#1571 A Conversation With David Nicandri

He's been writing to me regularly with encouragement and praise. He thinks this may be some of the best work that I've ever done. He wants to be part of it, of course, and I'm thrilled that he does so. We were talking about road journeys, that's the last segment, and we're just getting started with that.

We talked about Paul Landis's new book, The Last Witness, about the Magic Bullet, and new revelations of his own withholding of that evidence from the Kennedy assassination. We talked about part one of Ken Burns to Part Bison Buffalo documentary, which I'm in. I'll be in more tonight with a second night. But we, we did a review of the first half, we'll do a review of the second two hours in our next conversation. And then we talked about the road, life and and how every person who goes on a journey of this sort.

I mean, whether it's Marco Polo or John Steinbeck goes through a similar process. It's called the genre process of this sort of travel. So now I want to pick up here a little conversation that Mr. Nick Henry and I had after the recording. It floats over the map pretty quickly, with a lot of different subjects, but it covers a lot of our passions and I think you will enjoy it. So let's listen.

Let's pick up a little of my after recording conversation with our Enlightenment correspondent, Mr. David McHenry.

Hope you don't mind my teasing that debate, that's not gonna be a debate with Chervinsky, but but that could be a fun show when we get around to doing it. Because I think Kennedy is just a classic example of a person president whose reputation rises and falls almost with the frequency of the tide.

I remember the sense that something, some, some moment, some innocence, some, some, something, some hope had been dashed. And things might never be the same, and I do think things have never quite been the same. And it's not just that it was the assassination of the president. And a young and vibrant one, with a, you know, beautiful wife and young family. All that's true. But it somehow also signalized that violence was going to be one of the answers, and we didn't think that that was true.

In the United States, after the assassination of McKinley, we, we basically had created a secret service, and, you know, protective vehicles. And I think none of us thought that that was a likelihood in, particularly in the U.

S And then, of course, it was only prelude to Malcolm X, to Martin Luther King.

Yeah, but Malcolm X and then Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. You know, it was the five years of the assassinations and I don't think I think what's going on now. You know, the sort of the mega phenomenon and the attempts to turn back the clock by the far right. I think that these are however crazy those things are, they are. They're still part of the reaction to all of this. That too much breathtaking change occurred in the 60s and the 70s. And then there was another round of it recently, with gay marriage and LGBTQ stuff, gays in the military, and I think that that a part of the country and a large part. I think most of us, in some sense, and some of us in a huge sense, are still kind of reeling from this. Is that the America we thought we lived in?

Central influencers that we, because everything's so fractionated by social media that there's so few. What's the right word cohesive?

Elements that, oddly enough, clay. I'm not making a brief, extended one anyway, but this is where sports the N.FL, College football, Major League baseball. That's why they have such an enduring appeal is because they, they, they, they are moments of community for better for us. Yes, they, they have their own set of difficulties to be sure, injuries and such, but.

That's why they, that's why they're as durable as they are, as cultural phenomenon. But anyway, but I just wanted to get your sense of the Oppenheimer, the Kennedy thing. I hope that does. Now I find myself in your position. These are the birds.

I hope that doesn't end on the cutting room floor. Because I thought, given anyone who's paying attention to these podcasts or radio shows, I hope we'll see the connection that I was trying to make in our common interest in the Oppenheimer.

So I've been asking this question and I want you to be thinking about it. To fill in the blank, if you want to understand America, you have to understand.

Blank. And so I'll give you just one example. Currently, people might say race that if you if you can't understand this country unless you understand the racial.

Complexity and tragedy of American history. Or you might say, you can't understand America unless you understand the West, the frontier. And and it's it's dynamism in in shaping the American experiment. But there are many answers to this question. But I'm gonna ask everybody that question, and I want to ask you that question. So that's one thing. I want to go back to baseball for just a minute, my friend.

