The Chariot of Desire and the Winds of Ignorance
How I rediscovered history, baseball, America, and pizza on a cross-country road trip in a shitty Oldsmobile.
In September, my girlfriend and I had planned on moving to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for her new job, but a week before our flight this happened. She got temporarily relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, and suddenly I had some time on my hands.
In October, I drove from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Boston in my 2004 Oldsmobile Alero. I went slow and steady. I didn’t plan for much, other than history museums and pizza consumption. A few weeks later, I retroactively wrote about my trip.
I. The Book Cliffs
Traveling south through Utah with a bagel in one hand and a steering wheel in the other, I find the Book Cliffs. My mind wants a place like this for its own. My mind is in a cluttered place with all the complicated infrastructure, overgrowth, and debris of modern existence. This place out here, though, is empty. Washed over, dried out, and left alone. That’s a place where my mind wants to be. That’s a place where it can breathe and step and stare and feel no pull toward distraction. My eyes trace up and down the Book Cliffs and look for a spot to put myself, but I don’t want to be in it. I want to be it. I want to be the Book Cliffs.
The orange turns to blue then black. The sun leaves a fluorescent westerly glow from the past behind me. My sweet Chariot climbs forward into hills then mountains. The foliage, the cliffs, the breathtaking vistas — they’re tucked in for the night, hiding under that lumbering ocean of darkness that comes and goes with comfortable familiarity. It’s a beautiful drive, if only I could see what’s around me.
II. Camp Amache
Traveling west from Pueblo through southeastern Colorado with a coffee in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, I head across the plains towards the mountains. After I realize I’ve been driving in the wrong direction for a half hour, I turn around.
Traveling east through southeastern Colorado, the mountains turn to hills turn to ripples. I’m on U.S. 50 instead of the Interstate—a deliberate choice on my part. The curvy road takes me through small outpost settlements that must have had a purpose at some point. People still live there, but it’s hard to say why. A railway runs through a lot of these towns, if only, I’m forced to presume, to deliver barnstorming baseball teams and pick up whatever meager harvest the hapless locals produce. The Arkansas River runs parallel to the rail for long stretches, but you won’t see any steamboats or cargo ships chugging through—being so close to its rocky origin, the river’s good for irrigation, fly fishing, and, I can only presume, quality freshwater for illicit moonshine production.
I’m unabashed about my ignorance of this region of the world. No one ever sung its praises to me over sips and nips of wine and tapas: “You simply must visit Granada in Prowers County if you’re ever in the area. It is quintessentially Colorado, a true tour-de-force. Try the post office or the high school.” It is ignorance that drives me as much as my sweet Chariot. Ignorance is the wind blowing in my sail, taking me to the places my compass of comfort wouldn’t dare point to. This can be a perilous method of navigation. This is how you forget your direction, misplace your bearings, and surrender your good senses. This is how you get lost.
That’s how I found the Amache Japanese-American Relocation Center. Or rather, the place where it used to be. People once lived there, but it’s hard to say why. Over 10,000 people were sent here at some point, making it the tenth-largest city in Colorado in the 1940s—magnitudes larger than nearby Granada, where hundreds of people still willfully reside.
Amache today is a grid of dirt roads with signs denoting the previous locations of makeshift buildings. A hospital. A fire department. A co-op. A post office. A high school. The sign marking the high school cites the cost of construction ($301,000) as a cause of “national controversy.” Later I found deeper context from the Densho Encyclopedia:
Still reeling from the Dust Bowl, the region had seen very little new construction for decades other than federally-supported projects. Local residents resented the expense of building a school specifically for Japanese American students. … The fray was taken to the state and national level when Colorado Senator Edwin Johnson identified the construction as one of the ways the WRA [War Relocation Authority] was “pampering” the enemy. Although the high school was completed, the plans for an elementary and middle school were abandoned on orders from the national office of the WRA.
