ABOUT THE
BOOK
STATES OF MIND is a philosophical, historical and conversational
journey across America, an attempt to find the virtues lost amid the
negativity and disillusionment of the late 1990s. It is an excursion
into the American scene and the American psyche. Like Robert Pirsig's
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it is a travel essay
in the form of a philosophical inquiry. Eighteen years after Blue
Highways, 36 years after Travels with Charley, a
half-century after Jack Kerouac's journey On the Road, STATES
OF MIND re-examines the state of the union.
At age 27 and 26, respectively, Brad Herzog and his wife, Amy, toured
the country in an attempt to find states of mind so elusive in the
eyes of their generation – the pride, for instance, and faith and
wisdom and inspiration. They did so by turning the figurative search
into a literal one, visiting the towns of Pride (Alabama), Faith
(South Dakota), Wisdom (Montana) and Inspiration (Arizona) – a total
of 18 small towns, villages and hamlets in 18 different U.S. states,
resulting in 18 self-contained chapters.
STATES OF MIND is the small town as microcosm, the hamlet as allegory.
Within the context of each state of mind explored and within the
confines of each town, there are excursions into concepts. Call them
relevant detours. In Comfort (Texas), for instance, there is an
examination of comfort as it applies to roots, regional loyalty and
America's nomadic tradition. Comfort, as it turns out, is the site of
the only Union monument on Confederate soil, dedicated to several
dozen German immigrant "freethinkers" in the area who refused to
pledge loyalty to the Confederacy and were then slaughtered while
trying to escape to Mexico.
The location of each town also provides an opportunity for pertinent
historical detours. Wisdom (Montana) was named by Lewis and Clark in
reference to Thomas Jefferson. Hope (Mississippi) is adjacent to the
city of Philadelphia, where civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner
and Chaney were murdered in 1964. Truth or Consequences (New Mexico)
is the nearest city to the Trinity Site, offering an opportunity for a
tangent about the atomic age, Oppenheimer and scientific truth vs.
moral consequence. Triumph (Louisiana), located at the end of the
Mississippi River, has been completely destroyed and rebuilt twice by
hurricanes. Freedom (Wyoming) is a state line town founded by a Mormon
polygamist escaping religious persecution. And half the population of
Justice (West Virginia) consists of direct descendants of the
Hatfields and McCoys.
But the heart of STATES OF MIND is the conversation, the encounters
with characters too real and too rich for even a fertile imagination
to invent. It is a visit to the home of Ollie Mae Welch, a former
sharecropper in Hope who has never voted, who still steps aside for
white folks on the sidewalk, and whose landlord is the man on whose
property the decomposing bodies of the three civil rights workers were
found. It is a bizarre tour of Pride given by "Chicken" Owen Foster, a
6-foot-8, 340-pound, cigar-chomping good ol' boy. It is four hours
sailing the Gulf of Maine outside the coastal village of Friendship
with Bill Zuber and his family aboard his 1902 restored Friendship
sloop.
STATES OF MIND begins in early January in Harmony (California), an
artists' colony of 18 residents. It ends ten months later on Columbus
Day in Joy (Illinois) with a hilarious-yet-poignant discussion with
Kyle Tompkins, who was found sitting alone in the city park amid the
fallen leaves on his seventh birthday. In between, there is cause for
optimism, astonishment, confusion, fascination, admiration and
despair. In the end, however, there is simply an appreciation of the
experience. As John Steinbeck wrote, "One remains away just long
enough to learn the lesson." |
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