So, you know, I last night I'm in. I'm in a pretty dark space right now. Because I read the Landis book. And it really upset me deeply. Not only because of what I take to be his malfeasance and negligence, but also just kind of reopening that wound, which happens from time to time. And this is a big picking of that scab, I think, but also what's going on in Gaza, I mean, and and and the whole sort of national.

Dialogue or controversy? About what's the right weight to give to what Israel's now doing in Gaza, as opposed to what Hamas did to those Israeli people, and so on? And I think it's it's healthy, but it's also really upsetting. But then I and I watched the Burns film, and who's deeply depressed by? That's just like the wanton slaughter of a majestic animal. And with it, a people who were dependent upon it, and who not only were dependent upon it, but but saw it as the center of their, of their life, the centerpiece of their life, including sacredly. And then, finally, so, now, to cheer myself up, I turned on sports for a minute and I watched back and forth the NFL game.

Dallas versus the Chargers was a chargers, Dallas versus yes, yes, and, and the other one was the baseball game, and between the rain, Texas Rangers and Houston. Yes, and, and here's and here. This is an obvious point, but we cling to baseball in spite of the problems, and we know the problems. Because it is like, it's more central to our idea of what America was than football can ever be.

Are it's an affinity with a part of the country's history that we're more comfortable with then we are with the history of the country that's associated with football. That make any sense?

It's it's much, it's much too violent for me now. I used to love it when it was a game of finesse, I like it much less now that it's a game of brute force.

With finesse, baseball has almost no contact, I mean, the obviously somebody sliding into home, or two outfielders colliding, or somebody hit by a pitch ball or a bat flying. But there's, there's virtually no contact in baseball, and that elevates it as something more admirable, it seems, to me, than contact sports, which are we know that they're.

They're fundamentally debilitating to the people who participate in them.

You can't understand, and that might be, but that might be so cliche, because that's true of every, of any place on earth.

I've postponing the Arctic narrative because I don't want three writing projects up in the air at the same time. Two is plenty. And, by the way, if you heard anything from the folks in Pullman lately about the series.

But I think he nailed it, and he said this at Kennedy's inauguration in January of 1961.

He wrote a poem for it, but it was too windy and he couldn't see, and so he recited this great poem. But listen to this. The land was ours before, we were the lands. She was our land more than a hundred years before, we were her people.

She was ours in Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England's still colonials, possessing what we still were unpossessed by, possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak until we found out that it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living. And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were, we gave ourselves outright. The deed of gift was many deeds of war to the land, vaguely realizing westward, but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, such as she was, such as she would become. That's one of the greatest things that has ever been written. I think about America.

Moderated and hosted the Theodore Roosevelt Symposium at Dickinson State University at the TR Center. And so all this is roiling around and I'm driving home the other day, tired, weary, a little bit spent. And I thought, you know, frost, Frost had it. The land was ours before, we were the lands we we. We took it using the doctrine of discovery, yes, and then we explored it to a certain degree. You know, Lewis and Clark and Fremont and others.

But it took us a long time to sort of understand what it was we had, and by then we had erased some extremely significant things in it. Like the bison, like the grizzly bear, like Native Americans living in a state of freedom. And only then, now, with the American Prairie Reserve. And our nostalgia, and I would say that the Burns film is heavy on American nostalgia. That that we are now able to come to terms with it. But think of the tragedy of all we have let be erased in the process.

Yeah, they went over that too quickly in the film. I agree. All right, I'll talk to you later. This was perfect.

Perfect, thank you.

Thank you my friend, thank you. If you can contribute to the success of this program, I'd be delighted. You see how many interesting things I get to do with my life and now I have my airstream.

It's parked right out in front of my house, it's going into storage here for the worst of the winter. But it's going to be a metaphor for a search for whatever America's sense of itself is as we approach the 250th birthday of this country. We need a couple of thousand, couple of hundred thousand dollars per year. But gas cards and your well wishes, your thoughts, your suggestions, all of that. And we're sending out a poll through the website Listening to America Lt. America. org. And you can help me think about all of this. And we're going to be reading books around it and so on, and so forth. So let's go to the show. Dave the Cantor, a four topics all enlightenment, based on this week's Listening to America.