The WRA required new Amache arrivals to fill out Selective Service Form 304A, entitled “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry.” The questionnaire set out to determine the respondent’s national loyalty, the desired loyalty being an American one. Answering incorrectly or inadequately on the form posed serious consequences: relocation to “segregation” centers for the allegedly disloyal; revocation of American citizenship or resident national status; prosecution for espionage; deportation.
Versions of one question asked if the respondent would renounce their Japanese citizenship and allegiance to the Emperor of Japan—a problematic question on multiple points. Due to their legal categorization as racially non-white, Japanese immigrants were barred from American citizenship, so renouncing their Japanese citizenship would make them citizens of nowhere. Furthermore, United States citizens born in the U.S. of Japanese heritage had likely never even set foot in Japan, let alone pledged allegiance to its head of state. In spite of the questionnaire’s impossible logic riddles, Japanese Americans faced punitive action if they refused to complete the form. You had to be loyal, or you were disloyal. Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.
Another question asked men who were natural-born citizens if they preferred the United States so much that they might even serve in its military. 953 men from Amache checked the box and were sent abroad to fight for the United States. 31 of those men died in service of the country that vetted their loyalty. 106 more Amache inmates died while detained in Colorado. A cemetery, including a newer war memorial, is one of the few remaining original features.
Three structures were rebuilt at Amache on the south end of the site: full scale replicas of a barrack, a guard tower, and the camp’s water tower. Looking southward from those structures, you’ll see a great lonely endless nothing. The sign outside the replica barrack details the bare accommodations inside: single rooms for entire families, with stone floors and no insulation to protect from harsh summer heat or the bitter, unobstructed winds of winter. The winds of ignorance don’t always take folks; sometimes they keep them.
Camp Amache was named after Amache Prowers, a 19th-century Cheyenne woman who married John Prowers—a white cattle rancher whose surname now graces his home county. Amache was the daughter of Ochinee, a Cheyenne chief killed in an 1864 military massacre of a Cheyenne-Arapaho village not far from the eventual site of Camp Amache. Witnesses of the massacre described ruthless atrocities against mostly women and children, prompting a government committee to accuse the perpetrators of “murder and barbarity.” Despite the committee’s findings, those responsible never faced charges.
The winds of ignorance whisk me into Kansas, away from colorful Colorado. By the time I cross the border, it’s mostly dark. I’m forced to presume not much of note can be found around me.
III. The Negro Leagues
In recent years, the winds of ignorance have been gusting my sails toward the past. My grasp of history, particularly United States history, was largely unearned and unchallenged. When Thomas Jefferson said all men were created equal, I took him at his word. I had to. Imagine believing one thing and knowing another.
The blustery winds of baseball have also filled my sails. I rode a northerly earlier this year to Los Angeles for the World Baseball Classic finals, where I found an exhilarating intersection of all-star baseball, international culture, and batting helmets full of nachos. I have to admit that the trip mostly validated everything I already loved about my favorite sport.
Baseball is a near-perfect conduit for storytelling, for all its boundless idiosyncrasies, its mathematical constraints, its deliberate interdependence, and most importantly its uncanny utility for juicing raw life from the fruit of the moment. If you think baseball is boring, well, you’re right. It is boring. It’s designed to be boring. But I would contend that a two-out, 3–2 count in the bottom of the ninth with a runner on second in a one-run game strains to be boring. Life is lulls with moments, and baseball is a mimic of life. In a word, it’s art, except it’s better than art because it has batting helmets full of nachos.
The history of baseball stashes a long series of lulls and moments. I’ve grown increasingly fascinated with that history, so much so that I made the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, my first premeditated stop on my sweet Chariot’s cross-country ride.
Jackie Robinson is rightfully credited for breaking the “color barrier” in professional baseball, but he was not the first black player in Major League Baseball. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum tells us that Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black ballplayer in MLB. Recent research suggests it actually may have been William Edward White, the son of a slave and a plantation owner. He appeared in one game for the Providence Grays on June 21, 1879, five years before Walker. But White had a secret weapon in his professional baseball arsenal: he could pass as white. All his life, the light-skinned White identified as a white man, an invaluable asset that Walker could never call upon.
