October 30, 2023

Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in South Carolina, is just barely in South Carolina. The state line (S.C.-N.C.) runs straight through the center of the observation platform. At least half of what you see from the perch is in another state.

As mountains go, Sassafras is fairly humble, at 3,554 feet. North Carolina claims 28 peaks above 6,000 feet starting with Mount Mitchell, just north of Asheville. Tennessee has 16 “sixers,” led by Clingman’s Dome in the Great Smokies, the class of the western end of the Blue Ridge. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is close to 6,300 feet.

We came again to Sassafras with Virginia friends Pat and Mike. We were lucky, the sky was bright and blue out to the pale mist of the horizon. On three previous visits fog and clouds locked the summit in. Twice I started five miles west at a lonely place called Laurel Valley and hoofed up the Foothills trail to the top in cold rain, the place was deserted. The silence then spoke to me of the isolation of the wilderness, of the heart.

The road trip for us is an even 50 miles, up U.S. 25 to S.C. 11, then eight miles of winding and climbing on U.S. 178 to a mysterious unincorporated place, Rocky Bottom, site of a Conference Center for the Blind and a small church or two. There the road widens just a bit before the turn onto Sassafras Mountain Highway (or F. Van Clayton Memorial Parkway) for five miles. The narrow two-lane road bisects the Foothills trail at a small clearing called Chimney Top. Then it’s up, up, past a second trail junction, to the summit.

On Sassafras, although it’s way down the list of high places, you are up there. A black painted stripe marks the state boundary, visitors get a mild thrill in planting one foot in North Carolina and the other in South Carolina. Tennessee and Georgia are on the horizon. You can see some of the tourist town of Brevard, N.C., to the east, Mount Wolfe and Mount Pisgah, and odd places like Dunn’s Rock. The gorgeous Chattooga River, the northern boundary with Georgia, flows to the west.

Sassasfras’s shiny observation platform, parking lot, and restrooms make it an easy spot for the tourists, but the place is on the fringe of wildness. The thick forests surrounding the summit are deep within the Jocassee Gorges Management Area, 50,000 acres of wilderness penetrated by wild white-water rivers and plunging waterfalls, a few meandering trails and fire roads, and a few isolated communities.

The view from the west of the summit picks up Lake Keowee and Lake Jocassee, shimmering in the afternoon sun. Jocassee is a vast manmade lake of 7,500 acres, 300 feet deep. The flooding submerged neglected structures, including a church. The lake’s creation, starting in 1972, was the theme of the movie Deliverance, set in the rugged country of north Georgia, that captured the dark side of human nature meeting wilderness.

The hike to the mountaintop, for those who try it, hints at some of that. Much of the 76-mile-long Foothills trail is hiker friendly, but the nine miles up from the east and the five miles from the west drain the spirit. From the access point near Rocky Bottom the route rises and falls to the Chimney Top road crossing, then climbs relentlessly through thickets of vines and over huge boulders until it twists in circles to the summit.

We read that Sassafras is the boundary for three watersheds. Water draining from the mountain’s east side flows to the South Saluda River, Broad River, and Congaree to the Santee-Cooper Lakes, to the Atlantic. The southside drainage runs to Lake Keowee and giant Lake Hartwell, on the line with Georgia, then out to the Atlantic. Rain and snowmelt from north and west end up in the French Broad River, then the Tennessee and Ohio rivers before dumping into the Gulf of Mexico.

So the place is a geological inflection and a tourist attraction. But we find a personal touch, both sad and joyful, in the hundreds of inscribed bricks laid at the base of the observation platform. In 2019 the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources raised funds for the platform by offering to donors bricks they could engrave with personal commemorative messages. You stand over the space and browse. A few celebrate nature and wilderness: “Find Solitude and Renewal in Mountain Beauty”; “Love this place”; “A place of serenity”; that kind of thing.

But others honor parents, grandparents, children, friends, now lost, some with birth and death dates. Some are simple: “Ken and Karen”; “William Beckwith Family.” There are dozens of “In Loving Memory of …”; “Know What You Believe and Why You Believe It,” and so on. You think of a stroll through a cemetery, where poignant messages speak.

