"Preserving Our Roots: My Journey To Save Seeds And Stories" by John Coykendall with Christina Melton, Photographs By Sarand Hackenberg

"Preserving Our Roots: My Journey To Save Seeds And Stories" by John Coykendall with Christina Melton, Photographs By Sarah Hackenberg, (2019, Louisiana State UUniveristy Press) is an instantly eyecatching book. I had heard of the author and his book shortly after it was released during a conversation with my good friend Bill Best who is also an expert on the preservation and propagation of heritage crops. I finally saw and purchased John Coykendall's book directly from the author at the April 4, 2026, Pike County Seed Swap in Pikeville, Kentucky. My wife Candice and I have traveled to the seed swap primarily to visit with Bill Best. But the entire event and the people we met made the day much more than a meeting with an old friend. When I first saw the book, several copies were laid out on a folding table in front of John Coykendall whose table was set up just a few feet from that of Bill Best. Bill introduced me to John and we spoke for a few minutes early in the morning, but that conversation was quite brief. The crowd was in the process of growing as people streamed in the doors of the Pike Central High School gymnasium where it was held. I wandered around the tables, met a few people, bought some honey, a bag of stone ground meal, and talked to anyone who had a minute or two free for conversation. At the official start time of the event, a low key memorial was held for my recently deceased good friend Frank Barnett who had died on Narch 18, 2026, as the culmination of a series of cascading health problems which had begun with a cardiac valve replacement surgery. Like Bill Best and John Coykendall, Frank was a giant among the seed savers of Appalachia. As the day wore on and traffic slowed, I returned to John Coykendall's table, had a few enlightening minutes of conversation with him and bought the book. John Coykendall is still employed as a heritage gardener at Blackberry Farm resort in Tennessee near where he has spent most of his life. The vegetables he grows are an integral part of the menu at Blackberry Farm, a resort in Walland, Tennessee. But this book is focused almost entirely on another aspect of John's life, his annual trips and lifelong friendships in Washington Parish Louisiana where he travels and stays for lenghty periods in the off season at his job. The book is divided into sections based on the four seasons, and each section is composed of well written, highly informative stories of life in a very remote and somewhat traditional area of Louisiana. Each section describes the farming lifestyle of the parish during that season, provides several short stories of John's encounters with his many friends there, and is illustrated with stunning photographs of gardening, crops, prepared foods, and the people of the parish. It is also illustrated with closeup photographs of many of the pages of the lifelong journals which he has kept complete with his hand drawn illustrations of what he has seen and learned in the parish. Each October, he travels to the parish for at least a full week to volunteer in the Washington Parish Free Fair, one of the few free local or regional fairs in the entire country. During those visits, he serves as a cook in the fair kitchen each day, visits with his many friends, meets new ones, and feeds them all with foods produced from heritage food crops. John is professional trained artist and a former art instructor for quite a few years. Everywhere he goes, he takes his journal and takes notes, draws finely detailed illustrations of people and processes they have discussed during their encounters. The book is an amazing piece of work in todays world where publishing has generally taken the low road to avoid extra work and expense. It is an artistic masterpiece in every possible definition of the word. If you are a person who loves gardening, good food, traditional lifestyles, and stories of life in the southern USA, this is the book for you.

"Band Of Angels" by Robert Penn Warren, A Wonderful Old Novel And Still Worth Reading!

 

"Band Of Angels" is a 1955 novel by Robert Penn Warren, one of the handful of American writers who was never awarded a Nobel Prize and probably should have been.  But he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel "All The King's Men", and the second for his poetry.  He was also a Rhodes Scholar and taught at both Vanderbilt University and Yale.  He also worked as a Consultant In Poetry for the Library of Congress.  He was an amazingly prolific writer and produced 12 novels, 15 non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, 3 children's books, 2 major dramatic versions of his novel "All The King's Men", 1 short story collection, and 21 collections of poetry.  