Thank you everyone.

Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkins. And today, my pleasure is to have Dave McCandry across from me, at least virtually. We have a full slate of things to talk about, Dave.

I think you saw it in your own part of the world. It was cloudy here in western North Dakota. I want to talk about a just published book by Paul Landis about the Kennedy assassination and the so-called magic bullet. And I want to begin talking with you about road trips and the both the purpose of road trips and the and the spiritual and psychological aspects of them. So let's let's get started.

I watched the first two hours of the Ken Burns documentary on the Bison. I will watch the second two hours tonight. I'll just say from the start, I'm in it. So I'm hardly a completely objective analyst, but I thought the cinematography was absolutely magnificent in every way. It was achingly beautiful.

I think there's there's more visual in this film than there usually tends to be. The emphasis is on that. And Peter Coyote as, again his narrator. The script was written actually by Dayton Duncan. I thought it was all extremely well done and beautiful, but deeply.

25 or 30 of these, maybe certainly two dozen, right? And and he's able, he's now. He has so much of the national story composed in his own documentaries, in his own body of work. That he's able to do for those of us who are intimately familiar with his work, as you certainly are, and I'd like to think I am. He's able to self-reference. Other stories he's told, for example, begins with Lewis and Clark, and he ends episode one with a clear foreshadowing of the vital role.

YeLLOWSTONE As I know, there's some debate about this, but Yellowstone is our first national park. So, having done previously Lewis and Clark, and having done previously the National Parks. He's able to tie these things together and he's developing. The word of the day seems to be, he's so economical with his approach and his interpretation. You just like seeing a craftsman at work like Christopher Nolan when we talked about Oppenheimer.

Different idioms, of course, but the same can be said of Ken Burns.

That's the right balance. Yeah, I think so.

And and of course, there are evidence, there's evidence of people like George Catlin, of All Too Quick Passover, of Bodmer. I thought, I'm sure you would agree with that, Catlin figures. And these Bodmer and Catlin are important because they are the ones that embed this iconography in the American imagination, in the American mind. And we see evidence of that. But but I thought that that was kind of passed over quickly. But again, it's the context, the connections, the interrelationship. For example, when Elliot West talks about how the fur trade, how the fur trade embedded Native people into the American political economy, it's a point very well made.

One thing I want to ask you about place. And there's always something new when you read a new book, you see a new documentary. But the segment on the meteor shower, I found absolutely stunning. I had no familiarity with that. What can you expand or amplify about that particular episode, if at all?

What's the great story of the year 2023? I think that was a revelation to many viewers and I didn't know much about that. I'll say this and I'm gonna be really cautious about this and I want you to rebuke me if I'm wrong here, Dave. I think it's possible to overplay the native anticipation of destruction of the West. Or there's a sort of a portentousness there and locking into the to Native anxiety about what's coming. And I think that in some cases, it. And I want to be very careful here because I loved it. And I and I believe that we need all the Native voices we can possibly get, particularly in a film like this. And they were outstanding, but I feel that it's a little overplayed at times, you know that?

What did that meteor shower really portent? I don't know. I would have loved to have been there, wouldn't you? I'm sure we would have been terrified.

And one last personal point play. So, in my summers, I worked in a yarn and knitting mills in upstate New York. Before that was all hollowed out and all those frames and mules and cards. All of those were run by electric power, but the belts, belts were everywhere in that mill structure.

And that the thought never occurred to me until last night. Where did all those belts come from? Well, they may not have been of such vintage as that they were originally. Buffalo hides. But it just goes to show how much of our contemporary daily life we pay absolutely no attention to. Like, how did we get to this point? Agreed?

He was a crossover figure, he was an American philosopher, essayist, poet, master of prose and an important voice in in the Native American world. And I thought that having him in there was a kind of a valedictory, since we know that he has passed. I loved it and I thought I thought it was great, but I came away deeply depressed. And it's not just that, of course, we're also watching the debacle in Israel and in Gaza, and our own paralyzed national political system. And I think this is a pretty tough time, Dave.

