August 8: New Orleans to Algiers to Ocean Springs and a FEMA Trailer
Soundtrack: Local Radio; Blues film
After this tour, you’ll have a better understanding of events pre- and post- Katrina and the “REBIRTH OF NEW ORLEANS!”
Gray Line 2006 Sightseeing Tours Brochure: New for 2006 - Hurricane Katrina Tour
I got up early to do laps in the pool and catch up with the Joads on Route 66. Like Steinbeck, the spectacle of he little girl running a gauntlet of racist harridans in this very city had frozen my own backwards trek through the South. I had stopped reading Travels With Charley and taken up the more distant history of the Depression and the California Dream. But where Steinbeck found his odyssey flagging in the face of an America he could not stomach on the brink of the Civil Rights Revolt, I was about to plunge into the aftermath of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina.
In the safe haven of the Quarter the familiar funk and squalor of New Orleans was like I never left, though it had been twenty years since my last Mardi Gras. On my own at 717 St. Peter Street in the nineteen seventies, I had welcomed the experiences of poverty and racial tension as thoroughly as my new tastes for gumbo and raw oysters. I got my first job in New Orleans by the sheer luck of being at the unemployment office on the day State Senator Gillis Long hired the first six girls referred to update his mailing list for Christmas. All of the others were African American and lived in the projects. Their everyday conversations and concerns were an education in real life for me, sheltered as I had been in the all-white suburbs of Houston. My handwriting was fine enough that I stayed through December addressing the cheap black and white family photograph cards Mr. Long sent out to constituents, (saving taxpayer money, I presume). Sometimes I made a little extra money playing music on Bourbon Street.
My birthday a week before Christmas was also payday. I decided to celebrate by playing harmonica on Bourbon Street and donating the proceeds to Pacifica Radio in Houston, where my sister and I had begun to produce a little jazz show. When the police hassled me at my “spot” on the Marie Jean steps by the Club 500, I managed to get myself arrested, wrestled to the ground by my hair, and dragged off, literally kicking and screaming, to Central Lockup. The senator had me bailed out within hours, but then fired me for being associated with a “commie organization.” The paranoia that hung heavy in the air of the “city without care” was never lost on me. After Katrina, there were allegations that the deferred maintenance of levees on the last bend of the Mississippi was a racist plot to wash poor African Americans out of the landscape. Wouldn’t put it past the kind of government that blew billions for defense but not one cent for upkeep.
Dry at last poolside and homesick for Steinbeck’s “bright and terrible desert,” I wrapped a towel around me and went to check on Glenn, who had finished off last night’s leftover wine and was ready to bike it across the Mississippi on the ferry. He had found one of the few secure free parking spaces in the Quarter and I let the HHR stay up an elevator in the Monteleone garage after checking out of the room. The borrowed van stayed legally right where it was and Glenn took out the bicycles. As the sun hit the sidewalks, so did we.
In Algiers Glenn knew some people who ran a cafe in an old 2-story house and we had a fritatta for brunch, my first. The place was named for the owner’s Aunt Leni whose recipes they used and it had an open, sunny feel to it. We talked over the trip I was taking and he reminded me that I should also be reading Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon.
We pedaled on through the charming district to the Blaine Kern Warehouse, where the stuff of Mardi Gras dreams was stored: a hodgepodge of cartoon characters and giant heads of floats and Wizard of Oz sets. Algiers had largely been spared by the hurricane and the community was thriving, with many people buying and restoring old buildings. We rode the ferry back, posing for pictures as the boat neared the New Orleans shore near Jackson Square.
As soon as I had redeemed the HHR, an interesting process by which the car rode an elevator down and crossed the street to the valet area, I drove up behind the van where the bicycles had been stowed away. We pulled out east toward Ocean Springs, a town where Glenn had lived for many years, hard hit by the hurricane. Our route took us by neighborhoods where most of the houses had been flooded and were now useless because all their wiring was ruined by rising waters. Piles of debris sat outside at the curbs and many trailers provided by relief funds were parked in the drives.
At Glenn Miller’s, volunteers had pulled off most of the interior walls on the first floor to get rid of mold and he had his own FEMA trailer in the back. The cute cottage with wood siding painted pale green was slowly being stripped to the studs and the art books and sketches he had managed to save were stored on the porch and in the garage on higher ground. We walked over to the library where he went to check his e-mail but I wasn’t allowed access to a computer because I didn’t live in Ocean Springs. We got a copy of Blue Highways and a dvd of Song of the Thin Man to check out on his card.
That night we drank wine out of a box in the well-equipped but cramped FEMA trailer and watched a blues documentary by Ntozake Shange, the author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff. As Frank Lloyd Wright would have said, Glenn Miller was “battered, but still in the ring,” maybe hitting the communion wine a little heavier than usual, but still trying to get his home back together. I could sympathize totally: I had sometimes finished a whole bottle Chardonnay in one evening and other members of the suicide grief group reported the same reaction. Some had given up and moved on, but Glenn decided to hand in there; I admired his tenacity.
There was an addition upstairs in the house that had escaped flood damage; it was a serviceable room, with lights and working plumbing and relief supplies like tuna and granola bars in the cupboards. One of Glenn’s friends had been staying before the hurricane. I climbed the outside deck stairs to read myself to sleep with Blue Highways.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Day 24: Freewheeling in the French Quarter and Beyond
August 7: Monteleone Hotel to Faubourg/Marigny and back again
Soundtrack: Carousel Bar muzak, Jazz at The Spotted Cat
Imagine the luxury of lolling on the rooftop pool at the Montelene, stretching out on chaises and swimming in the tepid water while the sky worked its way out of mist from the river! Well, maybe not so tepid; the pool was sufficiently bracing that for the two early mornings of my stay I was the only one willing to brave the experience. Once in, of course, it was heavenly to float under the authentic Royal Street sky and relax reading Grapes of Wrath poolside.
I napped in the room until noon and then walked about the quarter, first to try to buy India Arie tickets for the House of Blues and then to visit the Martin Lawrence Gallery and see if they stil had any Peter Max art. I was unsuccessful in both, but stayed out of the rain at the music shop acoss from the club, where I found a copy of The Best of the Zydeco Party Band, and browsed the expensive art at Martin Lawrence. The George Rodrique Gallery was closed. Again the blue dog holding a “Hey FEMA, throw me something!” sign made me grin.
Glenn Miller, my old friend from the Quarter was meeting me at the famous Carousel Bar. In glass cases through the Monteleone lobby, autographed editions of works by Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and Tennessee Williams attested to the literary significance of the place. The main effect of the hurricane on the Hotel was the clots of filthy relief workers dragging in to their subsidized rooms after spending hours cleaning up flood debris. Only one section of the hotel’s ground floor, the former oyster bar, remained barricaded because of water damage. The bar was the first attraction to recover and it wheeled nonchalantly round and round as patrons became more and more susceptible to dizziness from the happy hour well drinks, sangria and Szeze rac cocktails they knocked back. I was sufficiently tipsy by the time Glenn Miller waltzed in and we took up conversations left off years before as easily as if no time had intervened. He had been out to Hollywood to show his art at the Runyon Canyon Festival when I was the Keymaster and Charlie was the Gatekeeper (we watched a lot of Ghostbusters back then).