 

"Band Of Angels" was made into a 1957 movie which starred Clark Gable, Sidney Poitier, and Yvonne de Carlo.  The heroine and narrator of the book is Amantha "Manty" Starr, a woman who was raised by her father on a Central Kentucky plantation in the years preceding the Civil War.  Her mother is dead and buried near the house instead of in the plantation cemetery some distance farther away.  Her father who pampers her, apparently loves her deeply, and regularly takes her to Cincinnati to meet his friends there.  He also enrolls her in Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.  But he never tells her much about her mother, and the primary female influence in her childhood is an older slave woman.  The father dies suddenly while Manty is still in college and, when she returns to the plantation just in time to see the end of his funeral proceedings in the cemetery, she learns that her mother was a slave, that she was never freed by her father, and is seized, as part of his personal property, at the graveside by a local loan shark who has loaned her father large sums of money.  She is shipped to New Orleans to be sold as a slave in the slave market there and bought by an older man who pays $2,000 for her to keep her from falling into the hands of a young southern ne'er do well.  She becomes the mistress of her owner who turns out to be a former slave trading ship's captain.  He also owns a unique male slave who is the actual overseer of his plantations but has been raised much like his son and holds a great deal of power over the other slaves.  

This book is full of one surprise twist after another and flows with wonderful prose which is the trademark of Robert Penn Warren.  Modern readers, especially readers of color, are likely to be deeply offended to the prolific use of racial slurs in the book which are not just limited to the "N" word.  But it is an accurate book for the times which it describes in the slave holding south both before and after the Civil War.  Manty is eventually set free, marries a former Union Army captain, and lives for a time in New Orleans high society.  She also eventually joins her husband in a long westward migration as he seeks a career as a lawyer but finds one reason after another to fail in town after town.  There is a great deal to love in this book along with a somewhat sizeable portion of things some readers will hate.  But it has survived, as every word Robert Penn Warren published has and should have survived.  It's arguable weaknesses are clearly overcome by its powerful strengths.  Put aside any negative emotions you might have for Warren's broad usage of language which is historically accurate but despised today and read the book.  In fact, I would say that any reader who likes to read broadly of the best writers in the world would be remiss to avoid reading Warren as broadly as possible.  He is one of America's great masters of literature.  

Take A Real Vacation--Go Somewhere You've Never Been

The photo above is a little bar on US 2 in Northern Wisconsin where we had a spontaneous lunch.

At about this time of year in the area of Eastern Kentucky in which I live, I see or hear people I know who are extremely excited because they are going on vacation to some spot they have been going for the last many years.  Generally, these people have never been on a real vacation to any other spot in the country.  Once in a while they say they "went somewhere else and I didn't like it" or "I went somewhere else and I had to drive all the way to get there" or "I went somewhere else and it was too expensive".  For me, the only one of those statements that has any validity whatever is "...it was too expensive".  But there are dozens of great spots to take a vacation within a reasonable distance at a reasonable price near just about anywhere anybody in America lives.  I love to see places I've never seen, meet people I've never met, do things I've never done, and have new experiences of almost any kind.  Why does anybody want to go to the very same place for a "vacation" year after year, frequently staying in the same hotel or bed and breakfast, eating meals in the same restaurants which are often other locations of the same chains they eat in at home, and often seeing the same attractions year after year?

This photo is on a tour boat in Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin. 

In the area in which I live, there are about a half dozen locations I see people visiting year after year and most of them are not places I would ever want to visit twice.  Those areas include Gatlinburg, TN;  Virginia Beach, VA;  Myrtle Beach, NC;  and Cherokee, NC.  These people come back saying how much fun they had going to Dollywood or swimming at the beach where they have been on numerous occasions.  I do not understand that kind of thinking.  Yes, I have been to Dollywood, Gatlinburg, Cherokee, and Virginia Beach, most of them one time each.  I have been to one of two of them twice.  But I have also been in thirty-one of the 50 US states and can't wait to get to the other 19.  I have been from New York state to Arizona, from South Florida to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Nogales, Mexico, and I loved nearly every minute of all those trips.  I despise going to some place I've seen a dozen times before, staying the same, now deteriorating hotel, eating in the same restaurants, and often seeing the same dull people who are stranded in the same low paying jobs.  I even see a lot of these people I am referring to who could easily afford to take a vacation anywhere they wanted to.  