This is a really special episode of Listening to America.

It's near Marmoth, North Dakota, it's in the Lower Badlands, I've been there, I've taken groups there. I mean, I know exact.

I knew a rancher who knew exactly where that was. It had been staked out by a U.S. Forest Service ranger in the 1970s. And I could. I can promise you, Dave, if you were here, I could get you within a quarter of a mile, at least to the site where Roosevelt killed. His first place, which is now on display in the North Room at Sagamore Hill. And Dayton Son, I need a photograph of that, and I said, Okay, I'll send you. Somebody said it preferably when the weather is miserable, as it was when Roosevelt got his bison. And so I went out there with my friend Jim Fugly and we were just tooling around out there and it turned out to be a gloomy, drippy gray, stormy day. And so I took 40 or 50 pictures of the site and sent them to Dayton. I hope I'll be happier if that photograph is in the film.

Then, if I am somehow, that would give me more pride than I know. I'm a talking head and I'll be in a number of times in an episode too. And of course, I cringe every time I see my face or hear my voice, but I'm also proud to be in it. So we'll see about that. So let me move on. The eclipse occurred on Saturday, October 14th.

I was not able to see it, I was so sorry about that. You saw it, was it full there?

It was a very ephemeral moment when the skies kind of part. Of course, it's nine, it's eight, fifty nine o'clock, nine ten Pacific time. The sun is slow. It was a beautiful sunrise, but as the sun rise, it went into the clouds and in the fog and the mist. But at the exact moment ecliptic effect, the sky kind of parted, but not entirely. So there was kind of a haze that one could see it through and I took a quick picture.

But for everyone that was there, it made the time seem worthwhile when I.

Well, it was similar, so again, it was a cloudy morning.

There was a virtual traffic jam, so, but as I got closer to nine, you could sense there, rather than the day, brightening. Even though it was cloudy and getting increasingly foggy as well, you could sense that the daylight was dimming and it was distinctly dusk. Like, by 9 a..m. Actually came from the upper right of the sun down to the lower left, you could kind of see it through the mist and the fog. So let me ask you, Clay, what is it about eclipses that attracts people to them?

Because it happens every time, there are people who go all over the world.

And you said waiting for the eclipse, you could have said waiting for Godot, but you said waiting for the eclipse. But I think it's this. It's when the solar system opens the curtain and shows you the mechanism of itself. This is the one time when you think, Oh, planets spin and orbits, and at certain points, they get in front of each other. And when that happens, you can measure things. And humans are savvy enough to be able to predict an eclipse. in fact, in the ancient world, Archimedes and others predicted eclipses.

They didn't have telescopes, they didn't have calculus, they didn't have computers, they didn't have algorithms, but they were so good with the naked eye. This is almost 2,000 years before the development of the telescope.

They were able to predict things like this, the periodicity of the planets and so on. It's astonishing that the ancient Greeks and Babylonians had this capacity. Because of if I gave if, you gave me a million dollars and said, Figure out how to predict an eclipse. It would take me a very, very long time to get up to speed on that. So I think the answer is that it fills us with wonder because we realize we live in a solar system that runs like a clock.

And I just have the deepest admiration for those who are able to do this. About the kind of equipment and computing capacities that we have today, you know? Lewis saw an eclipse at Fort Mandan in the winter of 1805. But he was able to know it only because he had one of those manuals, those almanacs, the ephemeris, that warned him that the eclipse was coming. He would never have been able to figure that out himself, I don't think Jefferson would have been able to figure that out himself. That takes a real expert and a group of experts at Greenwich working this stuff out. And then you just do the the adjustments for longitude and how far you away are away from Greenwich to be able to figure out local time for these things.

But I, but I did not see. That's kind of solar glare, there was just too much moisture in the air.

I'm not surprised to learn that, but I guess I'll have to watch. Get them, see it in some other format to see who all the technical contributors and repositories of images work.