At Sassafras these persons linger here in the language of those who loved them, and, it seemed to me, a little closer to the Almighty. They lie at rest somewhere else, but they also are here on this rocky point in the sky, immortal, insofar as a humble brown brick can speak to the world.

We talked a bit with others milling about the platform, a woman from New York’s Adirondack region, a couple from East Tennessee. They know about mountains and bracing cold. Like us, they stared out at the deep brilliant fall colors that extend to the horizon. Like us they read the messages of the bricks.

This is a remote, rugged place, hidden in the far northwest corner of a state better known for its beaches and near-tropical humidity. Majestic Great Smoky Mountain National Park, visited by millions each year, is about 100 miles west. The Smokies tourist clout has brought the shlock, the miles through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., of cheap motels, wax museums, Dollywood, a space needle, Titanic museum, a rainforest zoo. Pigeon Forge offers a “We the People” Trump souvenir store.   

As a tourist attraction, Sassafras is a minor afterthought. The solemnity, the humanity of the place spoke to us, speaks to everyone. Sassafras is the mountain, the rocky trails, the deep forest, the steep, breath-stealing access road. Then too, the messages of ordinary people, who decided they love this humble, beautiful place.

October 23, 2023

“Fall for Greenville” brought thousands of people, we heard 250,000, to Main Street. The weather for the three days was glorious. Something like 60 local restaurants had booths, 80 bands performed, 50 beer vendors and vineyards showed up.

Like most of the crowd we strolled the length of Main to the West End, beyond the Reedy River, which flows through downtown. We listened for a while to soft country played by “Remember Me,” who call themselves a “Willie Nelson Tribute Band.” We stepped out and danced to a few Willie and Kris Kristoferson tunes, then got some Greek food and ate it sitting on a wall near Falls Park and watched the people flow by.

“Fall” seemed a little bit of a dream. The Main Street foliage swayed in a soft breeze, the sun shone brilliantly, the temperature stayed mild. The shimmer of the tents and canopies and the kaleidoscope of colors elevated the crowd. Rides had been set up for kids on side streets. Restaurants and bars were packed. The world we live in seemed very far away.

The day was a moment in the history of the place that, like anywhere else, creates its own rhythms of life. The energy of the city rushed forward, as if extricating itself from the three timeworn features of Southern life: fundamentalist religion, textiles, and segregation. You turn your head, everywhere you see steeples. Everywhere you see those billboard-like signs with the tacked-up invitations to attend Protestant services of every strain.

Greenville is probably the only American city that has honored a Revolutionary War British soldier. Paris Mountain State Park, within the city limits, remembers Richard Pearis, an Irish immigrant who first settled in Virginia. He served with the British during the French and Indian War, then moved to South Carolina. He tried to sell Cherokee land to white settlers, and in 1770 built a home near the Reedy. In 1775 he became a Tory officer and fought with the British, was captured by the Colonials, then escaped to the Bahamas.

The town has a gritty industrial past. Gristmills for processing grain were built as early as 1816, the hulk of the Vardry-McBee Mill remains on the river near Falls Park. A statue on Main Street recalls McBee (1775-1864), who in 1815 owned most of the town. Greenville once was called, or called itself, the “textile capital of the world.” The textile business drifted into town before the Civil War. In the early 20th century the city produced 10 percent of the nation’s textiles. Forty-three mill presidents lived in Greenville.

The Reedy offered a setting for new mills. Camperdown No.1 was built on the river in 1874 by three Massachusetts men after a fire destroyed their Boston mill. Camperdown No. 2 started operations in 1876 farther upstream. No.1 failed but was put back into service around 1900. Soon eight mills were running within two miles of downtown producing thirty thousand bales of cloth a year, with dozens more on the outskirts. A Farmers Alliance cotton warehouse was built in 1890.

By the 1950s Japanese competition had put the mills out of business, leaving hundreds without work. Some were demolished, a few still stand. No. 2 was torn down in 1959.

An artifact of the textile business is represented by the Milliken & Company corporate headquarters outside Spartanburg, 30 miles north. Milliken lobbied for decades for government protection against foreign competition and fought an organizing campaign by the United Textile Workers of America, closing its Darlington, S.C., plant to avoid the union. In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled against the company. Fifteen years later the company paid the affected workers and sold off most of its textile business.