The rain eased up and Glenn Miller rolled out bicycles from the back of a van he was test driving to see if he wanted to buy it. He had already scored several vehicles from people leaving town after Katrina and wasn’t sure he need another one, but it was an opportunity to take bicycles into the quarter. We pedaled up DuMaine to Fauberg-Marigny where we lounged in a bar called the Spotted Cat and listened to some young guys playing azz. The Spotted Cat had a unique way of saving money: they bought blank matchbooks and let the patrons decorate them and leave them for others at the bar. We made custom Spotted Cat matches and in the process Glenn found an old freind, tooling past the bar on a segue scooter, who showed us his latest paintings in progress in a chaotic bungalow a few doors down.
We looked about for a place to eat out of the quarter, but as it got later we ended up back at the hotel, closing down the Hunt Club on the ground floor next to the Carousel. I had a bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay from the A & P on Royal, the market I had frequented when i lived in the Quarter, and we stayed up talking and watching the television far into the night, finally falling asleep on the separate beds just before dawn.
Soundtrack: Carousel Bar muzak, Jazz at The Spotted Cat
Imagine the luxury of lolling on the rooftop pool at the Montelene, stretching out on chaises and swimming in the tepid water while the sky worked its way out of mist from the river! Well, maybe not so tepid; the pool was sufficiently bracing that for the two early mornings of my stay I was the only one willing to brave the experience. Once in, of course, it was heavenly to float under the authentic Royal Street sky and relax reading Grapes of Wrath poolside.
I napped in the room until noon and then walked about the quarter, first to try to buy India Arie tickets for the House of Blues and then to visit the Martin Lawrence Gallery and see if they stil had any Peter Max art. I was unsuccessful in both, but stayed out of the rain at the music shop acoss from the club, where I found a copy of The Best of the Zydeco Party Band, and browsed the expensive art at Martin Lawrence. The George Rodrique Gallery was closed. Again the blue dog holding a “Hey FEMA, throw me something!” sign made me grin.
Glenn Miller, my old friend from the Quarter was meeting me at the famous Carousel Bar. In glass cases through the Monteleone lobby, autographed editions of works by Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and Tennessee Williams attested to the literary significance of the place. The main effect of the hurricane on the Hotel was the clots of filthy relief workers dragging in to their subsidized rooms after spending hours cleaning up flood debris. Only one section of the hotel’s ground floor, the former oyster bar, remained barricaded because of water damage. The bar was the first attraction to recover and it wheeled nonchalantly round and round as patrons became more and more susceptible to dizziness from the happy hour well drinks, sangria and Szeze rac cocktails they knocked back. I was sufficiently tipsy by the time Glenn Miller waltzed in and we took up conversations left off years before as easily as if no time had intervened. He had been out to Hollywood to show his art at the Runyon Canyon Festival when I was the Keymaster and Charlie was the Gatekeeper (we watched a lot of Ghostbusters back then).
The rain eased up and Glenn Miller rolled out bicycles from the back of a van he was test driving to see if he wanted to buy it. He had already scored several vehicles from people leaving town after Katrina and wasn’t sure he need another one, but it was an opportunity to take bicycles into the quarter. We pedaled up DuMaine to Fauberg-Marigny where we lounged in a bar called the Spotted Cat and listened to some young guys playing azz. The Spotted Cat had a unique way of saving money: they bought blank matchbooks and let the patrons decorate them and leave them for others at the bar. We made custom Spotted Cat matches and in the process Glenn found an old freind, tooling past the bar on a segue scooter, who showed us his latest paintings in progress in a chaotic bungalow a few doors down.
We looked about for a place to eat out of the quarter, but as it got later we ended up back at the hotel, closing down the Hunt Club on the ground floor next to the Carousel. I had a bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay from the A & P on Royal, the market I had frequented when i lived in the Quarter, and we stayed up talking and watching the television far into the night, finally falling asleep on the separate beds just before dawn.
Day 23: Cranes and Oysters in Louisiana
August 6: Natchez to Bird Sanctuary to New Orleans
Soundtrack: Moody Bible Network
At that table with its silver soft and dull, shining as pewter, I remember the raised glass of the grape’s holy blood, the stem caressed by the doctor’s strong artist fingers, and even now I can hear the sweet little health and welcome in the singing language of Acadia which as once French and is now itself.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
There was no Denny’s in Natchez; starving, I followed the local traffic and pulled in to a Shoney’s, a southern franchise I had seen advertised on billboards all the way from Shenandoah, but never tried. Their mascot was a cute cartoon bear. The word, as Monty Python cautioned about Australian table wines, was BEWARE! I didn’t know it was possible to ruin breakfast, but the cold scrambled eggs and flaccid bacon at this location took all the pleasure out of dining out. Even the grits verged on concrete consistency and this was the South, for gosh sakes. Queasy from the indigestible lump in my innards, I took the road into Louisiana, vowing to uphold my foolish consistency and fidelity to Denny’s’ Grand Slam in the future, bourgeois as it might be.
From 79 degrees at Ferriday, the temperature climbed to 86 as I left the river road to explore a wildlife refuge that wound through piney woods on red gravel for what seemed like hours, without a single bird or reptile to redeem it. Assured by two guys in a pickup truck that the highway was close by, I reemerged onto Louisiana 15, listening to a sermon on answered prayers on the Moody Radio Network. Suddenly, miraculously, overhead a flock of whooping cranes wheeled around in a big circle, huge and wonderful seen through the sunroof. A little farther down the road another flock passed, with black faces and long legs tucked under, so close, and settled into a deep green field.
The Reverend Irwin Luther preached on about making prayer work for me. In my childhood I had prayed to see whooping cranes, especially when my daddy had taken me on a trip to Aransas Pass Bird Sanctuary in the 50’s. Then there were only 36 left; we never saw a one. As I drove away from the field the twenty or so birds were bright white against the receding landscape. It was amazing!
I continued down the levee, past locks and channels devised to manage the Mississippi, which snaked along, largely invisible, east of the barrier. Through the tiny towns on the way into New Orleans I played tag with rain, trying to time my arrival to check in to the Monteleone and hit the SatchFest events in the Quarter. In a few places I saw wind damage left over from the hurricane, cypress trees standing gray and dead from the intruding saltwater and big billboards advertising help fighting insurance companies. Around three I dropped the car at the underground garage off Royal and walked toward the old watermelon stalls, with jazz music floating through the alleys from the riverside. I had lived on St. Peter Street for a while in 1971 and sold candles in the flea market on the weekends, so this was familiar territory.