Dave I've been reading books about this. I just finished reading William Manchester's Majestic Death of a President. Which is a moment-by-moment account of the events of November 22nd and 23rd and 24th and 5th through Monday of that horrible week in American history. I know where I was that day, I know you know where you were that day.

I continue to be haunted by this. I don't think we can ever, we can never attach enough.

Significance to this pivotal moment. I think you agree that this. It's not clear. It was at a loss of innocence. You know, we're going to bring on the era of disillusionment. Not quite clear what the way to talk about it is, but it's, it's, it's not just an assassination.

It's somehow a pivotal event of modernity.

You were talking about the liberal consensus and how a rare a time the night late 1940s, 50s and early 1960s were. And the Kennedy assassination is the main fracture in that.

American manufacturing was strong, the American economy was booming, we had a huge building boom in higher education. It was really an extraordinary time, and almost everybody now sort of looks back on that era with nostalgia. And the question then is, what's the terminus?

What's the end date? And some would say Watergate, some would say the Reagan election in 1980. But I think 1963 through 1968, the the era of the assassinations, has to be central. Yes, and much the same.

I think Reagan represents a different American history, post Reagan is a different era. That probably ends, and more recently, with Obama, maybe even with Trump. But but with the in retrospect, these epochs stand out. You can kind of see where the bookends are, where the fault lines are, and you're right. I remember vividly where I was on November 22nd this this country.

What would have been so much different if that hadn't happened? You know, you can play the hypotheticals and the counterfactuals all day long. But I just know in my heart that so much would have been different about modern America. And it was so inexplicable, which is why it's not so, so unexpected, so inexplicably. I just say, America at its peak cultural influence, and they have its leader gunned down. On a sunny day in Texas is so improbable that, in some respects, culturally, this nation still has not gotten over. I think so.

He'd written a favorable book about John Kennedy, summoned him and gave her first and only interview during that period to White. And the presses of life were being held up for this and was costing like $30,000 an hour for them to wait, but they had to have this. I, I just got through eBay, the whole issue of Life magazine from December 6th, 1963. And at the end of the interview, she said, I want you to know that Jack liked to play this record, the soundtrack from the Broadway hit Camelot, and and that this was one of his favorites. And I think that's who he was. This is this one brief, shining moment.

White went on to to be a little embarrassed that he'd been drawn into that trope, but the trope is stuck. I mean, camelot is still the term we use for that period, and with some appropriateness. That there was this sense of hope, that there was a newness in the world, that there was youth, that there was this in the fuse. Kennedy's favorite word, there was vigor, that this was a. The torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, the 60s were beginning.

Kennedy was that man, I think probably, it's probably. We have a stronger feeling about him because he died than we would have if he had lived through a second term. But but I think that that, that that's, that's not just a moment, that it's almost the moment of my lifetime. I would say, well, there's a this is, it seems to be clear.

Here's where our age, and, if I dare say, perhaps our cultural wisdom. I'm self-flattering. They might not be aware of it, but so many aspects of their day-to-day cultural life are ramifications of what happened on that November day. Lastly, clay, and I know this is the second time I've teased it.

I know you've made this commitment, and Lindsay Chervinsky has as well. That's why I'm so much looking forward to our most overrated, most underrated presidents in American history. Because the interesting story about Kennedy is he's in the 60 or so years since his death. He's gone from vastly overrated because he was killed, too. Now I would say underrated. Because of the very things you talk about, Clay and your guest, that was talking about the liberal consensus. Because what, we, we don't have a sense of common purpose in this country.

We don't have a sense of common endeavor, there's no real sense of hope, there's a pervasive sense of dread in this country. And I traced the roots of all of that back to this incident.

He was at Parkland and so gory, awful, horrible story. But Mrs Kennedy refused to get out of the car because she didn't want people to see the the shattered head of her husband. And finally, agent Clint Hill took off his jacket, and they covered a president, Kennedy's head, and at that point, only Mrs.

