The closest Grace came to the hoped-for post in journalism was a secretarial job in the publishing branch of the Presbyterian Church administrative offices in Louisville. As her daughter, as a lifelong journalist, I yearn to know more about her search; I never heard her talk about it. (How many of us heard about our mother’s early yearnings, I wonder?)

Within a year, she became engaged to my father, James Arthur Overholser (“Jimmy, she calls him below”), who was completing his graduate work at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Thinking about this new future, she typed a note to herself:

“There are certain things in my life which I want to do. I want to keep up with progress and development in the movies and on the stage….Friends are necessary to my happiness, and I want to cultivate the attitude of constantly being on the lookout for new friends…Letter writing has always been a joy to me, but somehow I have always exercised my talent for procrastination more directly in this line than in any other. If I find myself relapsing into it again, I hope I can have enough common sense and some of Daddy’s ‘horse sense’ to cut down the number of people to whom I am writing so that I won’t be inclined to ‘put-offness.’”

When she moves to her expectations for the deepening relationship with Jim, she soars. So high were her hopes for mutual personal growth. So determined she was that “material hindrances” should not dominate their lives. So confident in the prospect of seeing these things come true.

What I’d give to have Dad’s letters in response. No one, apparently, kept them.

“I want my correspondence with Jimmy to be one of the most productive and inspirational things I can find. I don’t know what sort of letters he is likely to write, but I know what I want to do and I shall not hesitate to express to him my wishes and desires. He is a source of challenge and help to me and I want him to know when he has helped me. Today, the day after he left for his church in Smyrna, the thought came to me as I sat at my desk in the window that our correspondence could be one of the dearest things we could ever experience. Even though we hate to be separated, if we can keep in mind personal development of ourselves, with the ultimate purpose of future development together — the more satisfying and happy because of what we have accomplished apart — then I think we have no need to worry about our lives together.

“It isn’t necessary to be thinking of the actual material hindrances all the time; why can’t we let this period be dominated by a desire to work and read and cultivate and develop something into our lives which will be the means of furthering our happiness later? I like to think of preparing myself for something big that is to come in my life; certainly I wouldn’t attempt to make a speech or write a book — a small book! — without long and intensive and adequate and thorough preparation — therefore, why should we want to rush into something which could be all the fuller and happier if we had fitted ourselves for it? We have just begun to know each other. I think he is in sympathy with these attitudes and wishes of mine which may have a tendency to lean toward the idealistic, yet I think I am practical enough to realize where idealism must stop and let realism come in to guide things — and because of his complete, I hope, understanding, he will want to develop himself to fit his own life for a greater life with another.”

Looking back over the three decades of their marriage, reading this makes me sad.

In the note, she returns to her hopes for her own growth — specific indeed. “I want to read a newspaper daily. I also like to hear the news broadcasts. Books I must choose more carefully, and I must read at least one each month, varying them to include novels, philosophy, science, biography, poems, drama and history.” She vows to exercise daily, keep flowers in her room and “be on the lookout for beauty in the street, in the windows, in the park, and wherever I go; and when I think of the moon it will be so easy for me to think of its beauty when Jimmy and I saw it together.

“I will spend only enough money to keep me up and up and not buy anything just because I happen to want it very much. When I go home Mother and Daddy will need that money to help pay for the wedding expenses.

“I want to regain the feeling I had begun to have that spiritual development is necessary in a full, productive life. I don’t want to consider it a duty and an obligation; rather, I want to do it because of its intense meaning and inspiration in my life. I want to rely on God’s help in directing my life, and if I don’t depend on Him, I can’t expect Him to see my needs and wishes.

“These are the things I want in my life — personal development along the above lines. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

But there was one more thing she needed to take care of: “I must work out and clearly understand my feelings for Bill, and I must explain everything to him so that he will understand our relation to each other. I need help and strength to do this.

Bill? Who was Bill?

Her brother died of appendicitis when she was six, another baby was stillborn, and Grace became the oldest child of Joseph Knowles McSpadden and Eleanor Porter McSpadden. They lived in the small Texas Hill Country town of Clifton. As an adult, Grace wrote reflections on her childhood. Reading them now, I am struck by how many themes would be repeated from one generation to the next.

“Daddy was a Texan all the way: He was outspoken, individual, had strong feelings, a hot temper which he lost quickly and got over quickly, moving from loud denunciations to equally loud declamations about how he loved Mother or us, whichever was the object of his wrath. He was most affectionate and loved to have us around him. He was sensitive and his feelings were easily hurt. He was an avid Bible reader and was outspoken about injustices and discrepancies in the Word and in life. He was given to saying, ‘I want to ask the Lord about…’ and then giving some instance of something he wanted to have explained.”

At first, the family were comfortably well off. “He was on the way up as a successful business man; made rather good money. We had a Baldwin baby grand piano, Mother had a real pearl necklace and a fine diamond ring. We had built our own home, which was attractive and well-furnished. But things went bad and he lost the zip and punch.”

Joe lost more than punch. Amid the Great Depression, he spent the little money the family had on a losing run for county judge. In the wake of that loss, Grace’s brother Tom later told me, Eleanor sold the diamond ring (and a lot more) to move the family to Austin. This made it possible for each of the children (by then also including Josephine and Joe Jr.) to go to the university, while Eleanor ran a boarding house.

“Daddy loved Mother and admired her. He was hard to live with, I’m sure, and I have seen him hurt Mother a great deal. She had a wonderfully patient and sweet and enduring nature and most of the time would put up with his outbreaks and vituperations,” Grace wrote. Uncle Tom told me that one day, when the family were all at home and the parents had been arguing, Eleanor walked out the front door, saying, “I can’t take this anymore.” A good while later, she came back. “I can take it,” she told her children. “I come from good stock.”