This photo is at the Alamo in Texas.
 

For me, the ultimate vacation is to get in a good vehicle with my wife, and point it in a direction toward some destination I have never been.  We do usually book a place to stay every night along the route because my wife has been in a wheelchair for over 20 years and has trouble sleeping in ordinary hotel beds.  But we also often schedule little of what we are going to do on these vacations and let the route dictate what happens.  Twice on our way to visit her family in Wisconsin we have taken spontaneous, totally unplanned trips which turned out to be two of the best trips we were ever on.  Once we suddenly decided to go visit the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she went to college which is in the northwest corner of Wisconsin.  Her family have always lived about an hour north of Milwaukee in the southeast portion of the state.  We hung a left in southern Indiana and crossed into Iowa at Clinton, Iowa, and then hung a right and drove up the old US highway along the Mississippi River to Dubuque, Iowa, and into southwest Wisconsin to Platteville.  It was a great trip up the Big Muddy.  We stayed in a little motel in Clinton, Iowa, and had a great pizza for supper from a little pizzeria in that town where, most likely, many of the locals eat every day.  On the other trip to visit her father, after her mother had died, she suddenly said, somewhere in Indiana, "I've never been in Michigan.  Let's go up through Michigan, across the Upper Peninsula and south his house."  That's exactly what we did.  We drove up the western edge of Wisconsin, stopped in Grand Rapids, spent a night in Saint Ignace, Michigan, spent half a day on Mackinac Island, drove across the Upper Peninsula, bought dried fish in a little store with antique coolers just like the ones in my parents' store when I was a boy, and drove down the eastern edge of Wisconsin to her father's house.  We ate fresh cherries from a roadside stand, saw the National Park on Mackinac Island, shot some photos of some Lake Michigan lighthouses, and had a ball.  

This is with friends in Nogales, Mexico. 
 

Once in South Louisiana, when we were staying in an AirBNB in Jeffersonville, LA, we took a day and drove down an old two lane highway to the Gulf of Mexico stopping at a few little restaurants which caught our eyes along the way.  We got the best pork roast I ever ate in a little restaurant stuck between a bayou and the highway, and some of the best fried shrimp and crawfish etouffee I have ever had in another little place with gingham curtains sitting beside the highway in a little town most people never go to if they visit New Orleans or Baton Rouge.  On that same trip, we also toured the LA state capitol, saw the spot where Senator Huey Long was assassinated, and had a fine experience with the security people at the capitol which you could have only had in a southern state before gun violence and bun related domestic terrorism became rampant in America.  We had parked in a free lot on the banks of the Mississippi and walked to the capitol a block away.  I never thought a thing about having my pocket knife in my pocket and when I got to the metal detector I remembered the knife, showed it to the security people, and asked "don't you just put things like this in a box or envelope and hold them till people leave" to which they said "no, we can't do that.  But do you see those bushes at the bottom of the steps.  Just take it out there, pick out a bush, and hide it under the bush till you get done" which is what I did.  You can't have that kind of experience in Gatlinburg or Myrtle Beach.  

The photo above is sitting in the porch swing on the porch of the boyhood home of President Lyndon B. Johnson in Johnson City, TX. 
 

And the beautiful sign below was on a carpet store marquee sign in El Paso, Texas, in October 2017.  I went inside to meet the owner and thank him for speaking out and defending America.  