Walker — and later, his brother Weldy — played for the Toledo Blue Stockings during the 1884 season. Neither he nor his brother returned to the team the following season, in large part due to the influence of Chicago White Stockings (today’s Chicago Cubs) player-manager Cap Anson. Anson regularly refused to play any team that featured black players, including Walker’s teams on multiple occasions. Only once, during an August 1883 exhibition matchup with Toledo, did Anson relent to sharing the diamond with Walker. His hand was forced when Toledo’s manager informed Anson that Chicago would lose its share of box office revenue for the game if the team didn’t play.
Protests like Anson’s became so commonplace during the 1880s that it was eventually impossible to put forward a roster with any non-white players. For this reason, Anson is the villain and unfortunate catalyst for the NLBM. And frankly, he’s a villain to all of baseball history. He’s a thief who robbed us all of great moments, like Satchel Paige pitching against Babe Ruth for the pennant, or Josh Gibson hitting a World Series-clinching home run — or for the love of God, Rube Foster striking Ty Cobb out. If Jackie Robinson doesn’t sign a Major League contract, step onto Ebbets Field in 1947, and absorb all of this country’s virulent, entrenched contempt for his body, what else is taken from us? Aaron? Clemente? Bonds? The World Baseball Classic? Segregation stole raw life, juiced from human beings and their fruitful moments.
Major League Baseball conspired for decades to keep black players out of baseball for no logical justification other than to preserve and mimic the prevailing institutional racism that brought comfort to those who depended on it. It’s a monumental tragedy, and it’s a near-perfect telling of the story of life in the United States.
IV. Abraham Lincoln
In Ken Burns’ Civil War, writer Shelby Foote (yeah, that guy) says this of Abraham Lincoln:
The curious thing about Lincoln to me is that he could remove himself from himself, as if he were looking at himself. It’s a very strange, very eerie thing and highly intelligent. Such a simple thing to say, but Lincoln’s been so smothered with stories of his compassion that people forget what a highly intelligent man he was, and almost everything he did—almost everything he did was calculated for effect.
That’s a thought I carried with me throughout my solo tour of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois. There’s no getting beyond the “smothered” reverence implicit in an interactive, theatrical, multimedia tour of one man’s entire life. But to be fair, the museum works hard to go beyond hero worship. (That role is reserved for the gift shop.) Visitors are routed through entire sections devoted Lincoln’s contemporaneous critics, such as a gallery of negative political cartoons and a dark, spooky hall of mirrors wherein recorded actors assail Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War. Efforts are also made to humanize Lincoln with elaborate dioramas depicting his childhood and private life. To borrow words, almost everything was calculated for effect.
For me, the museum is an embarrassingly intimate jaunt through the life of a real man who still feels alive to me. As soon as I enter the tour through the life-size facsimile of Lincoln’s boyhood log cabin, I can’t dismiss the impulse to explore the museum with Abe himself. For a man who once said of his own campaign autobiography, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” I want so badly to see the incredulous look on that man’s face when he comes into view of full-scale wax figures in the likeness of him, his family, his friends, and his murderer.
To achieve this wish with albeit diminished results, I imagine that Lincoln’s life was mine, and that the museum is dedicated to studying me. For example, instead of starting at a log cabin with young Abe teaching himself to read by the fireplace, the exhibit shows me in my childhood home parked in front of a TV watching The Bozo Show while I smash homemade waffles into my mouth. (Speaking as a firsthand source, that would qualify as an authentic scene in my upbringing.) Then I imagine the museum curators’ painstaking attempt to portray my banal childhood of buttered waffles and morning clown shows as the first stop in a majestic, inspiring journey of hardship and triumph. In that manner, I can take a guess at how Lincoln might feel about his own museum. Even so, my empathic comparison can only go so far — e.g. I’ve never been the president of a country before.
