, and nobody asked us what we were doing there.

We left Camp Shelby and soon enough passed a sign for Lake Perry, where we (finally) ate our picnic lunches.

One of the stained glass windows in the chapel of Temple Emanu-El in Dothan, AL, one of the communities I'll be working in this year. Dothan is actually one of the few small-town Jewish communities the ISJL works with that I'd heard of before taking this job because last year it made the the pages of the New York Times with a story about a "Family Relocation Project" that aimed to bring 20 Jewish families to the congregation/community by 2016, and in exchanged offered $50,000 to each family.
Funny and irrelevant side note: The website http://dothantemple.org/, which I thought was the synagogue's website, is in Japanese.

Florida's capitol in Tallahassee! Actually, the building in the front (with the ridiculous candycane awnings) is the Old State Capitol. The tall building in the back is where state proceedings actually happen now. At our pizza parlor meeting with members of the congregation we met a Tallahassee newbie and history buff who offered to take us to see the Old Capitol Museum and the state history museum the next day, which we happily took advantage of.

Inside the (new) capitol building. I'd never been to Florida before, so this trip added me both a state and a capital to my list.

Turns out we had almost a whole day of down-time in Tallahassee, and everybody we asked said the best thing to do would be to go to Wakulla Springs State Park.  I was picturing something along the lines of Yellowstone's hot springs and geysers, but when we got there it was actually a mini-lake with a high-dive and docks. And the water was free-zing.  I made sure to dunk all the way under to make my mama proud before we headed off to find some trails. Those weird stump-y things coming up from the swampy ground are actually tree roots!

Apparently, Wakulla is the world's "largest and deepest freshwater spring"--and unlike the big body of freshwater I'm used to from home, this one has alligators in it.

Some 'shrooms.

Since our first "event" of the day on Friday was services at the synagogue, we left Tallahassee early enough to have time to play at the beach in Panama City in the Gulf! It was glorious. I've never been in a natural body of water that warm before--the water felt like it was at least air temperature, if not body temperature (which were probably not that different from each other on that day, actually).

Thanks Gideon for having an ~~~ moment and writing to me about your State Count right when I was trying to figure out mine. Though this website is intended for tracking your election predictions, it's also a really good way of marking which states you've been to (and how many total electoral votes you've hit). So here's the key: BLUE (38) means I've been there. RED (2) means I'm not sure. And TAN (10) means I haven't. [A note about qualifications: Everyone has their own rules about how to count where they've been. Some say just driving through is enough, some say airports count. My rule is that I have to use a non-airport restroom.]

Now I'm back in Jackson until I head to Shreveport, LA (and Galveston, TX) on Aug. 6.

Settled Enough to Do Things

The previous blog post ended with the beginning of the Freedom Summer 50th Conference, and that's where this one will pick up.

Except not actually. I realized that I should give a brief update update work. I know which communities I'm going to be working with this year, and when I'm going to be going to each!


View Klionsky 2014-2015 Communities in a larger map 

So. I'll be working with Dothan, AL; Shreveport, LA; Lynchburg, VA; Williamsburg, VA; San Antonio, TX; and Houston; TX. Quite a spread!. My travel dates are: 7/22-26; 8/6-9; 8/12-20--I'll be going to each of my communities, but also tagging along on some of the other fellows' visits for extra practice.


And now back to Mississippi and Freedom Summer. 

Bob Moses and Marian Edelman Wright spoke about contemporary challenges to civil rights at one of the conference's morning sessions.

SNCC co-founder Julian Bond, sitting a few rows ahead of me and probably texting someone really important. This was during the "roll-call" of Freedom Summer veterans, each of whom was given a minute (loosely defined) to say where s/he had worked doing freedom summer and what work s/he is doing now. Very cool to see that lots are still involved in civil rights, education, and equal-access work 50 years later! 

The conference was hosted at Tougaloo College, a historically black college just north of the Jackson city limits. The school is old--it was founded just after the Civil War--and I was a little surprised by how how similar the building interiors looked like the interiors of big high schools I've been too, rather than colleges. To be fair, I was only inside the large gym, where the plenary sessions were held, and what seems to be a lecture hall, there were no (built-in) chairs in the room and there was a built-in stage.
I was excited to stumble upon a fig tree on the campus! I'm pretty sure no one will mind if I check back every now and then to see if they're ripe... There's also a community garden run off the campus, and another at the park a couple blocks from my house. I've started going to the workdays and it's nice to spend some time outside getting a little dirty and eating fresh, crispy cucumbers!

When I first got to Mississippi, I noticed that there was an interesting-looking exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art called This Light of Ours, a collection of photographs from Freedom Summer in 1964. I also remembered noticing that the cover article of the June Princeton Alumni Weekly was something about Mississippi and Freedom Summer. So I took a look, and it turned out that the article was about Matt Herron '53....who is not just a photographer who came down to Mississippi in 1964, but in fact one of the photographers whose work is in the This Light of Ours exhibit and moreover, is the curator of the exhibit! Many of the iconic photographs from that summer are his.
If Princeton taught me anything, it was to take full advantage of the alumni network. So the first thing I did when I made the connection was send Matt and email asking if, by chance, he'd be down in Mississippi (he now lives in California) for any of the Freedom Summer Conference. Of course he was coming--and invited me to join the gallery tour he was giving for other Freedom Summer veterans. 