Lectures were scheduled at the visitor center for Lafitte National Park Visitor Center, a small room with a stage behind the Cafe du Monde, nowhere near Barataria. I watched Times Picayune photographer John McClusker show photos of historic structures, some damaged by Hurricane Katrina and years of neglect: the homes of Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and Nick LaRocca, the saloons and theaters that were early venues for Louis Armstrong and other jazz pioneers.
Finally settled into the 14th floor of the hotel, I took a nap and dressed for a peak experience, dining in the French Quarter.
Earlier I had seen a group of boys recruited to staff Brennan’s gathering on Royal Street, the older guys instructing their colleagues in how to act to keep their recently acquired restaurant jobs. Brennan’s had finally gotten back up to speed and was serving dinner on a regular schedule, necessitating hiring of new busboys and kitchen help. I had a $50 bill Doug had given me in L.A. and was determined to stay within that budget and still sample some of the hautest cuisine in town. He played piano at the Brennan's in Downtown Disney, so
There was a private party upstairs and a jazz trio working on the balcony, but customers in the main room were sparse. I was able to walk in and be seated in a corner booth. Within my budget I had Chardonnay, turtle soup, oysters Rockefeller and creme brulet. My waitress, Rachel, was a Tulane student who had left after Katrina, but came back to finish her degree. I told her that Doug played piano at Ralph Brennan's next door to Disneyland and she gave me a rundown of the pedigrees of the various Brennan restauranteurs.
The candlelit courtyard with vintage music drifting over white tablecloths and silver was perfect, another peak experience in the wake of disaster. I walked the few blocks down Royal back to the Monteleone, from pure delight into luxury I might never have been able to afford if the Quarter hadn’t been humbled by Katrina.
The next day I would be meeting my old friend Glenn Miller to see more of the devastation first hand, in places where rebuilding was slowed or hampered by less available funds than many of the Quarter businesses could draw upon. A poster in George Rodrique's Gallery window showed the blue dog with a sign: "Hey, FEMA, Throw me something!" The art was funny, but the reality was bitter. In 1960, Steinbeck encountered New Orleans in the first throes of the Civil Rights upheaval; in 2006, the city was still recovering from a broken levees and promises unkept.
I settled into the opulence of the 4-diamond hotel to read about the Cheerleaders in Travels With Charley. Even with the supposed freedoms gained through decades of struggle, New Orleans still had its share of trouble.
Soundtrack: Moody Bible Network
At that table with its silver soft and dull, shining as pewter, I remember the raised glass of the grape’s holy blood, the stem caressed by the doctor’s strong artist fingers, and even now I can hear the sweet little health and welcome in the singing language of Acadia which as once French and is now itself.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
There was no Denny’s in Natchez; starving, I followed the local traffic and pulled in to a Shoney’s, a southern franchise I had seen advertised on billboards all the way from Shenandoah, but never tried. Their mascot was a cute cartoon bear. The word, as Monty Python cautioned about Australian table wines, was BEWARE! I didn’t know it was possible to ruin breakfast, but the cold scrambled eggs and flaccid bacon at this location took all the pleasure out of dining out. Even the grits verged on concrete consistency and this was the South, for gosh sakes. Queasy from the indigestible lump in my innards, I took the road into Louisiana, vowing to uphold my foolish consistency and fidelity to Denny’s’ Grand Slam in the future, bourgeois as it might be.
From 79 degrees at Ferriday, the temperature climbed to 86 as I left the river road to explore a wildlife refuge that wound through piney woods on red gravel for what seemed like hours, without a single bird or reptile to redeem it. Assured by two guys in a pickup truck that the highway was close by, I reemerged onto Louisiana 15, listening to a sermon on answered prayers on the Moody Radio Network. Suddenly, miraculously, overhead a flock of whooping cranes wheeled around in a big circle, huge and wonderful seen through the sunroof. A little farther down the road another flock passed, with black faces and long legs tucked under, so close, and settled into a deep green field.
The Reverend Irwin Luther preached on about making prayer work for me. In my childhood I had prayed to see whooping cranes, especially when my daddy had taken me on a trip to Aransas Pass Bird Sanctuary in the 50’s. Then there were only 36 left; we never saw a one. As I drove away from the field the twenty or so birds were bright white against the receding landscape. It was amazing!
I continued down the levee, past locks and channels devised to manage the Mississippi, which snaked along, largely invisible, east of the barrier. Through the tiny towns on the way into New Orleans I played tag with rain, trying to time my arrival to check in to the Monteleone and hit the SatchFest events in the Quarter. In a few places I saw wind damage left over from the hurricane, cypress trees standing gray and dead from the intruding saltwater and big billboards advertising help fighting insurance companies. Around three I dropped the car at the underground garage off Royal and walked toward the old watermelon stalls, with jazz music floating through the alleys from the riverside. I had lived on St. Peter Street for a while in 1971 and sold candles in the flea market on the weekends, so this was familiar territory.
Lectures were scheduled at the visitor center for Lafitte National Park Visitor Center, a small room with a stage behind the Cafe du Monde, nowhere near Barataria. I watched Times Picayune photographer John McClusker show photos of historic structures, some damaged by Hurricane Katrina and years of neglect: the homes of Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and Nick LaRocca, the saloons and theaters that were early venues for Louis Armstrong and other jazz pioneers.
Finally settled into the 14th floor of the hotel, I took a nap and dressed for a peak experience, dining in the French Quarter.
Earlier I had seen a group of boys recruited to staff Brennan’s gathering on Royal Street, the older guys instructing their colleagues in how to act to keep their recently acquired restaurant jobs. Brennan’s had finally gotten back up to speed and was serving dinner on a regular schedule, necessitating hiring of new busboys and kitchen help. I had a $50 bill Doug had given me in L.A. and was determined to stay within that budget and still sample some of the hautest cuisine in town. He played piano at the Brennan's in Downtown Disney, so
There was a private party upstairs and a jazz trio working on the balcony, but customers in the main room were sparse. I was able to walk in and be seated in a corner booth. Within my budget I had Chardonnay, turtle soup, oysters Rockefeller and creme brulet. My waitress, Rachel, was a Tulane student who had left after Katrina, but came back to finish her degree. I told her that Doug played piano at Ralph Brennan's next door to Disneyland and she gave me a rundown of the pedigrees of the various Brennan restauranteurs.
The candlelit courtyard with vintage music drifting over white tablecloths and silver was perfect, another peak experience in the wake of disaster. I walked the few blocks down Royal back to the Monteleone, from pure delight into luxury I might never have been able to afford if the Quarter hadn’t been humbled by Katrina.