I want to know what would amuse, baffle, horrify, and shame Lincoln about the way we see him today. From what I’ve yet gathered about his true persona, Lincoln seems very much like a human person to me. A witty person, maybe even a humble person—certainly a flawed person. But there’s this unreachable well of magic within him, too, and I can’t tell if it’s projected or genuine. Foote’s observation walks the edge of that bottomless chasm: how does a human person, time and again and without breaking down, remove himself from himself to make himself better? It’s that part of Lincoln that keeps him alive to me, not only because his “calculated” talent for harnessing his humanity to grand effect is a stimulating subject of study, but also because there’s immense value in that talent if it can be learned.
I want to learn that talent. I want to be the Book Cliffs.
V. Barraco’s Pizza
Traveling east with an entire pizza from Barraco’s (the finest pizzeria in all of Chicagoland) in one hand and a steering wheel in the other, I find Indiana again.
But I want to get back to that Barraco’s pizza for a second. This is very important: Barraco’s is, without a doubt, the finest pizzeria in all of Chicagoland.
You see, there are two pizza styles distinct to Chicago pizzerias, the most (in)famous of which is Chicago-style deep-dish.* If you’re unacquainted with the deep-dish variety, it’s the answer to a question that Midwesterners had been asking themselves for decades: what if pizza could kill a guy? That may seem like a frivolous consideration, but that’s the question at the artery-clogged heart of all Midwestern cuisine. Name any type of meat-based product, and a Midwesterner will tell you how many times you should deep fry it, how many pounds of cheese should be added to it, and sternly advise — but not necessarily mandate — which additional meats could be used to garnish or wrap around it.
With regard to deep-dish pizza, I would politely describe it as aggressively cheesed. The priority placed on cheese inundation is so high that the sauce and toppings are cooked on top of the cheese instead of underneath. The sheer preponderance of cheese necessitates this unusual layering technique due to the longer bake time — which, again, is necessitated to fully cook the overwhelming volume of cheese. The result is a lasagna-style pizza that’s delicious for one slice, decadent for two slices, and remorseful for any quantity above that. I strongly recommend trying it if you’re in Chicago or you’ve just wandered out of the desert after not eating for days.
Perhaps in reaction to the latest health fads sweeping the nation, there’s a a second, slimmed-down variety of Chicago pizza called thin-crust. Thin-crust pizza is almost the exact antithesis to deep-dish — a more socially acceptable amount of cheese is applied to the top, and instead of pie-style slices, the pizza is cut into a grid of snack-size squares. While the obvious risk of cheese overdose has been removed, there’s a sneaky danger to thin-crust pizza: the slices are so small, it’s difficult to determine an appropriate “last slice” threshold. I call this the Pringles Dilemma, which is two-pronged. First, you don’t count the number of slices you’ve eaten, just as you wouldn’t keep a precise count of Pringles munched — thus rendering a quantity-based consumption control useless or impractical. Secondly, because a single slice can seem relatively insignificant, it’s eminently justifiable to consume “one more slice” indefinitely. Before you know it you’ve put down an entire thin-crust pizza, ergo accomplishing an indulgence on par with eating deep-dish pizza. To quote an American proverb: “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.”
But let’s get back to Barraco’s, which is undeniably the absolute finest pizzeria in all of Chicagoland. Barraco’s serves both a deep-dish pizza and a thin-crust pizza, both of which deserve every accolade. But the thin-crust, I would contend, is the best consumable object in the known multiverse. It achieves perfection at every conceivable metric: the 100 percent real cheese infused with an impeccable blend of herbs and spices; the underlying red sauce that boasts a mind-blowing, complementary balance of sweet and savory; and the corn meal crust with a Goldilocks firmness that snaps without crunching. Biting into a bitesize square of Barraco’s pizza is like looking into the eyes of God if your mouth could see flavor.