Greenville has its sliver of high-tech fame. Albert Einstein came to town several times to visit his son, Hans Albert Einstein, who in 1938 worked for the city’s Soil Conservation Service. Einstein Sr. delivered several lectures at nearby Furman University.

Charles H. Townes, inventor of the laser, grew up on a farm near Greenville, attended Greenville High, and graduated from Furman in 1935. He did graduate research at Columbia and developed the maser, an earlier technology, and then the laser in 1960. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964. Later he led the effort to calculate the mass of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. A statue of Townes stands at the corner of South Main Street and Falls Park Drive.

Local cheerleading doesn’t obscure the hard past. On the corner of Main and Washington Streets statues of two Black students represent those who in the late 1960s demonstrated and marched to desegregate Greenville’s schools.

Sterling High started as Greenville Academy early in the 20th century, a school for African-American students financed by local White businessmen. It was renamed Sterling in 1929. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson graduated from Sterling in 1959. A president of the student body became the first Black student admitted to Furman when the university desegregated in 1965.

The Main-Washington street statue, dedicated in November 2006, recognizes the campaign by Sterling students to achieve racial integration. The corner is adjacent to the former site of a Woolworth’s store, where students began in July 1960 to demonstrate peacefully to protest segregation, following the lead of students in Greensboro, N.C. Students also conducted sit-ins at W.T. Grant’s and S.H. Kress & Co. All the stores shut down their lunch counters, refusing to serve the students.

Sterling High burned to the ground in 1967. City fire officials and other experts investigated the suspicious circumstances.  In 1968 the state Supreme Court ruled that the state schools must desegregate. Greenville schools began to integrate black and white students in 1970.

A few days after “Fall” we walked by the statues. An elderly woman stood reading the inscriptions. “I was in the class of ’67,” she said in a soft voice. “It was arson. But the community came together.”

She motioned at the inscriptions of names of contributors to the site. “Anyway, we have this,” she said. We looked at the inscribed bricks. I remembered the party feel of “Fall,” and the grim events now tormenting the country. Later, recalling the woman, I thought, we can move forward.

October 16, 2023

We settled into our usual pew for the 5:00 PM Saturday Mass, surrounded by senior citizens. We were part of the surrounding. It’s the same at the early Sunday Mass. Mainly old folks, just the way it is. Maybe the young ones come later.

We didn’t know it then, but Hamas terrorists already had started their attacks on Israel, murdering hundreds of civilians. Israel, the Holy Land, the birthplace of the three Abrahamic religions, has again become a bloodbath.

Individuals may endure private agonies of spiritual doubt. In the Middle East, religious conflict eternally tortures nations and communities. Disagreement and discord translate to fundamentalism and fanaticism. That is going on now in America, as “evangelical” Christians campaign for extremist Republicans, while so-called “traditionalist” Catholics attack the Pope.

Religious acrimony, sometimes as small-minded pettiness, shows up in strange places. Our daughter is a graduate of Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, N.C. So is Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry (N.C.) who became speaker “pro tempore” of the House of Representatives last week. The college president sent an email asking for prayers for McHenry. This was just after McHenry expelled the former speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, from her office. No prayers for Pelosi, though.

So Mass started, we stood, Father Steve approached the altar. He’s the new priest, a humble guy who will laugh at himself.  A week or so ago he began his sermon by talking about the U.S. Tennis Open. I don’t recall any connection to the Gospel. Sometimes I nod off. Sandy nudges me, I open my eyes and try to listen.

The tennis metaphor was unique. I guessed he looks to grab the audience with an offbeat, attention-getting opening. More priests need to do the same.

He talked about the Gospel (Matthew, chapter 21, verses 33-43), the one about Jesus debating the Pharisees and Scribes, the officials who controlled nearly every aspect of Jewish life at the time. Jesus describes a landowner who planted a vineyard and leased it to tenants. When he sent his servants to receive the grapes, the tenants killed them. A second delegation of servants also were killed. The owner then sent his son, the tenants also murdered him.