Always Confront Political Ignorance

Yesterday, November 28, 2017, I had an appliance repairman in my home working on my washing machine.  He has been in my house on several occasions over the last few years since it seems that the relatively expensive, high tech, front loading washer we bought a few years ago seems to eat software and other parts regularly.  Until yesterday, he had never broached any political subjects and that might be due to the fact that he and his brother recently took over the business from his former partner and the founder of the business upon his retirement.  But as he was working on the washer, we talked about many random subjects just as we always had before.  But during the the course of the conversation, he made the statement that "the problem with this country is that all the big corporations think there is nothing in the world except the left wing people".  Just as I always do in such cases with anyone, anytime, anywhere, I confronted his error in logic.  I responded "no, the problem with the country is that we have a Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate illegally occupying the White House".  

Freeway Carpets, El Paso, Texas, Photo By Roger D. Hicks

That response obviously was not the answer the man had been expecting but I have to give him credit.  He took it well as I proceeded to go on to inform him that in my opinion TRAITOR Trump is just that and nothing more, a TRAITOR, and that nearly everyone close to him is also a TRAITOR.  I went on to tell him about the long and ever growing list of evidence and documented incidents of illicit contacts between TRAITOR Trump, his Right Wing Radical minions, and various Russian operatives.  We also talked about the recent timeline of events in the Robert Mueller investigation and how the road is being paved to indict, convict, impeach, and imprison not only TRAITOR Trump but the great majority of his flunkies.  I reminded him that Russia and Putin seem to have begun to groom TRAITOR Trump for his current status as a Russian operative sometime in the 1980's with the onset being linked to the original deal to allow a TRAITOR Trump Tower in Moscow.  I have to admit that I failed to inform the repairman of the number of Russian covert operatives who mysteriously died immediately after the 2016 US Presidential Election in what seems to be an attempt to prevent any of the operatives who had contact with TRAITOR Trump from living to potentially defect and testify against the scheme, Vladimir Putin, and TRAITOR Trump.  

Freeway Carpets, El Paso, Texas, Photo By Roger D. Hicks

I also neglected to advise him of a recent article from Bill Moyers on his website in which he interviewed attorney Steve Harper, one of the top court room performers in the world of big time criminal law, about the rapidly moving events related to the Mueller investigation and the potential outcomes of that investigation.  I also informed the repairman of several legitimate sources of news which could help to relieve him of some of naivete and provide him with actual news instead of the fake news he had been receiving from a variety of Right Wing Radical Repugnican sources.  Additionally, I told him about several of the well informed people I know who would also be willing to assist him in relieving him of his factual void.  I told him about four people I had met on my recent southwestern vacation.  Those people included a carpet store owner in El Paso, Texas, who uses his outdoor marketing sign on a daily basis to post messages about the crimes of TRAITOR Trump and the Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate which he directs.  In that group is also a retired associate superintendent of schools in Austin, Texas, and her retired teacher/chef husband who work daily to assist in the effort to have Traitor Trump held responsible for all his crimes, past, present, and future.  Additionally, the group includes a retired engineer with a plethora of international business experience who lives in a gated community in Arizona and runs a business testing golf equipment for manufacturers and once got out of the car of an acquaintance more than thirty miles from his own vehicle because the acquaintance insisted on repeatedly defending TRAITOR Trump.  The last of the people on this list of which I advised the repairman is a retired plumbing contractor in the Baton Rouge area who started telling me of his knowledge of the crimes of TRAITOR Trump literally as soon as I entered his home.  I also informed the repairman of two men I know who between them spent nearly fifty years in the US Army, both with long time high level security clearances, who work daily to inform the world of the crimes of TRAITOR Trump.  The man did state that he would check out some of the honest media sources of which I informed him including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.  He might do as he said and check the sources.  He might not.  But, based on the information I gave him, he can never again say that he has not been told the truth about the danger in which American Democracy exists today.  