Funny I should bring God into this, because my connection to Barraco’s is longstanding and perhaps divinely imposed. As a kid, I went to elementary school with the heirs to the Barraco’s dynasty. (I’ll protect their names here, lest they be doxed and harassed by desperate pizza-crazed mobs.) I even played on the same Little League team with a Barraco — a team that accomplished the 1996 consolation championship game’s runner-up prize in the Oak Lawn Parks Department league. For years afterward our team photo displayed prominently in the entryway of Barraco’s Evergreen Park location — personally my favorite of the seven convenient locations scattered throughout the Chicagoland area. Looking back, it’s easy to surmise a celestial destiny: me and Barraco’s were meant to be.
Anytime I fall into the orbit of a Barraco’s restaurant (which is anytime I’m within a hundred miles of Chicago), I very purposefully gorge myself on a thin-crust Barraco’s pizza. On these occasions, the Pringles Dilemma is waived; I simply eat until the hard-and-fast rules of human physiology kick in. Alternately, I ponder a different conundrum when I eat Barraco’s: the cold, looming truth that I can’t eat Barraco’s pizza forever. In fact there’s a finite number of occasions, a number I’m blind to, when I will feast on those immaculate thin-crusts. This number I call the Barraco’s Number of Mortality, represented as ᗺ in mathematical equations. I fret not for death; I fret for ᗺ.
After a stop at Barraco’s I arrive at my parents’ house, body full of pizza, with ᗺ–1 left to live.
VI. Indiana
There’s a different kind of pride where I’m from. It’s not like other states: “We’re from New York, we’re tough!” or, “We’re from Texas, we like things big!” It’s more like, “We’re from Indiana, and we’re gonna move.”
— Jim Gaffigan
Indiana is no place to stay. I say this in spite of the people who happily stay in Indiana, to live and work and raise children and buy quality handcrafted Amish furniture. But when I say, “Indiana is no place to stay,” I’m representing two opinions: 1) mine; and 2) the opinion reflected in Indiana’s official motto, “Crossroads of America.” I could be misinterpreting the motto, but it appears to me that the state of Indiana is advertising itself as a featureless buffer zone through which travelers must pass on their way to a destination beyond the state. If Indiana wanted people to stay longer than the time it takes to drive across its borders, maybe the motto would be something like, “Where America Comes Together.” But that wouldn’t be true. “Crossroads of America” is appropriate and accurate. Indeed, the state quarter features the state motto along with a racecar, as if to say, “We recommend traversing our state as quickly as possible.”
From age 10, I grew up in Indiana. I lived about an hour from Chicago after living across the street from the city’s boundary line for the first decade of my life. If you had to put me in a corner, I’m more Chicagoan than Hoosier — I cheer for Chicago’s sports teams and yearn for Chicago-style pizza. But I don’t mind calling myself a Hoosier.
There’s a special power that comes from being from Indiana, a power that you’d never really know until you leave Indiana, tell someone you’re from Indiana, and witness the winds of ignorance blow over their expressionless face like waves of sand sifting over the Indiana Dunes.
Within my first few weeks living outside Indiana, a young woman in Utah asked where I was from. I told her I was from Indiana. “Oh,” she replied, “I’ve heard of that.” Around that time I began to perceive the special power bestowed upon all Hoosiers abroad: anonymity. Saying you’re from Indiana when you’re in a place anywhere in the United States other than Indiana is as meaningful as saying your favorite color is blue: nothing can be deduced, and no judgments can be passed. Even after living in Utah on-and-off for a decade, I still prefer to claim Indiana as my place of origin. It forces non-Hoosiers to disqualify the presumptuous generalizations of geography. As soon as it’s revealed that I’m from Indiana, folks climb into a mental racecar and speed over the featureless buffer zone of conversation that instantly appears in front of them: “So what brings you here, then?”
An alternative followup response I’ve never gotten is, “Tell me more about Indiana.” That instinct doesn’t seem to exist in people. As I write this, I’m still torn over whether that’s more a statement on Indiana or on people, but I lean toward the latter. Our curiosity has a narrow focus when we meet someone new. It’s as though we’re ticking the boxes of an invisible checklist as we go along, hoping that we mutually arrive at a comfortable destination as quickly as possible. There’s a small risk to going off-script. What if Indiana is boring? What if I know nothing about Indiana, and it shows? Indiana is no place to stay. It’s no place at all. So what brings you here, then?