Jesus asks, “What will the owner do to those tenants?” The answer is, he’ll put them to death and lease the vineyard to others who will surrender the grapes at the proper time. Jesus then says to the Pharisees, “Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to people who will produce its fruit.”

Father Steve wrapped up, saying, “Jesus is challenging the Pharisees, calling them out, because he sees through their hypocrisy in using legalisms and empty rules to maintain their authority.”

I heard something different. This humble priest in this modest parish in Upstate South Carolina was talking about present-day Pharisees and Scribes. He was challenging the Catholic cardinals and bishops who think they know Pope Francis’s job better than he does. These are the leaders who for decades covered up the church’s sex scandal and fail, even now, to communicate the truth of Christ’s message, while Catholics young and old abandon the Church.

Last week Pope Francis opened his “Synod of Bishops,” a conference of 450 bishops that is examining the future of the Catholic Church. On the agenda are tough questions: the place of LGBTQ persons in Catholicism, increased decision-making authority for women and lay people in the Church, and the still-simmering crisis of sexual abuse by priests.

As the Synod started, Francis wrote, “This is the primary task of the Synod: to refocus our gaze on God, to be a church that looks mercifully at humanity.” Meanwhile five so-called “conservative” cardinals sent pointed questions to Francis challenging him on his teaching. Francis deftly turned the questions aside, as Christ answered the Pharisees who tried to trap him.

Then last week Francis said, unambiguously, “Israel has a right to defend itself. I pray for those families who saw a feast day turned into a day of mourning, and I ask that the hostages be immediately released.”  

Through his ten years as Pope, Francis has communicated Christ’s message of compassion. That means looking beyond rigid doctrine. The so-called traditionalist cardinals, bishops, and others have relentlessly criticized him, called him a heretic and worse.

Francis hasn’t tried to overturn or ignore Catholic teaching on abortion, marriage, and sin. But he preaches that Christ never used legalisms or doctrine as a weapon.

The “traditionalists” are outraged at that. In August 2020 a priest from La Crosse, Wisc., Father James Altman, posted a video saying Francis has excommunicated himself. His bishop banned him from saying Mass. In 2021 Altman led the opening prayer at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference. Several bishops and actor Mel Gibson defended him.

Francis challenged the cardinals and bishops who attacked him, calling them backward-looking and reactionary. “Instead of living by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies,” he said.

Francis has not achieved everything he tried. When elected he promised “zero tolerance” for sexual abuse. But cases still show up. In February 2019 he convened a church summit on sexual abuse that produced no policy decisions.

I tracked down Father Steve after the Mass. I said, “I hope those angry cardinals don’t come after you.” He smiled and said something like, “yeah, there’s a parallel between the Pharisees and the people attacking the pope. That’s how I look at it.”

He added, “some of these issues are confusing. But the Holy Father is leading us to follow the teachings of Christ.”

In 2015 I stood in a crowd of maybe 25,000 below the Capitol to hear Francis speak after he had addressed a joint session of Congress. The cheers were deafening. At that moment he was a star. That was before the “traditionalists” or “conservatives” went after him.

Meanwhile the Israelis are bombing Hamas hideouts into rubble. The present-day Pharisees are looking for ammunition. Francis still is seeking, for all of us, the peace of Christ.

October 9, 2023

The staccato pace of Dublin and London raised our spirits, the streets jammed with buses and taxis; restaurants, bars, and shops packed. Working people and students stride past 18th century architecture and skyscrapers. Cross-country trains arrive and depart day and night.

We came home to the Republicans’ war over “vacating” the speaker’s chair, following their attempt to paralyze the government, abandon American pledges to Ukraine, and regurgitate their love for Trump, who wants the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs executed.   

Midway through our trip Conservative U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a speech to unveil his plan for Britain to achieve “net zero” in greenhouse gas emissions. He said, in part:

“I know the fundamentals of our great country are solid and timeless. Its people are its greatest strength. Their hopes and genius are what propel us forward, not Government. …  But what I have concluded …  is that for too many, there remains a nagging sense that the path we’re on isn’t quite what we hoped for, and that no one seems to have the courage to say so. … we do not have to be powerless … Our destiny can be of our own choosing. But only if we change the way our politics works. …

“Can we be brave in the decisions we make, even if there is a political cost? And can we put the long-term interests of our country before the short-term political needs of the moment? The real choice … is do we really want to change our country and build a better future for our children … I have made my decision: we are going to change.”

