North of Eden (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

For the second time in my adult life, I took a two-week vacation that didn’t involve delivering a baby. If you didn’t miss me, it’s because I can actually turn out a 700-word column while traveling. But I was no help at all on the hard work that the rest of the staff had to do without me. I think I owe some people a pie.

My husband and I, essentially empty-nesters except for the college senior we left at home to care for Scully the dog and Fox the cat, headed north to escape the Arkansas heat. I know a lot of people love the Gulf Coast; for my money, the Great Lakes are the big waters to see in July. On this trip, we saw Michigan, Superior and Huron.

We saw my husband’s beloved Pirates beat the Cardinals in St. Louis. We spent two days with our son in Chicago and left satisfied that he is well and happy. We lucked into the last available room in the Holiday Music Motel in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, which is a little slice of heaven for lovers of the midcentury modern style. The metal Simmons furniture in our room was original to the hotel, which was built in 1952. I wanted to steal it.

That’s where I woke up on my 55th birthday to learn that police officers had been ambushed in Dallas in a flare-up of racial tension that has been rare in my adult life. On Facebook, my social media drug of choice, people were actually 1) suggesting that more guns in the crowd of protestors would have helped and 2) condemning the Dallas Police Department for using a small bomb to take out the madman who had already killed five officers and wounded eight others (plus two civilians). Not the same people, naturally.

Texas keeps teaching us — Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Joseph Whitman, Micah Xavier Johnson — that marksmanship training coupled with elevation and the element of surprise are sickeningly effective.

While the heat index in Little Rock was 109, we were wearing jackets in the 59-degree breezes of Marquette in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s the farthest north I’ve ever been. My previous record had been Mackinac Island, Michigan, which we visited for a few hours as we turned back south. I attended a conference at the Grand Hotel about 20 years ago, but there was no way we were paying $300 per person to spend a single night in the smallest room. That’s just insane.

After a week on the road, Rob and I had to spend a couple of hours in a laundromat in St. Ignace, Michigan. There I watched two women, one black and one white, discover that they had both recently retired from careers as schoolteachers. One had bought the kind of RV that the other has been considering buying, so there were questions and advice. Both have children and grandchildren to visit, you see, and they shared photos. As the minutes on the dryers ticked off, they used their phones to friend each other on Facebook and then hugged goodbye.

I kept them in mind when I read about a secessionist group trying to bring the Confederate flag back to the South Carolina Capitol grounds.

At the Henry Ford Museum, just west of Detroit, I sat in the same bus where Rosa Parks made history. I thought I knew that story pretty well, but the docent pointed out something that was new and meaningful to me: Younger members of the Alabama Legislature — white, of course — were decisive in changing the law that required African-American riders to give up their seats to white passengers. I know I’m getting old because I’ve started to pin my hopes on the next generation.

As we drove, Rob and I listened to an audiobook — the unabridged “East of Eden,” by John Steinbeck. Twenty-two CDs of unforgettable characters representing the best and worst of humanity. Like only the best writers — Jane Austen is another — Steinbeck had a gift for recognizing his characters’ true motives.

My favorite line from the book made me think that Steinbeck — or at least the character of Lee, the Chinese servant — had some passing acquaintance with the politicians we had left behind in the Arkansas heat:

“The pants of their reputations must have some thin places.”

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.