VII. Niagara Falls
How would we do it if we found it today? Would we still build observation decks and elevator shafts around it, onto it, and into it? Would we still surround it with manicured lawns, gift shops, an IMAX theater, snack bars, and restaurants?
Niagara Falls State Park on the New York side is billed as the nation’s first state park. Before its inception in 1885, the Falls and surrounding areas were privately owned, so little-to-no emphasis was placed on preservation and public access. That changed after New York state (along with Canada) took over Niagara Falls via eminent domain. Still, nearly all of the aforementioned in-park amenities were built thereafter. The park designation didn’t necessarily slow development around the park, either. Hotels, casinos, and other tourist traps are densely situated near the Falls on both the American and Canadian sides. A hydroelectric facility just a few miles downstream eats up rerouted river water from above the Falls to provide electricity to much of New York state and parts of Ontario.
Harnessing the economic potential of a natural wonder has been accompanied by catastrophic setbacks. The walls of the Niagara Gorge are clustered with old mills and hydropower plants that were partially decimated by erosion and massive landslides. In 1889, the Niagara Clifton Bridge, connecting the United States and Canada over the Niagara Gorge, collapsed just a stone’s throw from the Falls. A new bridge, dubbed the Honeymoon Bridge, was constructed in its place nine years later. When that bridge collapsed in 1938, another new one was built in 1941. The Rainbow Bridge remains standing to this day.
In a brute-strength effort to better understand the erosion occurring at Niagara Falls, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completely redirected the Niagara River to the Canadian side of the Falls in 1969, effectively shutting down and drying up the American side for six months. Crews took the opportunity to patch up a few cracks before dynamite-blasting their temporary dam, thus replenishing the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls.
The Falls erode at a rate of about one foot per year. In 50,000 years, the waterfalls will be gone.
What I see today at Niagara Falls is something between wild marvel and manmade spectacle. I can take a pedestrian bridge to Goat Island, pick up an order of french fries at a concession stand, and walk a few hundred feet over to the edge of the Horseshoe Falls, where a ceaseless mist falls on tourists from all over the world. It’s imperfect — messy, even. The geology holds thousands of years of history, but from the looks of it, we’re the biggest story it has to tell.
With soggy french fries in one hand and a steering wheel in the other, I drove my sweet Chariot eastward that day, from Niagara Falls to Seneca Falls. It was in Seneca Falls in 1848 where the world’s first women’s rights convention was held. Activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass attended the two-day conference at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. On the second day, the assembly voted on a list of resolutions that would become the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence and intended to challenge conventional notions of female inferiority.
“The history of mankind,” the document reads, “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” A compelling list of grievances follows. To quote a few in no particular order:
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men — both natives and foreigners.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Along with the Sentiments came a list of eleven resolutions, the most controversial of which called for women’s suffrage. Added to the list by Stanton herself, some attendees worried such a radical suggestion would delegitimize the other ten resolutions. But the resolution would pass, boosted in part by Douglass’s adamant support. Over 70 years later, a woman’s right to vote would be included in the United States Constitution.
The Women’s Rights National Historical Park, designated in 1980, commemorates the first women’s rights convention. The old chapel has been restored to appear approximately as it did in 1848, and next door is a museum with a small gift shop. A sign is posted at the street corner where the convention was held.
The sign was posted by the New York State Education Department in 1932—84 years later.
It’s election season in Seneca Falls, so front lawns throughout the town are marked with signs advertising candidates in local races. Barry Porsch is running for DA; so is Joe Sapio. Frank Sinicropi and Edward Barto are vying for County Treasurer. For Town Council, pick two: David Delelys, Douglas Avery, Thomas Ruzicka, or Steven Turkett. John Gallagher is unopposed for State Supreme Court Justice. Altogether, 18 candidates appear on the ballot for Seneca Falls. Four are women.