Eleanor, wrote Grace, was “wonderfully skillful in making a meal out of practically nothing. I can remember once in Clifton before we moved when there was no money and nothing much to eat in the house. We wondered what kind of lunch we would come home to find at noon. We found delicious pan omelet with chili. I never shall forget the feeling of ‘marveling’ that I had for her.

“Mother came from a family dedicated to learning and proud of its educated sons and daughters. Every one of them pursued higher education [this in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s}, and each was constantly aware of the need to make the best of himself through constant improvement of mind, body and spirit. Mother’s sister, my Aunt Pearl, was vigilant in seeing that we read the right things and said the right things and acted the right way; Mother was only a little less so. We always had the feeling we could do anything we set our minds to.”

It didn’t always go quite that smoothly. At the University of Texas, Grace majored in English and journalism. She was religion editor of the Daily Texan. She was inducted, together with Claudia Taylor (later Lady Bird), into the journalism honorary society. But she had had some readjusting to do, in the wake of the family’s move. She reflected on this when, just after graduation in 1935, she went to a leadership session at Geneva Glen Camp in Colorado, where she wrote:

“When I graduated from a small town high school I felt, as I think most high school graduates do, that I knew a great deal about everything. Because the school was small I had had an active part in most every event or activity the school offered. I think I must have tried my hand at everything!

“Yet this ability to do a great many things even on this small scale had the unfortunate effect of developing in me a feeling that I could do most anything I wanted to and, through this ability to do a lot, ‘get by’ with other things. This attitude prevailed until I had completed the first semester of my university work. When my grades came in my pride went plop! Because of my financial conditions I was unable to pledge a sorority and, since our family had just moved into the university town, I was almost wholly lost. Here I was doing nothing and I had thought I was able to do and know everything.”

Her disappointment in herself jolted her. “After a summer away from home, and after I had had my first college love experience, I began to see more clearly what had been wrong with my attitude and to resolve to make it healthier. And now, after four years and four summers of college, church work, study, reading, friendships and self-study, I feel that I am nearer finding my place in life than I have been since I left high school.”

Still, she added, “I know so little, yet I have the most burning desire to learn more. I realize that I am very emotional, and because I feel such a need for friends, I have to be doubly careful in physical control. With this greater self-realization and equipped with a stronger and deeper faith in myself, which has come chiefly through reading, religious experiences and friendships, I feel much more sure of my life. And even though I cannot see my way clear to obtaining the work in religious journalism which I want to go into, I am keeping my eye on my goal.”

This is the beginning of something I’ve been working on about my (unusual) mother.

Grace McSpadden was a winsome girl from bluebonnet country, as smart as she was lovely. She knew it, too. High-spirited and strong-willed, she was determined to live a rich (and fully examined) life. In college, she worked for the Daily Texan, interviewed Carl Sandburg, dreamed of being a journalist. But this was the 1930’s. It didn’t happen.

She married — a preacher. They moved often, from one small southern town to another. They lived in genteel poverty. She cooked and washed and sewed. They had three children. She sang in the choir and did church work. He preached fine sermons but felt professionally stymied and sorely under-appreciated. She failed to be the helpmeet he pined for; she longed for things they could not afford. Their marriage grew more and more unhappy.

I imagine that the life Grace lived and the attitudes she held are representative of those of many of her contemporaries in comparable circumstances. But three things about her stand out: Her lifelong bent for self-reflection. How doggedly she held on to her hopes. And the fact that she wrote it all down, year after year, in letters to family and friends and, occasionally, in probing notes to herself.

Also: She kept carbon copies.

I have two manila folders full. In 2020, amid the crises we alI experienced plus a few extra of my own, I found the folders in a “Memorabilia” box. I put the papers in chronological order and, for the first time, read them through. I saw what a long path she had walked to become the person she was when she died at age 58. I was struck by how little I had known of that path. And I felt that what Grace had left behind, wittingly or not, was a rare record of the experiences of so many of our mothers, who lived, as she did, in the middle of the last century.

The Grace I knew in my young adulthood (I was 24 when she died) was full of fresh accomplishment. She’d earned a graduate degree, bought a house, become a dean in a small liberal arts college. She was teaching college English and African-American studies, and pursuing ground-breaking research on the work of Richard Wright.

My college friends marveled at the sort of mother I had — recently divorced, striking out on her own, a mother who urged us to read Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, a woman who knew how to counsel a student seeking a safe abortion. A striking, vibrant, confident woman. While so many others’ mothers seemed forlorn, mine was flourishing.

On occasion, I could’ve used something less extraordinary. Here’s an example: When Grace dropped me off at Wellesley, she promptly went home and wrote an article called “How to Tell the Kids Goodbye without a Tear.” Proud to have it published, she enclosed it in a note to me. (Would a tear be so terrible?!) Here’s another: In a brief visit home before returning to college after a summer job at Glacier National Park, I told her I’d hopped a freight train from Glacier to Spokane. I thought she might say, “You could’ve lost a leg!” Or, “You could have been raped!” She said, “Oh, how I wish I could have done that.”

Now, though, I think I get it. Reading these letters, full of struggling to force herself to defer to her husband, of stretching dollars and mending clothes, of manses crying out for repair and cars with holes in the floorboard — now I see that this was a woman who had been yearning for years to live the life she was finally living. Yearning to get back to the hopes she’d outlined to herself as a brand new college graduate. To become, as she had put it early on, “A Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.” And damned if she hadn’t gone and done it. But what a journey — from the wish to the reality — it had been.

By David Westphal and Geneva Overholser

One of the dominant themes of political life these days is the ever-growing division between urban and rural Americans. Thomas Edsall described it this way in The New York Times: “A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the upheaval in American partisanship.”