Kennedy was willing to get out of the limousine, so they extricated both the corpse, now of the president and Mrs Kennedy. And then agent Paul Landis looked into the backseat and he saw up on the place where the backseat cushions up against the metal of the trunk.

He saw a bullet, it was a two-inch bullet. It was most mostly pristine, it had some striations on it, but it had no other damage. And he says in this book that he was afraid that the bullet would be picked up by a souvenir hunter or something would happen.

So he picked it up and put it in his pocket and he went into the emergency room and it was chaos. And he tells a really, really effective accounting of just how insane things were. The crowding them, uncertainty, the horror that just everything rushing around at once, just the actual definition of chaos. And then he furtively put the bullet on one of the gurneys. So he has tampered with evidence of the crime of the century.

No question, morally, let's leave the moral side of it out. It's just a plain fact. He's tampered with evidence, he did not report that to his superiors, he did not report that to the Secret Service.

He did not report that to Clint Hill, his good friend. He did not report that to the Warren Commission that didn't call him for an interview, he never reported it. He's 88 years old now.

He happened upon a book that was given to him, called Six Minutes in Dallas, and and that led him to sort of go back to think about it. And so he's come forward and said, This is what I did. Wow, to think that for 60 years, 59 years, just under 60. He has withheld that essential, critical, fundamentally important piece of evidence from the world, not just us, the American people. But from the Secret Service, from the Warren Commission, from the other investigations, there was a congressional investigation in the 1970s. I have to say it's appalling.

I write in the book that when Cook was, there wasn't a more shocking death in the Western world after Cook's. The news of Cook's death arrived in England in January of 1780, until news spread around the world in November 1963 about John Kennedy. And it was so shocking that, I mean, there are some outlandish conspiracy theories out there. But it wrote, So how do you explain that? The attachment and and the devotion to, if they aren't necessarily conspiracy theories, they are a fervent quest for explanation?

Why and how did something so shocking happen? And if the fact pattern on the face of it is so quotidian, so ordinary, so pedestrian, that's not satisfying as an answer. So we have to make up a bigger, more encompassing narrative in order to make sense of it, to interpret it back to ourselves. Culturally. Of course. So Mrs.

That's not magnitude enough for the thing that has happened. I think that's the basis of this. I'll just say this, we got to get into it here for a minute. This book by saying that the bullet came from the car blows the Warren Commission report. Not out of the water, but it creates great havoc in it. And it, and particularly, the most important of all, questions, Dave. Was it a lone gunman or not? and this would seem to suggest maybe not a lone gunman.

You ever been to Dealey Plaza Clay?

As you say, there's kind of a ho-hum response. It's not a great book, but I read it in a single evening yesterday and I took extensive notes and I was so depressed after I read it. Because he tells the story, let's assume it's true. He doesn't say that he's sorry, he doesn't say that he had a duty to turn this evidence in.

It's just like, Oh, I just thought I'd get this off my chest. And I think that he owes the country more than that, and I, and I think we now need to reopen this case. Because the magic bullet theory probably would never have been invented by Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission had it not been for the fact that that bullet wound up on a gurney. And the fact that it's behind the seat in which Mr. Kennedy was sitting, suggests, you know, in forensics, can be crazy. But it suggests that the throat bullet came from the front, and that's why it would be on, destroyed. That you go through the fleshy part of the throat, you're not hitting a bone.

You're not hitting cartilage. Probably the bullet can survive that. Now I'm speculating, we don't know this. This could go in any direction.

I don't pretend to be a forensics expert and I know bullets can do crazy things, but I've never trusted the magic bullet theory. And you know, the American people didn't trust the Warren Commission, even when it was published. About 40 of the people said No, that can't be right.

I want to just begin a conversation. We'll have a second round on this if you're willing. And I know you are about books of the road, road travel. And I asked you a few weeks ago if you'd be willing to do this. Because I'm going to be doing this immense road trip, as you know, I've got my airstream. It's called Rosanante after the the horse of Don Quixote. And that was the name of Steinbeck's rig when he did this trip in 1960. I'll be tracing Steinbeck's journey over the next couple of years, not in one fell swoop, but in segments.