Sunak then announced he was canceling most of a big rail project called HS2, priced at 106 billion pounds ($128.4 billion), and plowing the savings into Network North, a system of roads, rail, and bus lines across the country’s midsection. So the U.K. creates authentic public policy, and continues stalwartly to help Ukraine defend itself from the Russian killers.

Now, in downtown Greenville, Falls Park glows green in bright sunlight along the Reedy River. Autumn is much like summer in northwestern South Carolina, minus the humidity. Dublin’s and London’s chilly gray skies seem like a faraway dream. The snail’s pace of this Southern suburb is either serene and comforting or remote and anesthetizing. It’s what we chose, where we are, for now.

My younger brother stopped in on his trip from Delaware to Florida. We walked through Falls Park. Old times came up, as they always do among brothers with thinning hair. We talked about the usual, family, health, future plans. We mentioned this neighbor or classmate or that one from the old neighborhood. He had the memories. I mostly shook my head.

The subject of cemeteries came up. He has a plot in Jersey, where our parents and brother are buried. We recalled an aunt’s funeral, years ago, far out on Long Island, New York. We drove from Virginia in a snowstorm, determined to be present. Seven cousins showed up, we stood for the service in our dark overcoats on frozen ground. Our last internment, on Sandy’s side, was in Tennessee last June. The subject is out there.

The subtheme is travel. He was heading to the Gulf Coast, eight or so hours down I-85 to I-75 most of the way. He’ll cut across to the Atlantic side and take I-95 home. We’ve done the trip in reverse, from the Gulf across the Florida midstate boondocks to the interstate, then north.

It’s just as easy, maybe easier, to go west. From Atlanta I-20 runs through Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. It’s then a straight shot across Mississippi and Louisiana, through Shreveport into Texas, Marshall, Kilgore, Dallas-Fort Worth, and across the oil country, Midland, Odessa, to the intersection with I-10 in the middle of nowhere. Then El Paso, skirting the Rio Grande, and more empty country to Tucson. We did that once and camped out in Fort Stockton.

This is how to see the richness of the country. The culture, the essence of a place opens. Grasp the knowable chords of life, appreciate and learn from them. Then move on. Still, Tucson is a long way. The South has lessons.

In 2017 I took two of our girls to Sylacauga, Ala., not far from the Georgia state line and a few small towns off I-20 for a running event. The town, once known for production of marble, is at the far southwestern end of the Blue Ridge. The notable landmark is Mount Cheaha, Alabama’s highest point at something like 2,400 feet, humble by Blue Ridge standards.

We explored the place, walked the downtown and the rest of it. The big business was a Wal-Mart. The demarcations of segregation showed in the layout of the streets and neighborhoods. All that is over, I thought at the time. The legacy is our political nightmare.

Across the next state line is Meridian, Miss., a modest city with a lively downtown. I once visited the Naval Air Station there. We passed through five years ago, walked Main Street and stopped in Weidmann’s, the famous local restaurant. We looked at the little museum devoted to Meridian’s role in giving birth to country music and its local hero, Jimmy Rodgers, who the city calls the “Father of Country Music.” I lived for years in Nashville but never knew that.

More history can be dredged. Meridian is the hometown of James Chaney, one of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., about 40 miles north, in June 1964. In 1966 eighteen men were put on trial in Meridian, not for murder but for conspiracy to violate the victims’ civil rights. Seven were convicted.

You can explore these places, scenes of nightmares, and many others, a far galaxy from London or Dublin. Yet Sunak’s words may yet resound: “solid and timeless … hope and genius.” Some shade of truth, the truth of humanity, emerges and resonates. It is common to Greenville, Meridian, London, Dublin. Common to all.

October 2, 2023

An American living in Oxford, in England’s mid-country, told me Oxford has two seasons, tourist season and student season. Only around Christmas does the place calm down. Right now the students are arriving and, the locals hope, the tourists are leaving.