And that is exactly what every American citizen should be doing every time anyone, any time, anywhere attempts to disseminate support for TRAITOR Trump, his lies, his Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate members, or any other aspect of their efforts to destroy American Democracy.  Always stand up, speak up, and speak out when the supporters of TRAITOR Trump attempt to spread the disinformation, fake news, and outright lies about the criminal conspiracy currently under investigation by Robert Mueller and his staff.  

 

Foods I Have Ordered But Never Been Served!

There is nothing I enjoy more than eating something I have never eaten and, if possible, never seen.  Any time I walk into a restaurant or other food service setting and see anything on the menu which I have never experienced, I try it.  That is one of the best ways I know to broaden my culinary knowledge, experience, and taste.  When I travel, I look for food service settings which will provide me opportunities to eat and experience new foods.  On our recent extended vacation in the desert southwest, I had several experiences to do just that.  But I also found myself in a situation which prompted this post.  My wife Candice and I were eating in a little restaurant in Southern Louisiana called Boudreaux's in a wide spot on Louisiana 56 called Chackbay, Louisiana.  It is a well known, but never before known by me, little restaurant with nice gingham curtains in the windows, a few good sized bass mounts hanging on the walls, and a single waitress with just enough of South Louisiana in her accent to let you know you are in the right place.  While we were there, we were served some really nice craw-fish etouffe and Candice ordered fried shrimp which came to the table big enough and fresh enough to hang over the edge of the plate as if they were preparing to walk back into the Gulf of Mexico.  Fried shrimp do not usually tempt me at all.  In the majority of places which serve them, they are usually rubbery with a hard, doughy crust, and over cooked to the point that it is sinful.  Candice shared her shrimp with me and they were tender, cooked just enough to be done but still tender and tasty.  Amazingly, the breading was light, fluffy, and crispy which was one of the most pleasant surprises I have had in a long time.  

But the event at Boudreaux's which prompted this post was something which I ordered and was told they did not have that day.  Turtle Sauce Piquant was on the menu but not in the kitchen, at least not that day which was Wednesday, October 25, 2017. I have eaten turtle prepared in the traditional fried Appalachian manner since I was a child.  But this was my first chance to have genuine Cajun Turtle Sauce Piquant and I have to say it made me sad to miss it. Wednesday is a day in the middle of the week when sales can be slow and I fully understand why they did not have turtle in the kitchen.  But this kind of thing has happened to me several times, in several great restaurants, in several cities, in several states and Candice and I both agreed that I needed to write a blog post about foods I have ordered but never been served.  I have now had this happen, with a variety of foods and restaurants all the way from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to the southern shore of Lake Superior, from Saint Louis to Rockville, Maryland.  These dishes are usually a bit off the mainstream food taste when this happens to me.  I find an inviting menu item listed which I have never tried, order it, and the server says, "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't have that available tonight."  It has happened often enough to cause me to sometimes think people who want to limit their exotic menu see me coming and plan ahead to not order anything an ordinary meat and potatoes eater would not order.  Rationally, I know this is not true.  I am just paranoid but it happens far too often for my personal satisfaction.  

One of the earliest occasions I can remember of having this happen was in the middle 1990's when Candice was traveling regularly to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.  I would often drive her there and rent a room in a private home in the neighborhood of the clinical center which rented rooms at low cost to family members of patients.  Most evenings during Candice's stays at NIH, we could sign her out of the clinical center and go out to eat and do our version of the tourist thing.  We found Sam Woo Jung Japanese and Korean Restaurant on Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland.  This became one of my favorite restaurants of all time and was generally well reviewed by anyone who ever ate there.  They served a melding of Japanese and Korean dishes and had Korean Barbecue grills in the center of their booth tables.  Their sushi was awesome and I will always remember eating flying fish roe sushi there. They also had the best kimchee I ever had. But on our first visit, I noticed beef intestines on the menu and immediately ordered them.  You guessed it!  They did not have them that night.    Now, I am sad to report that during a quick Google search as I am writing this blog post, I have found that Sam Woo is no longer open in Rockville.  That is a damn shame if there ever was one.  It was a wonderful restaurant which should have lasted a thousand years.