This topic sometimes makes its way to our dinner table discussions, where we try to understand what is driving rural and urban citizens so strongly apart. It hits home for us partly because of our journalism careers at The Des Moines Register, which for many decades was arguably the pre-eminent American newspaper covering farming and rural life. Iowa ranks secondonly to California in the value of its farm production, and even with population declines over the years, more than one-third of its residents are still classified as rural.

Chronicling this rich agricultural footprint was a huge part of The Register’s mission. The farm sector was both a major source of the newspaper’s advertising revenue (mainly classified ads) and a primary focus of news coverage. And it resulted in one of the rare daily newspapers that was delivered to homes in all of the state’s counties. It was, The Register boasted on its front pages, “The Newspaper That Iowa Depends Upon.” (At one point, the Sunday Register claimed a statewide circulation of more than 500,000 — a majority of the state’s households.)

Although vestiges of that time remain — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) still draws thousands of riders each year — the newspaper’s statewide reach is long gone, a result of demographic, cultural and economic changes that have hit newspapers nearly everywhere. According to a recent NiemanLab report, The Register’s combined print and digital subscriptions have fallen precipitously, to below 40,000.

What did it mean when, for half a century, most Iowans were reading The Register? What was the impact of a newspaper that covered both rural and urban Iowans? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, of course. Consider this a thought experiment — one with some relevance to the divisions our nation is facing today.

In his book, “Covering Iowa,” William B. Friedricks wrote:

“Beginning in the 1870s, but really from the 1920s on, when its circulation began to take off, The Register sought to appeal to all Iowans. In so doing, it became a unifying force within the state. In an age when tensions between farmers and merchants, politicians and professionals, rural and city people, and even men and women were increasing, the paper provided a common meeting ground for all Iowans. It held the attention of the state’s various constituents by providing special sections to appeal to certain groups: it offered detailed coverage of agriculture; campaigned for programs of statewide interest, such as the promotion of good roads; and identified the views of Iowans on important issues in the Iowa Poll. Through such efforts, the Register brought citizens of the state together, and in many ways helped define what it meant to be an Iowan.”

It’s not the case, of course, that rural residents were all big fans of The Register. The newspaper routinely spotlighted problem areas in the farming sector such as damaging environmental practices or safety issues. It regularly chronicled the amount of federal subsidies farmers were receiving. The decidedly liberal orientation of The Register’s editorial pages was not a big hit in many rural homes.

But one thing we think is true: A great many farmers, agribusiness people, and small-town political and business leaders believed that, through The Des Moines Register, they were being seen — by the state’s political and business leaders and by ordinary Iowans across the state. Even as they in turn could see the lives of urban Iowans.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Iowa was the antithesis of the sharp rural/urban divide that now defines our politics. From Harold Hughes to Dick Clark to John Culver to Tom Harkin, Iowa fielded some of the most liberal politicians in Washington, often with robust support from rural voters. In 1984, Harkin’s first Senate victory, a majority of rural counties voted for him. And in that same election, about 40 percent of Iowa’s urban counties backed Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale for president.

There was a striking open-mindedness in the electorate, with voters gravitating to candidates and issues without the bindings of tribalism. That fluidity was still in evidence in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, with nearly two dozen rural counties supporting his 2012 successful re-election bid. Not so today, of course. In the last two presidential elections, all of Iowa’s rural counties have voted for Donald Trump.

In an editorial after the 2020 election, The Register lamented the state’s new pattern of “us vs. them” voting, which it said is permeating politics at all levels. “The risk for Iowa,” the editorial said, “is that it feels as if the state’s historical rural-urban divide is now on steroids, pushed to a new extreme…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find ourselves believing that The Register’s decline, and its retreat from a statewide footprint, is a significant part of this story. Again, impossible to prove. But perhaps examining what has been lost, or nearly lost, from the paper’s report could shed some light.

At one time, The Register had full-time correspondents in eight Iowa cities beyond Des Moines. It had stringers in all 99 counties. It had a fleet of cars that reporters and photographers would use to drive across the state to cover athletic contests, cultural events and spot news developments. The Register was wonderfully innovative. In the 1920s it was one of the early newspapers to purchase airplanes for covering spot developments around the state. At one point, according to George Mills’ book, “Things Don’t Just Happen,” the editors employed carrier pigeons to fly film of an execution at the state prison in Fort Madison to Des Moines. (The pigeons never arrived.)

Three examples of The Register’s statewide orientation:

● Farm and agribusiness coverage. For much of The Register’s life, it had a daily page or more of farm news. The Sunday Farm/Agribusiness section, though, was the showcase, filled with rural-Iowa stories and, not coincidentally, pages of classified ads for farm equipment, livestock, auctions, and so on. The farm/business staff was stocked with some of the best journalists in the room. But that room was only part of the story. The Register’s Washington Bureau arguably had the strongest farm coverage of any DC staff — from reporters like Nick Kotz, Jim Risser, George Anthan. One of the byproducts of their coverage was to make Iowa more internationalist, showing how the state’s multibillion dollar farm exports tied the state to a global economy.

● Political coverage. For nearly 50 years, The Register’s political coverage has been recognized mainly for its chronicling of the Iowa Caucuses and the bellwether Iowa Poll. But day in and day out, reporters like Jim Flansburg and David Yepsen would reflect the local and regional politics of the state, traveling to county conventions, steak fries and other political events across Iowa. Former Gov. Robert Ray once remarked that he had a significant advantage over other governors. Because of The Register, he said, he knew what Iowans across the state knew.

● Sports coverage. For many years, and even today, The Register’s sports coverage has been anchored in its dispatches on the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. Almost as important, though, was its commitment to statewide high school sports. The Register sought to print the scores of every football and basketball game from the state’s 400-plus high schools, and would produce weekly columns and features on high school athletes. Every Friday night in football season, a reporter and photographer would travel to a “Spotlight Game,” often played in one of Iowa’s small towns. They would produce a short story and single photo that sent quite a message: What happens here on a Friday night, miles away from Des Moines, matters to us.