How would we do it if we found it today?
VIII. Baseball
A word starts to sound funny the more you repeat it.
Based on the latest science available, the history of baseball begins, arguably, six million years ago, when humanity diverged from its ape ancestors. A series of humanlike species would glacially evolve in prehistoric Africa and eventually morph into creatures that resemble modern people like us. A couple hundred thousand years ago, those people migrated to current-day Greece, but it would take thousands and thousands of years more before humans spread throughout the Balkan Peninsula. Knossos, on Crete, was settled roughly 9,000 years ago, making it one of the first known major neolithic settlements in Europe. The Minoan culture would emerge over the next few thousand years there, culminating in a written form of language around 2500 BC—a written language that would later be partially adapted by Mycenaean Greeks, giving us the first known written form of the Greek language. (Tablets mindlessly left lying around in a Knossos dwelling from about 1400 BC provide the earliest evidence.) Parts of this early version of Greek persist in the works of a writer we call Homer, whose language we call Epic (or Homeric) Greek. It’s in Homer’s Greek where we find the verb “βάσκω,” the noun form of which is “βάσις,” which translates as “step,” “foot,” or “foundation.” Latin would eventually adopt a similar word with a similar meaning: basis. From this Latin term springs a number of derivations in proceeding European languages, but none perhaps more consequential than “basse,” a word used in Anglo-Norman writings by the proto-French poet Phillippe de Thaun around 1119 AD. That same word would appear in the French language for centuries onward, and slightly later (circa 1300 AD) it would be stolen and modified for use in English as “base.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists seven noun forms, four verb forms, and one adjective form of “base.” The third noun form originated in 1440 AD, and it describes a children’s game similar to tag and sometimes called “prisoner’s base” or “darebase.” Most variants of the game involve two teams running back and forth trying to tag and capture the opposing team while tagging and freeing members of their own team. The first printed mention of a game called “base-ball” came in 1744 in an English children’s book published by John Newbery.
And if you’re still reading, that’s where the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, hastily begins its early history exhibit — with this children’s game called “base-ball,” or sometimes “rounders,” played with bats, balls, and bases.
Bourgeois 19th-century social clubs in the United States would give grown gentlemen an uninhibited excuse to perform this children’s game. They formed their own teams, dressed themselves in elaborate matching costumes, composed and published entire rulebooks, and kept meticulous record of their own inconsequential achievements. Eventually this children’s game would become so special that grown men were hired and paid to perform it better than other grown men. But certain grown men with certain physical features were not permitted to perform the children’s game with the special grown men — they’d have to dress up in their own elaborate matching costumes and keep record of their own inconsequential achievements, which would be regarded as even more inconsequential than the special grown men’s achievements in the children’s game. And grown women could not perform with the special grown men either, nor should they perform on their own — ladies performing the special grown men’s children’s game would amount to a “miserable burlesque.”
Special grown men paying other special grown men to dress up in elaborate matching costumes and perform a children’s game: this is how base-ball became baseball. And by some thread of storytelling, we end up with today’s billion-dollar entertainment and merchandising industry with millionaire superheroes and batting helmets full of nachos. Or at least that’s the thread we’ve chosen as the popular and collective history of baseball. An overwhelming portion of the baseball audience invests in a history that dignifies and aggrandizes the inconsequential achievements of grown men performing a children’s game. They tell the tall tale of a serious journey to “greatness,” a lofty destination at which only the greatest grown men most driven to be the greatest performers of a children’s game can arrive. Those inconsequential achievements of greatness include winning the most performances, batting the most balls, running the most bases, and countless other recorded measurements that are dedicated to the most avid patron’s memory, ready to be instantly recalled and recited by heart.