The next day I would be meeting my old friend Glenn Miller to see more of the devastation first hand, in places where rebuilding was slowed or hampered by less available funds than many of the Quarter businesses could draw upon. A poster in George Rodrique's Gallery window showed the blue dog with a sign: "Hey, FEMA, Throw me something!" The art was funny, but the reality was bitter. In 1960, Steinbeck encountered New Orleans in the first throes of the Civil Rights upheaval; in 2006, the city was still recovering from a broken levees and promises unkept.
I settled into the opulence of the 4-diamond hotel to read about the Cheerleaders in Travels With Charley. Even with the supposed freedoms gained through decades of struggle, New Orleans still had its share of trouble.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Day 22: All-Nighter on the Freedom Road
August 5: Atlanta Day’s Inn to macy’s to West Point, Georgia to Montgomery and Selma Alabama, to Vicksburg and Nachez, Mississippi
Below us the old rails were covered by kudzu, a voracious and surreal plant that has turned most of the South into Bosch-like topiary...impressionist and ubiquitous like postmodernism.
Andre Codrescu, Hail Babylon
I remember thinking that our parents didn’t have the first idea where we were, other than that we were somewhere in the continental vastness between Des Moines and the Florida Keys...
That sort of thing did really happen down there, you know This was only five years after three freedom riders were murdered in Mississippi. They were a twenty-one-year-old black from Mississippi and two white guys from New York, Andrew Goodman twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty. I give their names because they deserve to be remebered. To me this was and always would be the South.
Bill Bryson, Lost Continent
The ice machine on the 14th floor overlooked the pool and both were necessities in Atlanta in August. There was a quick swim in the early heat; a couple of little girls and their mother were bouncing in the water by the time my laps were finished. With my in-room coffee and granola bar breakfast I read more Grapes of Wrath and caught Travels With Charley up to the Cheerleaders in New Orleans, where I planned to be by Monday. From the comfort of the queen-size hotel bed and the infernal convenience of my secondhand cellphone, I fulfilled a girlhood dream, booking two days at the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter. I never had the money to stay there during all my Mardi Gras in the 70’s. The closest I had come was trailing along with the Half-Fast Walking Club – right behind Phil Harris and Pete Fountain – as they ducked into the back door to the Carousel Bar on Mardi Gras Day, swaying through their celebratory itinerary.
Hurricane Katrina had interfered with the rates in the Quarter, even putting a damper (so to speak) on Carnival and the Jazz and Heritage Festival. Word was out that hospitality had recovered in the historic core, but the rates were still around a third of the usual and this would be my opportunity to luxuriate, as well as survey the damage.
First I had to find a macy’s and pay my bill, so I followed the desk clerk’s directions, sort of, and headed across town to the Lenox Center, where I basked in civilization, found a Mexican wedding dress-style blouse to go with the skirt from New York and, after being demonstrated on by a persuasive clerk, bought the Strivectin I had intended to get for Charlie’s stretch marks three years before. Now it was for my wrinkles. The temperature in Atlanta had climbed from 80 at 9 a.m. to 94 at noon and by the the end of my shopping trip at 4:00, it was 102. Fortified with a Raspberry Freeze from the in-house Starbuck’s, I headed out on the 85 toward Alabama, out of those sunny skies and into a raging thunderstorm; the temperature dropped to 79 in a matter of minutes.
Rain came in sheets that obscured the windshield and I watched a Georgia pine struck by lightening crack open and explode at the side of the road. Radio kept me company: 97.1 The River from Atlanta, kudzu.com through the hulking overgrowth on the Georgia roadsides, Rooster Country 106.1, and another Eagle radio station playing classic rock out of Birmingham. It was too hard to choose cd’s and drive, so I followed radio stations through their broadcast ranges to where they merged with another agreeable frequency.
Out of the storm, I drove between humps of kudzu into blue skies at Lake West Point, took a nap at a picnic area next to another family reunion, and watched a wild black and white cat lounge and stretch on a picnic table. This, the ring of horseshoes, laughter, and boaters shouting from the lake was civilized, idyllic. At a closed Army Corps of Engineers center, planted with magenta crape myrtle that sheltered hundreds of shy birds, there was a quote from W.H. Hudson, “There is no more fascinating pasttime than to keep company with a river from its source.” This was what I looked forward to, driving toward a reunion with the Mississppi after the earlier encounter in Minnesota. At Montgomery I left the 85 and started west on a direct collision course with the River. The clouds gathered again and the sun was red, the sky gold, green, and deep gray as lightening began to flash in the distance.
This was to be one of the most dramatic drives of the trip because of the weather and the special significance of the road. As I traveled west in gathering gloom, I picked up amazing blues music on WVFG, 107.5, “The Real Thing” out of Uniontown, Demopolis, and Selma and realized I was driving the route of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Freedom March, the Historic Road of the March to Montgomery. A billboard advertised 5 museums in Selma, and coaxed the weary to stay “Where Hospitality Meets History.” Along the way, markers announced the site of four encampments where the marchers spent night on the way from Selma to Montgomery in 196. When I reached Selma, commemorative signs pointed the winding way to the church where the march began, an imposing if somewhat down-at-heel two-story red church next to a newer and sleeker chapel with tall white columns. There was the ominous feeling of being at ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement, from which we had been somewhat insulated in the suburbs of Houston. Driving through Selma, a college town still a little ragged at the edges, the feeling continued down the road to Meridian, where the three boys were run off the road after being released by the police. In the dark, the ditches falling away into blackness on the roadside held a particular terror, especially as the lightening and thunder continued and a Black History Montage came on the radio from WNPR, segue to Highway 61, blues at WMRR, non-profit stations like the Pacifica of my youth. These were songs I hadn’t heard for twenty years: “Freddy’s Dead”, James Brown’s “Payback”, “Get Up. Stand Up”, The Last Poets, and a Slave Ship narrative with the sound effect of lapping water that I had never heard before. It reminded me of Lawrence Jones, a poet who was on the 3-6 a.m. shift before me at KPFT, the kind of politically-charged juxtaposition of music and spoken word he used to do. This carried me into Vicksberg at 4 in the morning and I drove around to look at ante-bellum mansions in the dark, then took the foggy Nachez Trace down the levee to the sound of gospel and Sunday Morning preaching.
Finally coming out onto the Mississippi after another all-nighter, I parked in a lot overlooking two casino riverboats, one of which had its own hotel and shuttle service a little back from the shore. Early morning joggers crossed in front of me on a path with an amazing view of the mile-wide Big Muddy and an old iron erector-set bridge spanning the river to the south. It was 6:00 and 70 degrees, perfect conditions for taking a nap, and I leaned the seat back, secure in this public lot on the edge of the Sublime.
Below us the old rails were covered by kudzu, a voracious and surreal plant that has turned most of the South into Bosch-like topiary...impressionist and ubiquitous like postmodernism.
Andre Codrescu, Hail Babylon
I remember thinking that our parents didn’t have the first idea where we were, other than that we were somewhere in the continental vastness between Des Moines and the Florida Keys...