Coverage like this was possible, of course, only because the newspaper’s statewide orientation worked as a business model. It doesn’t anymore. The Register, once with a full-time news staff of 225, now has fewer than 50 reporters and editors. It still tries to cover farming and rural Iowa, but with a reach and strength reduced by orders of magnitude. This is true not just of The Register. Coverage of rural matters has vastly declined in recent decades, even in newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that could well afford it.

Nearly 25 years ago, Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” in which he argued that “social capital” was in sharp decline in the United States, a result of dwindling participation in civic life — not just in bowling leagues but in community organizations, in churchgoing, in voting participation and yes, in newspaper readership. A Cornell University professor, Suzanne Mettler, said that because of these “cross cutting relationships … people had a sense that we’re all in this together; we’re all citizens of this country with a common project, even if we differ on policy issues.”

There may be many contributors to our current us-vs.-them climate. The internet. Social media. Extremist cable channels. Talk radio. Growing income disparities. A nation that becomes ever-less rural. But, as Putnam argued, a primary cause may also be the weakening of institutions like the newspaper that brought people of different backgrounds into contact with one another.

Last weekend on NPR, Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who has studied the impact of newspaper closures and downsizing, said this: “There’s a pretty big body of research that shows that when a local newspaper vanishes or is dramatically gutted, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, a general erosion of civic engagement. It makes it easier for misinformation to spread, for conspiracy theories to spread.”

And that makes it a nationwide problem because newspapers are in fast decline virtually everywhere, with scant prospects for a turnaround.

So what is the case for optimism here, particularly in addressing the urban/rural divide?

1. Ultimately, the hope is that digital news can help provide solutions. One early attempt: the year-old Rural News Network, which includes about five dozen news sites and organizations that focus wholly or partly on rural issues. Organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the network is anchored by the Daily Yonder in Kentucky and Investigate Midwest in Illinois (including its Iowa Watch newsroom), and seeks reporting partnerships among its participants. This is an initiative that merits the support of charitable foundations and wealthy benefactors, and should grab the attention of national newspapers and TV networks for partnership possibilities. Then there is the growing list of local and regional digital sites, such as Julie Gammack’s Iowa Writers Collaborative, which offer increasingly rich reporting on their diverse populations.

2. The New York Times, the Washington Post and TV newsrooms — those still with working business models — should return to the time when they gave much broader coverage to farming and rural issues. They are certainly on the case covering the pitched, ideological political battles taking place in rural states, and rightly so. But there is so much more to farm and small-town life, and the big news organizations would do themselves, and the country, a favor by better reflecting it.

Rural and urban Americans seem increasingly to find themselves utterly foreign to one another. In looking back at The Register’s (and perhaps some of Iowa’s) best years, we are reminded that this is not an unsolvable problem.

Part 3

Mont Blanc is the grandest hike I’ve ever taken. But it’s the memories of our all being together on it that I most cherish. There is no companionship quite like the companionship of a long hike. Looking out for one another. Having a good talk first with one fellow hiker, then another. Sharing beauty that can’t be captured in words. Prevailing together over blisters and cold and fatigue. Celebrating together the successful finish of a hard day.

From our early family hikes through many sibling expeditions to my kids and now grandkids, our family have followed in my father’s footsteps. Decades ago, my brother brought his family out to join ours at a friend’s cabin in Marble, Colorado, for several fine days of hiking. As a baby, our Paris-born daughter rode in a backpack through Eastern Europe’s Tatra Mountains and Julian Alps, as passersby called out “die kleinste Alpinistin!” Years later, back in Hot Springs, my dad gave her a quartz crystal and led her on a hike on the mountain where he found it. Long after she and I survived that thirsty Grand Canyon descent, we climbed Mt. Washington together. She was married in the Tetons, and David and I hiked all through the mountains of the Northwest on our way from California to her wedding. Their home is in Utah now: Hiker heaven.

By a stroke of good fortune, all of our kids lived in California during our five years in L.A., opening up wondrous hiking opportunities. Our son lived nearby, in Long Beach. We’d drive up to Angeles Crest most weekends, scaling one San Gabriel peak or another. The three of us climbed 10,000-foot Mount Baldy together and hiked in the Eastern Sierra. With our younger daughter, we’ve delighted in Northern California hikes in Point Reyes, Mount Tamalpais, Muir Woods, the Berkeley hills, Mount Diablo.

Our littlest grandkids commandeered our hiking poles last summer on walks in Crested Butte. In a few months, we’ll be back on the trails with all of them in Maine.

Hiking is especially fine for the particular companionship of marriage. From the Sawtooths, the Bitterroots and the Uintas to the Adirondacks, the Green and the White mountains, from Grandfather Mountain to the slopes of Mount Rainier, David and I have hiked untold miles together. We seek out hikes when we travel abroad, even if they’re not the trip’s focus — up Arenal in Costa Rica, down Samaria Gorge in Crete, through hilly tea plantations in Kerala, India, and in the mountains towering above rice paddies in Sapa, Vietnam.

Last month, in New Zealand’s splendid Southern Alps, we hiked on the slopes of Mt. Cook, at Arthur’s Pass and in Mount Aspiring National Park, all in preparation for the big one: the Routeburn. What a hike.

Shortly after we returned home, we each turned 75. That was my father’s age when he took his last hike up North Mountain, across from his house on Ramble Street in Hot Springs National Park.

For his birthday, I got David a book about Patagonia.

On the Tour du Mont Blanc

Part 2

What is it that draws us to the long, hard hikes? Some of it is testing yourself against the difficulty. Some of it is knowing that, the deeper in you go, the more the wildness envelops you, the more dramatic the beauty, the greater the chance of encountering a fox, a bear, a marmot, an eagle. The farther from everything ordinary.