The Baseball Hall of Fame consecrates these inconsequential achievements of greatness and preserves all associated relics. The most avid patrons (me, for example) take pilgrimage unto this revered shrine of the grown men’s children’s game so that they may view up close the precise bats, balls, and bases utilized in the interminable journey to greatness. After a sacred stroll through the hallowed spaces, patrons can wander into the withering daylight of a small lake town in upstate New York and purchase relics of their own journey, like t-shirts, hats, and keychains.
I did all of it. I saw the bat Babe Ruth hit with, the glove Willie Mays caught with, the cap Marcus Stroman wore with his elaborate USA costume when he pitched in the World Baseball Classic championship — a thrilling performance of the children’s game I myself attended. I walked through the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery, a spacious chamber with bronze pictures of the greatest greats accompanied by descriptions of their inconsequential achievements of greatness in a children’s game. Then I went to a store and bought two t-shirts.
This whole experience was the scheduled apex in my sweet Chariot’s cross-country ride. I love base-ball, the goofy children’s game played with bats, balls, and bases. I love that anyone can play it, and that I can behold anyone play it with nearly the same interest as though I were playing it myself. And I love that it can be played anywhere.
In a glass case stuffed with a hodgepodge of artifacts, I noticed an old wooden home plate with nails precariously protruding outward. This was not a regulation home plate. The special grown men would never allow this hazardous base in one of their performances. An adjacent placard explained why such an unacceptable prop was placed in a display case with Luke Appling’s glove and Bobby Thompson’s bat.
Sometimes I wonder when the last base-ball game will be played. The first game, whenever one might claim it happened, was probably played by children. The last game, I guarantee, will not be performed by special grown men in elaborate matching costumes. It will be played by an imperfect assembly of 18 or so human people in mostly suitable attire with mostly suitable bats, balls, and bases. The score will be mostly kept, the rules mostly followed. But near the moment when the teams disperse and the game ends, we might simply decide to call it something else.
Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball? Base. Ball. Base. Ball. βάσιςball. Base-ball. Still sounds funny to me. How would we do it if we found it today?
IX. Massachusetts
With no job or actual responsibilities in one hand and a steering wheel in the other, my sweet Chariot of Desire — a vehicle that somehow keeps going in spite of all outward appearances suggesting imminent relegation to either a junk pile or the untrained hands of a sorely disappointed teenager — is parked in Massachusetts, where I am also parked until conditions in my own troubled nation improve.
The Chariot’s finest moments will always dwell in Utah, where its uncanny feats of endurance mostly abide. One could argue that I never unleashed my car’s full potential: due in part to my preference for bicycle commuting, my 13-year-old car surpassed the 100,000-mile mark only this year. But when you tally up the mountain driving, the rebuilt title, the two collisions, and a lifetime without garages or covered parking, the Chariot touts a decorated profile in grit and fortitude.
If cars were people, and my car knew how to die, I would bury my sweet Chariot in the Book Cliffs. It was back there in that ancient expanse that I felt an old journey end and a new one begin. The old journey, in truth, was on its last feeble kid-legs for longer than I knew. It was a journey of youth, fear, sadness, insecurity, comfort, destruction, renewal, maturation, and most prominently, ignorance. I had driven through a desert basin, my eyes creased open, the stereo cranked up, the windows rolled shut, and my body safely contained in the metal-and-glass bubble that sent me rapidly through the unconcerned wilderness I had selfishly taken for a featureless buffer zone. Then I looked back and saw the multifarious world behind me, and I realized all that I had ignored before was matched in equal proportion to everything in front of me. In every blank space was an opportunity that was invisible until I chose, by aggravated volition and conscious purpose, to look away from my compass of comfort and spread my hands into the furious, unrelenting winds of ignorance. In the new journey, my sails are up, and the oars are in. I’m learning that special Lincolnesque talent to accept the pain of my limitations in pursuit of every inch of expansion. It’ll never be perfected, but I will resolve, from the Book Cliffs on, to always practice.
* — Some will contend that stuffed pizza, a variant of deep-dish, is its own distinct variety. I recognize stuffed pizza as a subcategory of deep-dish and will therefore forego a more elaborate discussion on the matter.