Oxford University is the oldest English-speaking institution of higher learning in the world. Records show teaching at Oxford around 1120.

To walk Oxford’s streets is to be stunned by the enduring brilliance and darkness of England’s history; of leaders of nobility, boldness, piety, and compassion, but also ruthlessness and cruelty.  It is a history of centuries of majestic achievements in art, literature, and science, but also control of a vast colonial empire through authoritarian political and economic power.    

On Broad Street an embedded stone cross marks the spot where, during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I (1553-1558), also known as “Bloody Mary,” three Protestant leaders: Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London, and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, were burned at the stake.

Lattimore and Ridley were executed in late 1555. Cranmer was forced to watch. He then recanted and returned to Catholicism, but Mary refused to pardon him. He went to the stake in 1556. The place also is marked by a plaque on the wall of Balliol College nearby.

Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, who started the English Reformation by breaking with the Catholic Church to establish the Church of England, tried to reverse her father’s policies. She failed and her successor, Elizabeth I, reaffirmed the preeminence of the Church of England.

Oxford is an easy hour from London’s Paddington Station by National Rail. The city is the university, the university, now encompassing 39 colleges, is in a real way the city itself. The city was home to great men and women of England’s intellectual life: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, P.D. James, Iris Murdoch, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Balliol College was established in 1263, making it one of Oxford’s oldest institutions. The poets Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins studied there. Balliol educated John Wycliffe, who first translated the Bible into English; 18th century economist Adam Smith and historian Arnold Toynbee; novelists Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene; Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.

Magdalen College, founded in 1458, has been home to nine Nobel Prize winners. T.E. Lawrence, legendary British general called Lawrence of Arabia during World War I, attended Magdalen.

In “Thyrsis,” the Victorian Matthew Arnold penned these lines:

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening, Lovely all times she lives, lovely tonight!

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who achieved first-class honors in classics at Balliol, wrote, in “To Oxford”:

This is my park, my pleasaunce; this to me As public is my greater privacy, All mine, yet common to my every peer Those charms accepted of my inmost thought, The towers musical, quiet-walled grove.

In Oxford today, tourists and local people browse the shops and sip coffee at cafes. Everyday city routines become trivial before the weight of centuries past, announced in the soaring spires of the city and university.

Oxford was established in the misty final years of the Saxon period in the 11th century. Saxon King Edward, a devout sovereign called the Confessor, later canonized Saint Edward, died in January 1066.  His brother-in-law Harold took the throne.

In October of that same year the Saxon reign ended with the last successful invasion of England by the Norman duke William, popularly William the Conqueror, who defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings. William became King William I. Oxford was heavily damaged.

During the English Reformation Oxford became a bishopric. For more than a thousand years Oxford has been at the crux of the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. During the English Civil War (1642-1653) the court of Charles I resided at Oxford and returned during the Great Plague of 1665-1666.

In one popular story, German bombers avoided striking the city during the 1940 Blitz because Hitler wanted it as his capital after Germany invaded England. During the war the city was used for training troops. Somerville College, the city hall, and local hospitals became centers for treating wounded servicemen.

In 1953 medical student Roger Bannister, who studied at Oxford, ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile in Oxford. After earning his degree he became a master of Pembroke College.

We walked through City Centre, heart of the University, through Christ Church on St. Aldates Street, founded by Henry VIII in 1546. We passed the Radcliffe Camera, built in 1737, now a reading room for the Bodleian Library, the second-largest in the U.K. Nearby is the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the University’s first church, used for services since 1252 and site of the trial of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. The Martyr’s Memorial, just off Magdalen Street, honors 280 Protestants executed under Mary I.

The city is not all ancient history. Much of the “Harry Potter” movie series was filmed there. It’s also the setting for the three TV mystery series, “Morse,” the sequel, “Lewis,” and the prequel, “Endeavour,” based on books written by Colin Dexter, a Cambridge alumnus who worked as an administrator at Oxford.

By train, bus, and bicycle the students are flowing back to Oxford. We watched them move in, as they have in this city for 1,200 years. The tourists are leaving. We looked back at a different Oxford, to see a different England across a millennium: complex, mysterious, eternal.