That sort of thing did really happen down there, you know This was only five years after three freedom riders were murdered in Mississippi. They were a twenty-one-year-old black from Mississippi and two white guys from New York, Andrew Goodman twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty. I give their names because they deserve to be remebered. To me this was and always would be the South.
Bill Bryson, Lost Continent
The ice machine on the 14th floor overlooked the pool and both were necessities in Atlanta in August. There was a quick swim in the early heat; a couple of little girls and their mother were bouncing in the water by the time my laps were finished. With my in-room coffee and granola bar breakfast I read more Grapes of Wrath and caught Travels With Charley up to the Cheerleaders in New Orleans, where I planned to be by Monday. From the comfort of the queen-size hotel bed and the infernal convenience of my secondhand cellphone, I fulfilled a girlhood dream, booking two days at the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter. I never had the money to stay there during all my Mardi Gras in the 70’s. The closest I had come was trailing along with the Half-Fast Walking Club – right behind Phil Harris and Pete Fountain – as they ducked into the back door to the Carousel Bar on Mardi Gras Day, swaying through their celebratory itinerary.
Hurricane Katrina had interfered with the rates in the Quarter, even putting a damper (so to speak) on Carnival and the Jazz and Heritage Festival. Word was out that hospitality had recovered in the historic core, but the rates were still around a third of the usual and this would be my opportunity to luxuriate, as well as survey the damage.
First I had to find a macy’s and pay my bill, so I followed the desk clerk’s directions, sort of, and headed across town to the Lenox Center, where I basked in civilization, found a Mexican wedding dress-style blouse to go with the skirt from New York and, after being demonstrated on by a persuasive clerk, bought the Strivectin I had intended to get for Charlie’s stretch marks three years before. Now it was for my wrinkles. The temperature in Atlanta had climbed from 80 at 9 a.m. to 94 at noon and by the the end of my shopping trip at 4:00, it was 102. Fortified with a Raspberry Freeze from the in-house Starbuck’s, I headed out on the 85 toward Alabama, out of those sunny skies and into a raging thunderstorm; the temperature dropped to 79 in a matter of minutes.
Rain came in sheets that obscured the windshield and I watched a Georgia pine struck by lightening crack open and explode at the side of the road. Radio kept me company: 97.1 The River from Atlanta, kudzu.com through the hulking overgrowth on the Georgia roadsides, Rooster Country 106.1, and another Eagle radio station playing classic rock out of Birmingham. It was too hard to choose cd’s and drive, so I followed radio stations through their broadcast ranges to where they merged with another agreeable frequency.
Out of the storm, I drove between humps of kudzu into blue skies at Lake West Point, took a nap at a picnic area next to another family reunion, and watched a wild black and white cat lounge and stretch on a picnic table. This, the ring of horseshoes, laughter, and boaters shouting from the lake was civilized, idyllic. At a closed Army Corps of Engineers center, planted with magenta crape myrtle that sheltered hundreds of shy birds, there was a quote from W.H. Hudson, “There is no more fascinating pasttime than to keep company with a river from its source.” This was what I looked forward to, driving toward a reunion with the Mississppi after the earlier encounter in Minnesota. At Montgomery I left the 85 and started west on a direct collision course with the River. The clouds gathered again and the sun was red, the sky gold, green, and deep gray as lightening began to flash in the distance.
This was to be one of the most dramatic drives of the trip because of the weather and the special significance of the road. As I traveled west in gathering gloom, I picked up amazing blues music on WVFG, 107.5, “The Real Thing” out of Uniontown, Demopolis, and Selma and realized I was driving the route of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Freedom March, the Historic Road of the March to Montgomery. A billboard advertised 5 museums in Selma, and coaxed the weary to stay “Where Hospitality Meets History.” Along the way, markers announced the site of four encampments where the marchers spent night on the way from Selma to Montgomery in 196. When I reached Selma, commemorative signs pointed the winding way to the church where the march began, an imposing if somewhat down-at-heel two-story red church next to a newer and sleeker chapel with tall white columns. There was the ominous feeling of being at ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement, from which we had been somewhat insulated in the suburbs of Houston. Driving through Selma, a college town still a little ragged at the edges, the feeling continued down the road to Meridian, where the three boys were run off the road after being released by the police. In the dark, the ditches falling away into blackness on the roadside held a particular terror, especially as the lightening and thunder continued and a Black History Montage came on the radio from WNPR, segue to Highway 61, blues at WMRR, non-profit stations like the Pacifica of my youth. These were songs I hadn’t heard for twenty years: “Freddy’s Dead”, James Brown’s “Payback”, “Get Up. Stand Up”, The Last Poets, and a Slave Ship narrative with the sound effect of lapping water that I had never heard before. It reminded me of Lawrence Jones, a poet who was on the 3-6 a.m. shift before me at KPFT, the kind of politically-charged juxtaposition of music and spoken word he used to do. This carried me into Vicksberg at 4 in the morning and I drove around to look at ante-bellum mansions in the dark, then took the foggy Nachez Trace down the levee to the sound of gospel and Sunday Morning preaching.
Finally coming out onto the Mississippi after another all-nighter, I parked in a lot overlooking two casino riverboats, one of which had its own hotel and shuttle service a little back from the shore. Early morning joggers crossed in front of me on a path with an amazing view of the mile-wide Big Muddy and an old iron erector-set bridge spanning the river to the south. It was 6:00 and 70 degrees, perfect conditions for taking a nap, and I leaned the seat back, secure in this public lot on the edge of the Sublime.
Day 21: Carolina Smoky Mountain High
August 4: Mount Rogers State Park, Grayson Highlands to Abingdon, Virginia to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Atlanta, Georgia
Soundtrack: Bad bluegrass from the National Park store; 97.1 FM The River, Atlanta
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four-o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-bye or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
In the mists over the meadow where I parked, three children from the campground were already romping with their dachshund, trying to fly a kite in the lilting wind at six in the morning. I took out my toothbrush, towel, and washcloth and went looking for restrooms among the RV’s and campsites. When Steinbeck traveled this way he had marveled at the congenial community of trailer parks. Would he have been surprised at their evolution into this bourgeois institution?
The pickup camper lifestyle was, in a sense, his own invention; Travels With Charley so captured the imagination of the American public that it became an inspiration for thousands upon thousands of travelers, intent upon carrying a simulated home environment with them on the road. Now, as I walked among the metal behemoths with their extensions and accessories, I marveled at the mobility of these enormous homes on wheels, most of which also dragged along a rover car for quick trips off the park. The vehicles bore insignia of the ideologies of their manufacturers and sometimes the personal stamp of their owners, as well as state license plates. There was an American Star from North Carolina, A Holiday Rambler Endeavor from Florida, Weekend Warriors and Trekkers and Jamborees and Fleetwoods and a purple and taupe monster called the Flagstaff Classic Supreme, also from North Carolina.