Powerful as Kilimanjaro was, Africa’s most remarkable hike for me was in the Ruwenzori mountains, along the border between Congo (where I was living) and Uganda. European explorers associated this range with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, because water runs from its slopes to the Nile. The Ruwenzoris are as mysterious as they sound, with mosses of every hue carpeting the ground and creeping up the trees, and towering plants that Dr. Seuss might have imagined. Our guides brought along a goat to roast for our Christmas dinner, later exchanging it for a piglet in a little village we walked through. (I appreciated the piglet’s slower pace for the rest of that long day.) In the third and highest hut was a guestbook in Flemish (from the days of Belgium’s colonialization), which Lowell Thomas had signed. The 10-mile massif, craggy, snowy, glaciated, towered above.

On our recent hike along New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, a most unlikely fact emerged: Of our group of 31, three of us had hiked in that fabled range, deep in equatorial Africa.

As the long days on the gorgeous Routeburn loosened the knots in my mind, I thought of other multi-day treks I’ve taken: The Jotunheimen of Norway, where a stream was so swollen that I have nightmares still of the terror I felt before throwing myself over it. The wild and rugged Pyrenees, and the two bird species we saw that are found only there. The Cotswolds, with their sheep pastures and their steeples beckoning from each storybook village. Machu Picchu, where our sure-footed guides carried everything from the portable toilets to our tents and woke us each morning with coca-leaf tea. The blazing-hot hike down into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim with my older daughter, when the water source we’d been told about didn’t show up. The Grand Traverse des Alpes across Switzerland, alpenglow out the window of each lovely inn.

But the granddaddy of them all was the Tour du Mont Blanc.

The idea of our trekking around Mont Blanc originated on a Blue Ridge hike with our younger daughter. (Another gift of hiking: You may find your teenager talking to you.) As we descended from the parkway past one lovely waterfall after another, I mentioned an article I’d seen in an in-flight magazine about a hike around the Mont Blanc summit. “I want us to do that,” our daughter said — but there had to be other kids along. Miraculously, given college schedules and two families’ busy lives, we gathered all three of our kids plus an uncle, an aunt and two cousins. It was a splendid trip, from the tough but beautiful first day ending at a little French inn with crème brûlée cooling on the window sill to our last celebratory night in Courmayeur, Italy.

David and I loved the hike so much that we returned a few years later to complete the 10-day loop, from Italy through Switzerland and back into Chamonix.

Part 1

Maybe it’s because our father loved mountains — and hiking — that I do, too. Growing up in a national park probably helped. You can climb Hot Springs Mountain from right behind the Fordyce Bathhouse on Central Avenue. On some Sundays, we’d take the scenic drive home over West Mountain, up Whittington Avenue from Dad’s church. Every now and then, he’d take us further into the Ouachita Mountains to hike. We’d camp in an old canvas tent and play cards by lantern light. He’d fry fish for breakfast. We’d find box turtles and tarantulas.

Dad once told me he hoped that, if he ever got old and crotchety, he’d just run up a mountain until his heart stopped. His heart stopped without that, but he hiked right up until the end.

If Dad and Hot Springs got me started, why has hiking remained so important to me? I was telling a friend about our recent trip hiking New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, and I found her looking puzzled. “Why do you like hiking so much?” she asked.

Part of it, of course, is the beauty. Hikes are almost always in lovely places.

I spent a summer during college as a salad girl in Glacier National Park. Six days in a row slopping together blue cheese dressing and stashing little glasses of tomato juice into ice chips for waiters to pick up, then off in a Red Jammer to Grinnell Glacier or Gunsight, the Garden Wall or Granite Park. Heart-stirringly beautiful, all of it. In grad school, I wrote to newspapers all over the Rockies, hoping to land a job amid mountains. As a cub reporter in Colorado Springs, I joined in the griping about our $110/week paychecks: “Do they think we can EAT Pikes Peak?” But I loved living alongside its majestic immensity.

The Rockies were my “local” range in those years: the San Juans and the Sangre de Cristos, the Gore and Collegiate ranges. The ghost towns and the sheepherders, high in their silent reaches. Later, living in D.C., it was the Blue Ridge we’d turn to. L.A. offered a magnificent array, from the Santa Monica mountains to the San Gabriels to the Eastern Sierra. Now, in New York, it’s the Catskills we hike each spring and fall, and Acadia in the summer — thanks to my sister, who has climbed every peak in the park.

Just the presence of mountains nearby — knowing they’ll be there when you can find the time to go to them — is heartening. The promise of a lift up out of the dailiness of life. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. The silence — and the creak of a giant tree, the scrunch of pine needles underfoot. Day hikes in our local ranges have fed our souls, soothed our worries, strengthened us.

The big hikes add other elements: The uncertainty, sometimes fear, about the degree of challenge. The grit-your-teeth dedication as you keep on going at it, even as your goal seems to recede into the distance. The relief and satisfaction when you’ve done it.

For years, “I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro” was my go-to offering when a meeting leader asked that we “tell something surprising about yourself.”

I was 26 when I made that five-day trip on Kilimanjaro. Three of our small group were teenaged boys; they were the ones who didn’t make it to the top. I think they didn’t want it badly enough. You have to believe it’s your only chance. Otherwise, the headaches, the exhaustion, the vomiting, and the scree at the top that robs each stride of half its gain, will prevail.

After I hiked Kilimanjaro, Dad wrote me, “I have news for you: If you climbed Kilimanjaro because it’s there, it still is.” Grandmother wrote, “I don’t understand why anyone would want to walk up a huge mountain.”

Part 2

April 1, 2020

Feeling very odd, yesterday and today.  That stoned feeling you get when a bad cold is coming on.  Not unpleasant.  A little floaty and blurred.  I’ve been coughing and sniffling – but honestly I’ve done that, to various degrees, ever since we came back from India.  

