Friend, friend
Here you come again
Empty handed like
A pauper in the cold

You found, my friend
That lonely road again
Where the world has left
Your wounded soul

I have said
I will be with you till the end
But sometimes the weight
Is more than I can hold

Forgiveness comes
But not with ease
Oh, faith, increase
Increase

Mulberry tree
Mulberry tree
Be uprooted and planted in the sea

– Gordon Mote

Secret Vistas –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Life is a little like dancing around the mulberry tree. You find yourself going around in concentric circles.

Change tends to come gradually. Unless there is some great upheaval in the galaxy. Like an asteroid hitting the planet and killing the dinosaurs. Or a political candidate like Donald Trump. Who shakes up the political world and crashes the norms and expectations of what a president of the United States should be.

I’ve been covering politics for nearly 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like him.

For the past five years, I’ve been traveling in a circle from my concentric home in Sweet Home Alabama to the nation’s capital to see what I can see and try to make a difference in my own way.

On this trip I left Mobile, Alabama, on Thursday, May 23, and camped by Logan Martin Lake for a night, a place I’ve seen many times since I first fished for striped bass there with my favorite Uncle Virgil as a kid in the 1960s.

On Friday, I grabbed a couple of barbecue sandwiches along Highway 231 and snaked over into Georgia the back way, picking up a lottery ticket near Rome. You still can’t buy a lottery ticket in Alabama. Weed is still illegal there too, and now you can’t get an abortion in the state either, even if you are the victim of rape or incest.

From there it was an easy drive across the Tennessee line to my favorite little campground in the Cherokee National Forest by the babbling brook. It’s hard to find on a map and there’s no sign on the road, so I won’t reveal the name of the place or exactly where it is. Some spots are worth keeping a secret to keep tourists from overrunning and ruining a place.

On Saturday my loyal dog Jefferson and I wound through the mountains to a camp near Tellico Plains, where we met up with some members of the Dogwood Alliance and the non-profit environmental group Heartwood for a memorial service to honor my old friend Doc Lloyd Clayton, who died this year. We will have more to say about this later, but for now suffice it to say he made millions with his own line of natural vitamins and a natural medicine and environmental college. It was amazing to find out just how many worthy causes he funded along his way in this crazy world and how many people who he affected in such a positive way.

There was no time to tarry, however, since we were running from a heat wave gripping the South and East. So we continued up Highway 74 to Interstate 40 and passed through Asheville and Black Mountain on the way to Marion, North Carolina, where we stopped for a few days to try to help in an ongoing worthy cause to help Vietnam veterans try to overcome their guilt and tendency to homelessness and thoughts of suicide. (More on that later).

We then camped in a state park for a night before taking our new middle way back to D.C., which included taking I-295 around Richmond and Highway 301 to the I-495 Beltway east of Washington. After a brief stop to say hello in Greenbelt National Park, we made it to the final destination in College Park, Maryland, just in time to set up camp under a giant black mulberry tree and the first annual Mulberry Jam.

While reading the Washington Post online, I ran across this story about another mulberry tree near the Washington Monument.

A giant, old witness tree had fallen over on the National Mall, and the National Park Service was trying to save it. Of course in it’s snarky voice, the Post just made fun of the tree, getting the science wrong along the way.

“If it might seem sentimental to say that this tree has ‘seen’ history (trees are generally considered inanimate) it is no stretch to say that history has seen it,” a reporter for the Post wrote.

But wait. An inanimate object is something that is not alive, like a stone or a metal chair. A tree is certainly alive.

“It stands on the southwest corner of the monument grounds, and is, except for a companion tree, all alone there. No end of major events have occurred within eyeshot. A glance out the window of a limousine in a motorcade on 17th Street would catch sight of the tree. It appears likely that it can be seen from the White House.”

Yeah, it has seen a lot more than that, but this is all they could come up with on deadline?

Old mulberry tree on Mall, felled twice, is lifted up again, National Park Service says

During a rain storm on May 12, wind knocked the tree over. It was propped up on May 22 but fell again the next day. According to the story, neither the tree nor the Park Service appeared ready to give up. It was back up again on Friday.

The Post says the tree dates to about 1890, and has become a sentimental favorite as a silent backdrop over the decades for historic events and tourist photos.

No doubt the black mulberry in the old Berwyn neighborhood has witnessed a few things too over the centuries, although probably nothing quite like me playing the drums to Sweet Home Alabama with my good friend Brooks Boliek, who bought the house with the tree in the back yard last year along with his wife Jeri, a couple of Birmingham natives who moved to the D.C. area more than 20 years ago and made it a permanent home.

It will be a temporary home for us for a few days, before we head back over to the campground for a few weeks. If things go as planned, with will be visiting New York for a couple of weeks in late July. It’s unclear where we will go after that. Maybe we can find a few new circles to add to this ongoing adventure called life. I’ve always wanted to see Boston and Cape Cod.

Check back in soon for more. We plan to go all Gonzo on Trump soon. No straight, factual news seems to have any effect on him in this alt-fact world we find ourselves in these days. Somebody needs to rattle his cage.