It was Friday and some of the campers were getting the jump on the weekend, but others, looking as if they had been there awhile, had personalized their spaces with staked signs like, “Lord Help Me Be the Man My Dog Thinks I Am” and The Walters – “On the Road Again.” One campsite had multiple tarps used as tents with every activity carried out in the open: cooking, washing, tables, beds and chairs around a fire ring. Shades of The Grapes of Wrath.
The children, with Henry the dog sniffing about the meadow, had managed to snag their kite in one of the trees at the edge of the clearing by the time I smoothed the bedding over to leave. Once again I traced “Travels Without Charlie” and the broken heart in the dust on the door of the HHR and wondered if anyone would notice. I didn’t want to be noticed as, for the first time on this trip, I snuck out before the ranger came around to check for fees.
“Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law!” I chanted on the way into Abingdon. Charlie would have enjoyed the sneak retreat. In direct opposition to Steinbeck, who found his experiences in the South so disturbing that he couldn’t wait to get back to New York, my adventure was just beginning. But as I cruised through Abingdon looking for a gas station and breakfast, I could see how the picture-pretty little burgh could be a bit of a downer in its perfection. Across the street from the Barter Theater, where once anything of value would get you in to see the show, the locals had set up an an arts and crafts fair, a little heavy on the crafts side. Under fluffy clouds, the thermometers just touched 80 degrees, the flower beds bloomed and the trim hedges sang with honeybees. It was all too picturesque. I couldn’t find a coffee shop, so I got gas at a bp, took a chance on the Lotto and headed down the highway. At a Bob Evans Restaurant I ate rather pricey raspberries and whipped cream among a tasteful selection of curtains and antiques. Although the food was tasty, it seemed I could not escape the boutiquery.
Little did I know the tribulation ahead as I drove towards the Great Smoky Mountains. Gray skies threatened and made good on the threat, pouring rain as I entered the uber-tourist trap of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Bill Bryson in Lost Continent describes the situation perfectly:
The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the limits of bad taste.
There is not much more to it than a single mile-long main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter – the Elvis Pressley Hall of Fame, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, two haunted houses, the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusion, the Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo’s Police Museum (“See Walking Tall Sheriff Buford Pusser’s Death Car!”), Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center, and last, but not least, Irene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall.
In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk food stalls, ice cream parlors, and gift shops of the sort that sell Wanted posters with YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps
with droll embellishments, like a coil of realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim.
Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice cream, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously...
Not much has changed in the nearly twenty years since Bryson made the trip. Add to this intermittent torrents of rain and signage contrived to deceive the unwary into sticking around this third circle of hell. The marvel is that Bryson actually enjoyed himself and, once I got off onto Nature Loop #8 north of town, so did I. But I mistook the 10-mile-an-hour one-way trail for part of the National Park and, rustic as it was, it was just another Gatlinburg ploy to keep me in the city limits. Now, if you happen to stay overnight in this hillbilly side-show of a town, Nature Trail #8 is a bucolic mini-tour just outside the Park, with the requisite settler’s cabins and burbling streams, woods and waterfalls, within biking distance of the main drag. If I hadn’t been so miffed at being fooled into staying in Gatlinburg, it would have been a pleasant diversion.
But at the end of the loop, here I was driving back past the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, predominantly obese tourists, and curb-to-curb traffic; I couldn’t believe I fell for it! With a closer reading of the signs, I finally aimed the HHR toward Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The mountains really do appear to smoke, mist actually, in a most provocative way, and at the apex of the park, Clingman’s Dome, the clouds were so scuddingly close you could taste them. 6643 feet up it was 66 degrees cool, with a substantial cloud chill factor and an effort just to climb the trail to the coiled observation tower. But wonderful! Just watching the play of mist concealing and revealing the landscape was a thrill. There are benches tucked into the rocks along the way facing out over the mountains, not just for viewing but to catch your breath on the hike up. Charlie, the heartbroken romantic, who in his teens reminded me of the doomed Manfred in Beethoven's overture, would have loved this place, its air of The Sublime and the natural high of the altitude. I paused on the way down to sit in one of these niches, wet with tears and clouds, missing him.
At the Visitor Center I meant to just get a decal and accidentally bought a sterilized mountain music cd, of all the vast offerings available, because I wanted to hear “Wreck of the Old 97.” They didn’t have Roy Acuff’s or Hank Snow’s version and I paid $15 for something I could hardly stand to listen to once, let alone enjoy as a soundtrack to the park. By the time I had been to the top of the Dome and back, it was too late to get gas at the last park store, but as I swung through the turnout, past the shutoff pumps, a handsome buck deer crossed my path from the median, Charlie’s totem animal again; it looked right at me.
In gathering mists on the way down the hill, there was a band of Mountain Men playing at a roadside bar, and I was sorely tempted to stop for more than gas. But the downside of the hill had no vacancies and seemed to be the Native American version of Gatlinburg with similar, if slightly less obnoxious, exhibits. So I pressed on in the dark to Atlanta.
Then came the uneasy awareness that I was entering The Deep South, which Steinbeck had approached with such trepidation, and it didn’t help that I got off the highway and was lost in the dark in a maze of muddy dirt roads, edged with the blurred forms that kudzu made of roadside trees and hedges. At one point, rounding a sharp curve crowded with pickup trucks and milling dudes in jeans, some loud goings-on in a lit-up metallic building had me “a little uh, anxious, if you know what I mean.” But I eventually edged toward where I could see more lights and found my way onto Interstate 85.
With Atlanta as my goal, I promised myself a nice dinner, maybe music and and a hotel room. By the time I reached the outskirts of town it was around midnight and, lured by a billboard advertising a $39 motel, I took the Shallowford exit. At closer look, the discarded beds on the balcony and trashed doors on the units indicated a level of maintenance that seemed a bit iffy. Continuing down the poorly lit road, drug dealers whistling and slapping palms on streetcorners began to actually frighten me and bode ill for finding upscale accommodations. I turned around in the parking lot of a Latin dance club, where squadra of lurching borachos crossing the pavement only added to my trepidation, and escaped to the comparative safety of the freeway. What a woose I was! Oh, well...
Since the only major street I knew was Peachtree, I got off at that exit and aimed at the skyscraper profile of a Day’s Inn that radiated familiarity and a good chance for a vacancy in its hundred or so rooms with views. Luckily, there were a few left, despite the presence of a large family reunion for the weekend.
Determined to treat myself to a salad or appetizer and glass of wine, I changed into my red and black batik lounger and headed down to the bar. But it was a Sports Bar, with no entertainment but a widescreen t.v., so I had my dinner in the City Grill next door, which was completely filled with wide-awake African Americans enjoying their own late night snacks. Nervous in a crowd of mostly young blacks, I imagined they were wondering whattheheck the old white lady was doing there in the middle of the night. The concept of Caesar Salad Southern Style did not translate well; the lettuce was smothered in heavy cream dressing and the only wine they had was rose’, sweet as soda pop. So much for even modest expectations, let alone the Peak Experience. Still, it beat sleeping in the car in Georgia heat.