Then last evening, I had that bit of fever.  I could tell from how hot my eyes felt in the back.  It was very low – not even 100 degrees.  I went to bed early and slept a long time – woke up with considerable muscle pain and took an aspirin, went back to sleep.  The muscle pain seems very like what I’ve had in my hip previously, especially when I’ve sat on the couch too long.

This morning, reading our breakfast poem, I felt short of breath.

So if I add all this up it could freak me out. And yet each of these things has various possible explanations.  Including perhaps fantasy, right?  Being scared is enough to make you short of breath, after all.  This is what Nell talked about – all the mind games as you try to assess your symptoms and their “progress.”

No diarrhea.  A cough that is sometimes dry but often not – often productive.  Nasal stuff.  All of those are atypical for the dreaded thing.  

We got our exercise bike yesterday, and assembled it.  Fits perfectly in the spot in the kitchen/DR where D’s desk had been.  Took the little (my former) glass desk apart and put it under our bed.  Put Diane’s plants in the living room.  Hoping they can withstand the radiator heat.  Trying to keep them off the most direct spots.  

Had a lovely little FaceTime near dinnertime, with James.  He sat alone and didn’t fiddle with the phone.  Didn’t even have a copy of the book we were reading him – the one we’d sent along for us to read together. And though we’d only read it once, he remembered it, and when we’d come across the goose, he’d honk, the goat, he’d maaa.  Then we sang Old MacDonald, and he was wonderfully boisterous.  It was such a treat. Such a gift.  

April 2

Email to Laurisa:

Well, thanks to you, I had a videoconference with my doc this AM.  I’m so grateful!  It just happened all off a sudden, there she was, signaling me to pick up for a videoconference.  “Tell me your symptoms,” she said in her brisk New Yawk way, “too much email back and forth wastes time.”  I told her my symptoms: 100 degree fever in the afternoons for three days, coughing, muscle aches at night and a weird floaty/zingy/disoriented/not unpleasant feeling.  And tired.  Very tired. She said, well it sounds like you may have the virus.  If all goes well, you’ll have a mild case.  It takes about 14 days.  You’re doing the right thing.  Get lots of rest, drink lots of water, Tylenol when your muscles ache.  Try to stay away from David.  Carry on.

That was essentially it.  

Email to family and friends:

Dear ones,

I have been having some mild symptoms for a few days, and figured I had a cold. Out of an abundance of caution, as we say these days, I had a video conference with my doctor this morning.  She listened to what I’ve been experiencing, and said I may well have the virus.  She was not at all alarmed. We agreed that it sounds like a mild case.  She recommends I continue doing what I have been — resting a lot and drinking lots of water.  Staying inside. Take Tylenol for muscle aches. Might last 14 days, she said. I had a good long sleep last night. If anything I think I may have had the thing for several days and won’t have too many more to go.  

Please don’t worry overmuch about this.  I am sure I am going to be okay.  

Love,

Geneva

April 3

Email to Laurisa:

My symptoms are SO mild.  It’s almost embarrassing.  I think we all had this notion that — you got this, you die!!!!!  I mean, we read about people feeling no symptoms, or people with mild to moderate cases, but I didn’t picture this. That I, a 72-year-old, could just feel exceedingly tired, cough a bit, have low fevers, feel a bit floaty and blurred.

I am mostly just so so tired.  I just want to lie (or sit) and read.  I do have a kind of shallowness of breathing.  Hard to say a whole sentence without taking a breath.

Anyway, I think I must be able to count at least six days in, so maybe not much more than a week more.  My fever has been getting less and less already.

Thank you for having me talk to my doc. I feel reassured that she was so quickly responsive.  I’ll never forget the look of her there, all white-robed and brisk, barking at me from the screen!

Tell me how you are.  I am going to be absolutely fine.

Later on April 3, another email to Laurisa:

I think the smell thing freaked me out, but then I reasoned that you lose your smell with colds.  I definitely seemed to be having a cold.  And sometimes you get fevers.  It sounds sillier than it felt.  I surely didn’t imagine this is what the dreaded virus would feel like!  I still can’t wrap my head around it, though I wouldn’t say I have any doubts now that I have it.

But I really do clearly have a mild/moderate case.  I just sleep and sleep.  I have a low fever every now and then.  I’m not very hungry but David feeds me good soups and the like.  He leaves them at our bedroom door. He is very loving and I am loving not having to think about anything but getting well. He gets back to everyone to let them know how I’m doing. I had to miss the O sibs Zoom today.  I just couldn’t do it.  It actually frightened me to think of having to summon up the energy to do that!  I don’t want to Zoom with anyone now for a while.

Nell is SO MUCH better!!! That heartens me, since it was just a week ago that she had the test.  For now I’m just keeping my head down (literally, most of the time) and devoting myself to beating this thing.  I think my body is doing a really good job of it.  David is doing well, no signs so far.  I really don’t want him to get it.

April 4

David, bless his heart, is playing “For Geneva” on the piano, and I’m having a “lime rickey.” He brings me this sweetened lime and fizzy water to cheer me in the afternoons

Nobody seems to know what to make of this virus. I had no idea that having such difficulty digesting things was part of it.  Though for others, it’s diarrhea.  It seems to rear its head in so many different unwanted ways, and the only clear mutual signal is absolute slam-the-head-to-the-bed exhaustion.  I’ve never felt so wasted.  

That first feeling of horror when I couldn’t smell the hand cream?  And then, when Nell got sick? I thought the world was over.  That’s what the message is.  Until it isn’t.  For the lucky ones of us.  You get it, you get through it.  God willing.  I just told David that, if a man could love me as much as to write a song like that for me, I had to live.