I'll be doing a lot of other things. It's real. Design is to give me a framework to talk about America at 250, which, in a sense, we've been doing here in this conversation. But I want to just start a conversation with you that will continue for several years. I think about road journeys and you've been on a couple of them lately, especially your trip to the Arctic Circle with your son. But when I read, I'm reading this really interesting book called The Romance of the Road. A primo, a man named Primo, and he says this, that there are eight phases of this.

So listen carefully, because this is where you come in. Phase one is the predisposition, you know, your your desire to do it. Phase two is the preparation, phase three is departure, phase four is the outward movement.

Phase five is the turnabout, Phase six is the homeward bound movement, Phase seven is the return, and Phase eight is memory recording. Report the narrative that we build of the journey we just took.

That's a that's a that's a very excellent taxonomy, isn't it?

But yeah, he's the he's, he's nailed it, that's it, exactly.

I mean, it was about as well planned a transcontinental journey as you could ever imagine. Departure. We all get that now, and there's some debate in the Lewis Clark world Is it the departure from Monticello? is it the departure from Washington?

Is it? The departure from St. Lewis is at the departure from St. Charles, but we get departure with all that hope.

Outward movement The outward movement was to the Pacific Ocean, where they arrived in November of 1805. Turnabout they premature turnabout on March 23rd, 1806. So eager to get home. The homeward movement was troubled. As you know, you've written extensively about this. It was a letdown.

They were out of, they were bankrupt, they didn't have the same esprit de corps. Everyone was really just ready to get home for the most part, particularly captain Meriwether Lewis. The return 23rd September 1806, A sort of a quietly triumphant return to St.

Louis Three cheers. And then, of course, the big one number eight, the report, and that's where Lewis failed colossally. I would say that he never wrote the report. And in doing so, he he forced us to accept a much diminished account, which was largely the adventure account of what happened. And he, he did not use his mighty mind to synthesize and to try to explain what this all meant. Does that seem quickly fair?

But if you're right about it, if you talk about it, of course. I haven't written a narrative about the trip, in fact, I'm terrified about the terror of writing, terrified about writing about that trip to the Arctic. For reasons we've we've talked about before, but, but you've got to force your way.

So briefly, I mean, just like in a minute on each one, tell me about.

In the case of the Arctic trip, my son had a satellite phone because we there's no cell service to speak up north of Whitehorse, so we had hundreds of miles to go. So if something really went awry, break, major breakdown, God forbid, some illness or accident, you need it. You need to be prepared to deal with those circumstance. I've remembered that I can see the moment of departure in front of my son's house.

Right now, it's very vivid. We kind of did a fist pump, I was at the wheel, we took off on a five or six thousand mile trip.

The the most exciting part of the whole process is the outward journey. When all of it is still in front of you, when there's nothing but potential in front of you, you can do, you can stay here, you can stop there, you've got.

You've got just a succession of decision points, one after another, the turnaround point for for me, Clay is the most, most emotional one. Because it's like the great conventions of literature, everything kind of builds up and what? Act three, and then you kind of slowly deflate the narrative you approach home.

Or if I said it's as beautiful as a postcard, which would be a sort of banal version of this, that's genre memory, in other words, that's that didn't just happen to me. I didn't invent that moment. That's a moment that is expected.

That's why I'm interested in this book you mentioned, and that that will get written some at some point, but that's very. But there you get in the delicate terrain, that's can be difficult and sometimes you like you again. If you want to avert your gaze, I might. And my most recent, most recent trip, because I am in the bottom of the seventh inning. I sent it, Dominic.

Who you gonna take these trips with one when I'm not around anymore? And he didn't want to engage in that discussion. So it's it's very, but it's something we both have to face. But again, it is only the bottom of the seventh, we hope so there's the eighth and nine that are left.

And so there's more road trips in the future.

We'll see you all next week for another important addition of Listening to America.