You can see in the background of this photo one of Matt's most iconic and shocking series from that summer. (Click here for larger images.) Five-year-old Anthony Quinn's mother had told him not to let go of his American flag, whatever he did. In his words, "I was way more scared of my mama than I was of the policeman." (I hadn't realized the powerful symbolism of the American flag; holding one meant "we want the law to protect us, as Americans. The alternative was holding a Confederate flag.) The irony of the photo is apparent: the policeman trying so hard to grab Anthony's flag that he's nearly lifting the boy off the ground--in the background is another policeman holding a sign that says "no more police brutality" that he's obviously snatched from another protester. The arm reaching out in the center photo belongs to Dr. June Finer, who volunteered during Freedom Summer with the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Although she didn't know Anthony at the time, in the next photo you can see her comforting him after the two of them were arrested (Ye, they arrested a 5-year-old child).
Flash forward 50 years: Anthony Quinn is a lawyer in Atlanta, and somehow the conference organizers got in touch with him. This gathering was the first time Quinn and Finer actually saw/met/spoke to each other since!

Next up: some ways I've been spending my time:

I forgot to mention in my last post a third frustration besides my lost package and setting up the internet: I was disenfranchised! Many of you probably know that there was a hotly-contested senatorial (?) primary in Mississippi a few weeks ago. The incumbent Thad Cochran beat Chris McDaniel, though McDaniel is challenging the count still. I was fortunate my friend Teddy, who is working for the New York Times was sent down to cover the election, which means that Teddy was officially the first friend to visit me here in Jackson!
Anyway. The point is that when I came down in May, I asked to register to vote at the same time as I got my license. I was getting nervous when I hadn't gotten any confirmation of my registration so I called to check the status. Long story short, bureaucracy sucks and the DMV never sent my application to the Circuit Clerk, so I couldn't vote. I'm not convinced that it wasn't intentional....
These are the elevator doors in the Circuit Clerk's office, where I hand-delivered my voter application so that I'll be good to go for the general election in November. (Indeed, I received my voter card in the mail last week.)

The view from the office where I did some phone-banking for Planned Parenthood. They recently re-opened their offices in Jackson and Hattiesburg, MS. We were calling people asking for updated contact information, and I'm proud to say that one of my successful calls (updated info and interested in volunteering) was to a member of the state House of Representatives!

What could be more American than going to a (AAA) baseball game on July 3? Maybe getting to see fireworks afterward?! The Mississippi Braves are Atlanta's AAA team.

The Old House Depot is my kind of place! It's basically a warehouse of house stuff from homes and businesses--doors, window frames, mason jars, wooden chests, traffic lights, these big letters... They have a big party on July 4 with freshly-picked heirloom tomatoes! (And lots of other delicious things and a brass band, but the tomatoes were the best part.) I'd like to go back with my Real Camera sometime and take some nice photos there. 

The next few shots are from around the neighborhood.

They're very very tall, in case you can't tell.

Your eyes are not tricking you, that's a miniature horse! She lives in the neighborhood and belongs to the same folks who started the Rainbow Natural Grocery Coop back in the 1980s (not the Mississippi of most people's imaginations, eh?). Usually she's in her own yard/stable, but sometimes--like after the July 4th parade (which is why her mane is braided with r/w/b bows)--she wanders around other people's yards. 

Just some vines.

This was my perfect Sunday morning: porch swing with cheerios, a nectarine, NPR, and a breezy 75-ish degrees.

On Sunday afternoon, we went blueberry picking! Yum! The sweetest part of the deal is that we didn't pay for any of it. 

The woman who owns the trees (in Mississippi, blueberries grow on trees, not shrubs) has a system worked out where anyone can come pick for free. You give half of your pickings (well, half of the ones that make it into the bucket) to her for her to sell, and you keep the other half!

Pretty berries :)

(Photo by Arielle Nissenblatt). I think I came home with close to 7 pints! Yum yum yum.

Meanwhile, the lost package saga continues. I'll spare all the details, but suffice it to say that I have spent more hours on the phone with the United States Postal Service than any human being should ever have to spend on the phone with all government agencies combined. The most recent update is that my box of books is definitely at the--I kid you not--"Dead Letter Center"--in Atlanta. The name has officially been changed to "Mail Recovery Center" for many years (decades?), but everyone still refers to it as the DLC. But here's the deal-io. USPS auctions people's stuff off. Because most people don't go through the trouble of contacting them by any means possible as I've done. So they wind up with boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff--hundreds of lost Apple products, thousands of books, boxes and boxes of ownerless Lego sets. When I heard this I 1) freaked out that all my books were being sold and 2) decided that I was going to go down to one of these auctions and write a piece about it for the New Yorker. Just my luck: they stopped doing live auctions in favor of online ones a year ago. So now you can buy other people's belongings even more easily!

Well, wouldn't you know: I walked into work on Monday and was told there was a package waiting for me! I obviously freaked out, excited that my books had finally made it to Mississippi! What a letdown when I heard it wasn't a big box, but rather a small bubbler mailer. So I walked dejectedly to my desk and found this envelope! From the Atlanta Mail Recovery Center! "Woah. They're going to send me back one book at a time? Absurd but...I'll take it!" I open the package impatiently only to find... a copy of The Help that isn't even mine! Yes, that was one of the books in my lost box--good news, it means that the MRC has received at least one copy of my list of books and plea to return them. But it also means that they were like, "This is so great, this girl will be so happy that she's getting one of her books back, even if it isn't the exact copy that belonged to her!" Let me tell you, I was not happy.
I called USPS once more and finally was able to acquire an email address (which bounced. Thanks Twitter for helping me find a correct one.) and a fax number. The email address was a whole stupid mess because it turns out you can only submit this specific form via the internal employee Outlook system. So today at lunch I went to the post office, form in hand, and waited while they emailed it in for me. We shall see what happens!