And Lord knows, it’s the truth. So much to live for. Watching Ben’s video of hide and seek (gawd, I wrote “sick”) — that moment when James shoots up from behind a chair, shouting: “Don’t find us, Daddy, don’t find us, Daddy!”  “James didn’t think that through thoroughly,” David said as we guffawed. And Petra, trying on all the voices and special effects available on Marco Polo to cheer us all up. Oh my goodness, I’m a lucky girl.

I know it.

But this is trying, trying stuff. To feel so depleted. And to wonder – surely this can’t be all? To wonder if, still, for all the relative moderation of your symptoms — if somehow it will turn to the horror that robs so many of their very breath.

I don’t think so for a moment.  Not now.

PS: But I am mindful, often when I can’t sleep, sometimes in the night, that I want this to be me:

“Often, the virus doesn’t start out feeling deadly, said Katrina Hawkins, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University Hospital in the District. Many patients experience mild symptoms for about a week, then recover.”

And not this:

“But in a small fraction of cases, the disease takes a sudden, dramatic turn. A dry cough and shortness of breath will give way to acute respiratory issues and dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. The body’s immune system unleashes a storm of protective cells and other molecules that can overwhelm vital organs, sometimes causing more damage than the virus itself.”

The same story says some 60 percent of deaths in New York are men.  I am even more mindful that I do not not not not  want to give this to David.

April 6, 2020

Another day, another…dilemma.  The sore eye is not pinkeye. It’s uveitis, come back to haunt my right eye, this time.  Good news is I know what to do, so the drops resume.  Let’s hope they work.  I’ll talk to Dr. Llop again in two or three days, she said at our teleconference.

Had more energy today, marginally.  But cough seems a little stickier, voice gookier.  Maybe a touch more breathless, but who’s to say.

Nell has been the essence of sweetness.  Sending me pictures of turtles. A kind of honey I should order.  Podcasts I might like.  And videos and photos of her sweet children.  What a lovely woman she is. What a loving daughter.

It’s a strange thing to be this sick but to have it mostly be about just being so dang tired.  Lethargic.  Listless.  Not moved to do anything. ANYthing.  But I realize I’m lucky if that’s the worst of it. My fevers seem mostly to have gone away. Lots of aches last night, but the Tylenol takes care of them.  Actually, I’m not sure about the fevers.  Both the last two nights I woke up in great sweats.  I thought I was too warm, but I don’t think that was it.  So maybe the fevers come in the night.  I sort of hope that’s right, since I read somewhere that it’s the fevers that really work the body up to resist the virus. 

It’s odd how little is agreed upon about it.  My doc didn’t seem to know that red eyes, pain in the eye – this is sometimes a symptom.  I found quite a bit about it once I started having it. 

Oh well. Back to listlessness, not all bad.

April 8, 2020

I didn’t write yesterday, and I’m not writing today.  But I finished “Middlemarch.” And I determined that all those sirens are not coming for me, thank the good lord. (Next up to reread: Anna Karenina.)

April 9, 2020

I want so badly to be able to size this thing up.  I fall so far short of doing it, even to myself, in moments of quiet reflection.  It seems one of the hardest things that has happened to me – to us.  It also seems preposterous that I could be getting away so easily if this is indeed COVID-19, and I am indeed 72.  Which both seem to be true.

There are moments when the terror of it pushes through the fatigue and listlessness. One afternoon in particular, when the weight on my chest seemed to be strengthening and I lay in the gloomy room on (yet another) rainy day and listened to the sirens, feeling the pain in my eye:  I thought hard about what really would happen, if this seemingly mild to moderate case of mine turned suddenly wrong.  All the normal ready-for-the-hospital notions seem ridiculous in  the harshness of this virus.  Who needs books or chargers or extra underwear when the question is whether you can breathe?  David would not be able to come with me in the ambulance, no one could visit me. All my normal “I’ve been so lucky in my life, I’d go now with regret but no feelings of having been robbed of a wonderful life” – all of them came up against “please not like this, not all alone, struggling to breathe,” hooked (if I was lucky) to a machine that would suck as much life out of me as it put in.

Pause here to rassle with CVS to get them to home-deliver my uveitis medication.

But even that quotidian detail shows how right the other part is – the getting away so easy.  800 people died in this city yesterday alone from this ghastly plague.  The black and brown died in far greater numbers – the people with less protection, shelter, ability to distance;  the people who are doing the essential work (alongside the health workers) so that the rest of us can stay cozy-safe and get our groceries and our exercise bicycles and our crossword puzzles delivered.

I almost always knew that I was going to be okay.  The moment when I couldn’t smell the Vicks VapoRub – that was the first moment of fear.  A couple of days later, the three days in a row of a fever. That was another. By the time Laurisa told me to contact my doctor, it seemed logical enough. Just get the facts on the record, whatever this is. When the doctor called me the next morning and said, well, sounds like you have it, sounds like it’s mild to moderate. Go to bed, drink a lot of water, and Tylenol for the aches and pains. 

Then when my eye began to hurt, and we researched it and it seemed a lot of people had red eyes in connection with the virus. But mine felt disturbingly like the uveitis I’d had so recently in the other eye.  So thank goodness I could start the drops. It was a huge relief because I didn’t lie there and think that I’d be in the hospital going blind at the same time I couldn’t breathe.  Although, I know, why care about blindness then?  Except of course that you hope you’ll be one of the few who comes out of the hospital.

And the sheer torpor. Lassitude. Inability to care about anything, not wanting to eat, listen to anything, write anything. Being actually terrified, that first Friday of the O sib Zoom, of the notion that I’d have to go on and act normal.  So far from attainable, that state of normal.  In a way all of that was the easy part.  The inability to do anything was so crushing a fact that there was no castigating myself for not doing anything. For once.