Soundtrack: Bad bluegrass from the National Park store; 97.1 FM The River, Atlanta
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four-o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-bye or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
In the mists over the meadow where I parked, three children from the campground were already romping with their dachshund, trying to fly a kite in the lilting wind at six in the morning. I took out my toothbrush, towel, and washcloth and went looking for restrooms among the RV’s and campsites. When Steinbeck traveled this way he had marveled at the congenial community of trailer parks. Would he have been surprised at their evolution into this bourgeois institution?
The pickup camper lifestyle was, in a sense, his own invention; Travels With Charley so captured the imagination of the American public that it became an inspiration for thousands upon thousands of travelers, intent upon carrying a simulated home environment with them on the road. Now, as I walked among the metal behemoths with their extensions and accessories, I marveled at the mobility of these enormous homes on wheels, most of which also dragged along a rover car for quick trips off the park. The vehicles bore insignia of the ideologies of their manufacturers and sometimes the personal stamp of their owners, as well as state license plates. There was an American Star from North Carolina, A Holiday Rambler Endeavor from Florida, Weekend Warriors and Trekkers and Jamborees and Fleetwoods and a purple and taupe monster called the Flagstaff Classic Supreme, also from North Carolina.
It was Friday and some of the campers were getting the jump on the weekend, but others, looking as if they had been there awhile, had personalized their spaces with staked signs like, “Lord Help Me Be the Man My Dog Thinks I Am” and The Walters – “On the Road Again.” One campsite had multiple tarps used as tents with every activity carried out in the open: cooking, washing, tables, beds and chairs around a fire ring. Shades of The Grapes of Wrath.
The children, with Henry the dog sniffing about the meadow, had managed to snag their kite in one of the trees at the edge of the clearing by the time I smoothed the bedding over to leave. Once again I traced “Travels Without Charlie” and the broken heart in the dust on the door of the HHR and wondered if anyone would notice. I didn’t want to be noticed as, for the first time on this trip, I snuck out before the ranger came around to check for fees.
“Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law!” I chanted on the way into Abingdon. Charlie would have enjoyed the sneak retreat. In direct opposition to Steinbeck, who found his experiences in the South so disturbing that he couldn’t wait to get back to New York, my adventure was just beginning. But as I cruised through Abingdon looking for a gas station and breakfast, I could see how the picture-pretty little burgh could be a bit of a downer in its perfection. Across the street from the Barter Theater, where once anything of value would get you in to see the show, the locals had set up an an arts and crafts fair, a little heavy on the crafts side. Under fluffy clouds, the thermometers just touched 80 degrees, the flower beds bloomed and the trim hedges sang with honeybees. It was all too picturesque. I couldn’t find a coffee shop, so I got gas at a bp, took a chance on the Lotto and headed down the highway. At a Bob Evans Restaurant I ate rather pricey raspberries and whipped cream among a tasteful selection of curtains and antiques. Although the food was tasty, it seemed I could not escape the boutiquery.
Little did I know the tribulation ahead as I drove towards the Great Smoky Mountains. Gray skies threatened and made good on the threat, pouring rain as I entered the uber-tourist trap of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Bill Bryson in Lost Continent describes the situation perfectly:
The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the limits of bad taste.
There is not much more to it than a single mile-long main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter – the Elvis Pressley Hall of Fame, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, two haunted houses, the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusion, the Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo’s Police Museum (“See Walking Tall Sheriff Buford Pusser’s Death Car!”), Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center, and last, but not least, Irene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall.
In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk food stalls, ice cream parlors, and gift shops of the sort that sell Wanted posters with YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps
with droll embellishments, like a coil of realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim.
Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice cream, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously...
Not much has changed in the nearly twenty years since Bryson made the trip. Add to this intermittent torrents of rain and signage contrived to deceive the unwary into sticking around this third circle of hell. The marvel is that Bryson actually enjoyed himself and, once I got off onto Nature Loop #8 north of town, so did I. But I mistook the 10-mile-an-hour one-way trail for part of the National Park and, rustic as it was, it was just another Gatlinburg ploy to keep me in the city limits. Now, if you happen to stay overnight in this hillbilly side-show of a town, Nature Trail #8 is a bucolic mini-tour just outside the Park, with the requisite settler’s cabins and burbling streams, woods and waterfalls, within biking distance of the main drag. If I hadn’t been so miffed at being fooled into staying in Gatlinburg, it would have been a pleasant diversion.
But at the end of the loop, here I was driving back past the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, predominantly obese tourists, and curb-to-curb traffic; I couldn’t believe I fell for it! With a closer reading of the signs, I finally aimed the HHR toward Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The mountains really do appear to smoke, mist actually, in a most provocative way, and at the apex of the park, Clingman’s Dome, the clouds were so scuddingly close you could taste them. 6643 feet up it was 66 degrees cool, with a substantial cloud chill factor and an effort just to climb the trail to the coiled observation tower. But wonderful! Just watching the play of mist concealing and revealing the landscape was a thrill. There are benches tucked into the rocks along the way facing out over the mountains, not just for viewing but to catch your breath on the hike up. Charlie, the heartbroken romantic, who in his teens reminded me of the doomed Manfred in Beethoven's overture, would have loved this place, its air of The Sublime and the natural high of the altitude. I paused on the way down to sit in one of these niches, wet with tears and clouds, missing him.
At the Visitor Center I meant to just get a decal and accidentally bought a sterilized mountain music cd, of all the vast offerings available, because I wanted to hear “Wreck of the Old 97.” They didn’t have Roy Acuff’s or Hank Snow’s version and I paid $15 for something I could hardly stand to listen to once, let alone enjoy as a soundtrack to the park. By the time I had been to the top of the Dome and back, it was too late to get gas at the last park store, but as I swung through the turnout, past the shutoff pumps, a handsome buck deer crossed my path from the median, Charlie’s totem animal again; it looked right at me.
In gathering mists on the way down the hill, there was a band of Mountain Men playing at a roadside bar, and I was sorely tempted to stop for more than gas. But the downside of the hill had no vacancies and seemed to be the Native American version of Gatlinburg with similar, if slightly less obnoxious, exhibits. So I pressed on in the dark to Atlanta.
Then came the uneasy awareness that I was entering The Deep South, which Steinbeck had approached with such trepidation, and it didn’t help that I got off the highway and was lost in the dark in a maze of muddy dirt roads, edged with the blurred forms that kudzu made of roadside trees and hedges. At one point, rounding a sharp curve crowded with pickup trucks and milling dudes in jeans, some loud goings-on in a lit-up metallic building had me “a little uh, anxious, if you know what I mean.” But I eventually edged toward where I could see more lights and found my way onto Interstate 85.