A few years ago, we were in Saint Louis where I was attending a Certified Personal Property Appraiser Course with the Missouri Auction School and we tried to complete another of my efforts to have still one more food I had never eaten.  Not too long before we left for Saint Louis, I had seen Andrew Zimmern's review of the pork brain sandwich at Schottzie's Bar and Grill and I wanted to try it.  I have eaten brains from hogs, cattle, and squirrels all my life.  I was probably fed brains as a babe in arms since they are usually soft, creamy, and tasty no matter who cooks them or what species had grown up using them.  But I had never had a fried pork brain sandwich and I was fired up to get one.  My professional training was a three day course on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the week, once again not the prime days for a restaurant to serve unusual items.  We drove to Schottzie's and managed to get Candice's wheelchair in the bar over a minor obstacle or two which we are accustomed to in our travels.  When I ordered the pork brain sandwich, I was told by the bar maid, "I'm sorry but we only serve those on the weekend."  Since I had one more night to spend in Saint Louis, I offered to go to a local grocery store or butcher and buy a container of pork brains if they would cook me one sandwich the following night.  I was given a health department based reason that they could not do that. I settled for an ordinary bacon and cheese burger which just did not sufficiently scratch my itch. I still cannot wait to get back to Schottzie's in Saint Louis on a Saturday night and have a fried pork brain sandwich. 

In July of 2016, Candice and I took another pretty good road trip all the way to Winnipeg and back and drove along US 2  along the southern shore of Lake Superior before crossing into Canada at International Falls, Minnesota.  We spent a night in the area of Bayfield, Wisconsin, and I was hoping to find whitefish livers at Gruenke's Restaurant in Bayfield.  We got there in the heart of the tourist season, but on a week night, and I ordered whitefish livers with a smile.  With a less enthusiastic smile, the server returned to our table in a couple of minutes and said, "I am sorry, sir, but we don't have whitefish livers tonight."  Once again I was foiled from eating a food which I could not find near my home or in most other places in the world.  I settled for some fish which just did not meet my expectations.

I do not blame any of these restaurants for not stocking perishable items which do not sell at the top of the menu.  But I truly regret every time I have ever met that apologetic smile from a server along with the stock answer about not having that items in stock at that time.  Since I travel widely I might be able to get back to some of these places at a time when they are serving the uncommon item I crave from their menu.  But it is a big world and I still have about twenty American states, eight provinces and three territories in Canada, thirty Mexican states, and more than 190 foreign countries to visit.  I am sure I will find other places where I will not be served the items I order and I know that I cannot double back to all of them on a day of the week when they serve the items I want.  That is a shame.  I hope all of you have better look finding these exotic foods than I did. 

Vacation Explanation

During the month of October 2017, I did less work on this blog than I had in several months, perhaps even for the past year.  My readers deserve an explanation.  From October 2, 2017, to October 28, 2017, my wife Candice and I have been on an extended vacation in the desert southwest.  We took a nearly month long road trip and when we are out of our home for an extended period of time we never disclose that on this blog or social media until we return due to the propensity for burglars to troll social media sites as well as blogs to seek potential victims.  We probably don't have enough personal property to attract a high dollar burglar but no burglar knows what they will find until they pick your lock, raise your window, or kick in your door.

We both love road trips and this was our longest, and probably best, ever.  We traveled 6401 miles and stayed on the road for 26 days.  We did most of the trip on Airbnb and saw parts of Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, and Mississippi.  We stayed with three different Airbnb providers, one in Arizona, one in Texas, and one in Louisiana.  All three were great places to say and wonderful people to work with.  I will write more about that and other aspects of the vacation on several upcoming blog posts.  I still managed to complete reading a couple of books and will review those in the near future as well.  I will still try to mix in at least every other blog post with one about some aspect of life in Appalachia.  This was a great trip and deserves to be discussed.  Look forward to it!