But honestly most of the time I had no doubt I’d be okay.  My fever never went frighteningly high.  My coughs were occasionally annoying but never terrifying, as Nell’s had been.  I was able to read and read and read.  I devoured Middlemarch. It delivered me from evil those four or five days, drew me like a barge along a canal. There was no doing anything but that, and it was such deliciousness to have it.

Wish I could tell George Eliot. 

April 11, Happy Birthday sweet Laura Grace!

I think I failed us yesterday – no writing.  

It was my best day yet.  Woke up feeling remarkably well.  Sat up quite a bit, a brief Zoom chat with the O sibs. Some good laughs and warm talks with D, with whom I am now actually sitting in the LR, albeit a good long ways away. TWO episodes of Broadchurch.  It was a turning point, an “I’ve surely got this sucker beat now” moment.

And, as such things go, of course I’m much tireder again today.  This thing like torpor. I’ve sought the right word.  Lassitude. Exhaustion. Fatigue is the usual choice, but it’s far too weak. They all need “utter” in front of them.  Arthur laughed when David said “robust fatigue,” but it’s a good phrase for it.  (D said he thought saying “extreme” would have scared them too much.)  Robust is right.  It’s so STRONG, this total sapping of your strength.  It takes over everything.  Even your mind.  Your usual tussle to quit worrying about this or that niggling thing, to replace that with thoughts about what you look forward to or what gave you joy that day: None of that goes on.  Complete takeover:  It was me, Middlemarch and the bed – sometimes sleep, often just lying there.  And the occasional terror. Not often, though. Even that couldn’t push through the robustness of the fatigue very often.

Today I still know I’ll be okay, but the day when I begin really to delve into anything is further off than I’d pictured yesterday.

Tomorrow is Easter. Imagine.  The parade will be “virtual” — along with all the Easter services. 

We’ll “tune in” to Jeff’s service, though I’d love to hear some glorious music.  But can anyone have choirs? I guess not.  But they can have organs.  We’ll listen to Jeff (10:30) then tune into Washington National Cathedral (11:15) to hear “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”  We’ll play it here, too.  Glory, hallelujah.  I am so grateful myself to have risen from my little tributary of the valley of the shadow of death.

April 12, 2020, Easter morning!

For long I lay in bed in great dismay

We thought that I would surely pass away

But now we have arrived at Easter Day

And – hallelujah! — I am here to stay!

Haha!  This ridiculous ditty came to me immediately upon awakening this morning (only I thought “decay” rather than “dismay.” Decided on a rewrite!). 

I got my first hug this morning.  It went right in to my little heart and soul.

April 18, 2020

I posted this article on Facebook:

There will be no quick return to our previous lives, according to nearly two dozen experts. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term.

I added this comment: 

“This otherwise helpful article, like so much COVID-19 reporting, falls far short of acknowledging how woefully inadequate is our current testing. I began my own bout with the virus on March 30. Eleven straight days in bed, fever, aches, indigestion, loss of smell and utter inability to do anything but lie there. My doctor, with whom I had a video consultation at the outset, told me I likely had a mild-to-moderate case of the virus. I later wrote to ask her how I could be tested. You aren’t eligible, she said. Why? I asked. You aren’t sick enough. I have since heard personally of a dozen people who had the same experience. One woman was told that, unless you go to the ER, you aren’t sick enough to be tested. As for the value of the blood donation after having the virus, the form I filled out in my attempt to donate said I was not eligible unless I had tested positive. Now we hear repeatedly that widespread testing is essential to our attempted recovery as a nation. How did we fall this far behind? Who is in charge of seeing that we move forward? If we don’t even understand just how short we’ve fallen, we are truly screwed.”

Scores of comments showed how many share this concern about our government’s failing response.

April 20, 2020

Today I went to rest in the guest room for the first time in a looooong time.  I squeezed out some of the hand cream on the bedside table – the stuff I used almost exactly three weeks ago today.  I smelled it.  It was awful.

Thank goodness.

On March 4, 2020, Geneva Overholser spoke at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics on the topic, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” She was interviewed by Charles Overby, the center’s chairman, and Greg Brock, a senior fellow there. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Charles Overby: Welcome to the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. I’m Charles Overby. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to what I know is going to be an interesting and informative evening. I’m joined by my colleague Greg Brock, who’s a senior fellow at the center with a distinguished career in journalism. And we both have the privilege of having a conversation with Geneva Overholser. Geneva was an editor at Gannett, and she has done so many things in journalism. For all the distinguished people that we’ve had here, I can’t think of another person who has done more different things in an excellent way in the field of journalism.

Geneva was editor of the Des Moines Register when it won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for Public Service. She was on the editorial board of the New York Times. She was ombudsman for the Washington Post. You know, any one of these things would probably be a capstone for anybody else.  She was director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. She was chairman of the board of the Pulitzer Prize. She’s really done it all in journalism, and the fact that she and her husband David Westphal, who’s here with us tonight and also was a distinguished journalist. But they’ve come here to Oxford and Ole Miss to share insights with us. It’s a terrific thing Geneva has been spending time, after you’ve had such a distinguished career, thinking about some of the major issues before us. And we titled this program tonight, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” Sometimes, titles can be overhyped and so, Geneva, I would ask you just to get started; is there in fact a crisis in journalism and democracy and if so are they related?

Geneva Overholser:  Thank you, Charles, and thank you for that lovely introduction. I think what it really means is I’m old but I’m glad to be here. And I do think this is not one statement that is overhyped. We do have a crisis and I bet most of us would agree that these two crises are related. There is no question that good journalism is good for democracy. It helps people understand their communities and helps people come together. Healthy communities have often gotten that way in substantial part because they had good newspapers and there’s no question that the demise — it’s  way too strong a word — but the enormous weakening of journalism that we have seen particularly locally has contributed to a sense that people are not confident about what they know. Many people are divided because the sources of information have fractionalized.