I had the most surprising and joyful experience Sunday afternoon in St. Petersburg, Florida. I flew down last Thursday for the 25th wedding anniversary celebration of my friends Dick and Lisa. It is because of Dick that I am in La Conner. His August 2016 phone call and casual but spirited assertion that "you can win that newspaper," in Vermont, not Washington, set me on the path to La Conner.

Joanna Sikes praised the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art when we spoke recently. The museum was less than a block from my hotel. How could I not spend the last two hours before it closed at 5 p.m. Sunday there? Of course I did.

My going into a museum is like an 8-year-old going into a candy store with a $10 bill. I can't get enough. I ran out of time.

I was the last one out, without getting through all the galleries.

I took photos for Amy Green and Ashley Sweeney. The exhibit, “Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West,” made me think of each as I spent time with specific quilts.

That is what good art does. It takes the participant out of the moment and their quotidian time and space. It did that to me.

I left the museum and was shocked to find myself in St. Petersburg. Minutes earlier I was with Edward Curtis on Lummi Island in 1899 and in South Dakota with the Sioux in 1907, including a deep white winter. There were other winter scenes and a stagecoach and Kit Carson and John Fremont exploring westward in 1844. There was Taos, New Mexico with avant garde artists 100 years ago and Native cliff village ruins at Canyon de Chelly yesterday or maybe 1,000 years ago.

And, besides being discombobulated, out of time and space, I was very clear-eyed and sad. I realized I was welcomed into a conversation with the most complex sources of my culture and was appreciative and a bit lonely. I earned my passage through the museum Sunday. For decades I have wandered through museums. I have chased down Edward Curtis at the Smithsonian Library. I have thought and thought and thought and asked questions.

So why did my self-inventory lead to sadness? I faced again the reality that culture and character are human choices and are earned, learned. We create civilization through individual, hard, mental, spiritual and ethical soul searching.

I have always advocated and wanted to believe that good character was inherent, instinctive in human beings. Anyone with a sixth-grade education could discern right from wrong and good from bad. That was both my belief and my hope. It is about humanity, not schooling.

Alas, the mass of men do lead lives of quiet desperation. Way too many do not think, do not reflect, do not want to drink the milk of human kindness, do not want to raise their eyes to the stars or accept the invitation to work for a kinder, gentler world.

We learn our way into culture. And too many of us enjoy saying no and will ban books and burn books and throw amazing, priceless paintings into the fire because they are confused and fearful and do not care to or try to understand the limitless possibilities within their own human hearts.

That is what two hours in this museum led me to consider.

Thank you, Joanna, for suggesting I go.