With Atlanta as my goal, I promised myself a nice dinner, maybe music and and a hotel room. By the time I reached the outskirts of town it was around midnight and, lured by a billboard advertising a $39 motel, I took the Shallowford exit. At closer look, the discarded beds on the balcony and trashed doors on the units indicated a level of maintenance that seemed a bit iffy. Continuing down the poorly lit road, drug dealers whistling and slapping palms on streetcorners began to actually frighten me and bode ill for finding upscale accommodations. I turned around in the parking lot of a Latin dance club, where squadra of lurching borachos crossing the pavement only added to my trepidation, and escaped to the comparative safety of the freeway. What a woose I was! Oh, well...
Since the only major street I knew was Peachtree, I got off at that exit and aimed at the skyscraper profile of a Day’s Inn that radiated familiarity and a good chance for a vacancy in its hundred or so rooms with views. Luckily, there were a few left, despite the presence of a large family reunion for the weekend.
Determined to treat myself to a salad or appetizer and glass of wine, I changed into my red and black batik lounger and headed down to the bar. But it was a Sports Bar, with no entertainment but a widescreen t.v., so I had my dinner in the City Grill next door, which was completely filled with wide-awake African Americans enjoying their own late night snacks. Nervous in a crowd of mostly young blacks, I imagined they were wondering whattheheck the old white lady was doing there in the middle of the night. The concept of Caesar Salad Southern Style did not translate well; the lettuce was smothered in heavy cream dressing and the only wine they had was rose’, sweet as soda pop. So much for even modest expectations, let alone the Peak Experience. Still, it beat sleeping in the car in Georgia heat.
Day 20: A Mighty Rough Road and Fireflies
August 3: Waynesboro, Virginia to Lynchburg to Danville to the New River Trail near Glaxa, Virginia to Mount Rogers State Park
Soundtrack: Wreck of the 97 and New River Train (in my head); Zydeco Party Band, Greatest Hits; Taj Mahal; O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack
They gave him his orders at Monroe, Virginia
Saying, “Steve, you’re way behind time
This is not 38, but it’s Old 97
You must put her into Spencer on time...
It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville
In a line on a three mile grade
It was on that grade that he lost his airbrakes
Oh you see what a jump he made
Charles Noell, Fred Lewey, Whittier/Work as recorded by Hank Snow
I woke up in Waynesboro to free granola bars and snacks and coffee in the room. After a quick swim in a cold pool, I dressed in my usual denim jacket and leggings and drove south toward the George Washington National Forest.
Passing through Lyndhurst, Virginia in the rising heat, a sign on a church challenged: “You think its hot here?” Things cooled off a bit at 4,000 foot elevations on the Appalachian Trail.
In downtown Lynchburg, Virginia I parked diagonally on an old- fashioned high curb and went looking for a pawnshop to buy an accordion. The local music store was heavy on guitars and drums, but not even the ghost of a squeezebox and no one behind the counter had any ideas. So I walked on, searching the brick storefronts (many to let) for a macy’s so I could pay my bill. Finally I asked another middle-aged lady in a respectable print dress.
“Is there a macy’s in this town?”
“I WISH!” she said simply and we both had a good laugh about it.
The quaint shops and abundant churches notwithstanding, this was a downtown in the throes of urban decay, with the wide, slow James River heading south at its edge. Before the meter could expire, I followed the signs past cemeteries and parks toward Danville and the mighty rough road I’d been hearing about since my childhood. I didn’t have a recording of the Wreck of the Old 97, but kept hearing the song in my head every time a mileage sign for one of the cities came in view. It was a song I'd learned from my mother, who was raised in the Ozarks and had brothers who played country songs on their guitars. The road was not so rough, but the train tracks paralleled it on the right and The O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack was appropriately tragic in places. Interstate 29 ran down to the Dan River sheet factory (largest in the world, who knew?) and from there the Crooked Trail led west in the opposite direction of Steinbeck’s route, past Lovers’ Leap where I pulled over and had a short nap. Dozens of cars pulled into the precarious parking area near the sheer drop, with its promise of almost certain death to the heartbroken who jumped, many of them star-crossed couples.
I got back on the winding road, looking for a suitable place to stop for the night. Just outside of Glaxa there was a section of the New River Trail with a parking lot and small visitor center, restrooms, and picnic tables. I had a nice dinner of granola bars, cashews, and some of the Luray Caverns wine and set off down the trail to walk it off before dark. Fireflies drifted in and out of the bushes along the river, where the cliffs often soared hundreds of feet high from the water’s edge and all the totem animals appeared one by one. There were deer foraging on the opposite bank, a blue heron wading in the pebbly shallows, and even a rooster, the symbol of my poetic alter ego, strutting by from a neighboring farm. Signs along the way stated that the narrow swath of riparian land linked private properties and farms that were united in their effort to restore the New River and complete the rustic trail along its banks. It was a magical place.
But it was not a campsite. I put the Taj Mahal CD on and started west in the last of the sunset. By the time I arrived at Grayson Highlands just east of Abingdon, it was late enough that I had missed the bluegrass concert on the park stage. Everyone had left except the ranger and a couple of die-hard talkers and I was sorry I had missed it. Under the light of a half moon I parked at the edge of a tree-lined field. The branches tossed in the light wind; I read a little Grapes of Wrath by flashlight, and settled into the comfort of the body pillows and Mexican blankets under the moonroof.
Soundtrack: Wreck of the 97 and New River Train (in my head); Zydeco Party Band, Greatest Hits; Taj Mahal; O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack
They gave him his orders at Monroe, Virginia
Saying, “Steve, you’re way behind time
This is not 38, but it’s Old 97
You must put her into Spencer on time...
It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville
In a line on a three mile grade
It was on that grade that he lost his airbrakes
Oh you see what a jump he made
Charles Noell, Fred Lewey, Whittier/Work as recorded by Hank Snow
I woke up in Waynesboro to free granola bars and snacks and coffee in the room. After a quick swim in a cold pool, I dressed in my usual denim jacket and leggings and drove south toward the George Washington National Forest.
Passing through Lyndhurst, Virginia in the rising heat, a sign on a church challenged: “You think its hot here?” Things cooled off a bit at 4,000 foot elevations on the Appalachian Trail.
In downtown Lynchburg, Virginia I parked diagonally on an old- fashioned high curb and went looking for a pawnshop to buy an accordion. The local music store was heavy on guitars and drums, but not even the ghost of a squeezebox and no one behind the counter had any ideas. So I walked on, searching the brick storefronts (many to let) for a macy’s so I could pay my bill. Finally I asked another middle-aged lady in a respectable print dress.
“Is there a macy’s in this town?”
“I WISH!” she said simply and we both had a good laugh about it.
The quaint shops and abundant churches notwithstanding, this was a downtown in the throes of urban decay, with the wide, slow James River heading south at its edge. Before the meter could expire, I followed the signs past cemeteries and parks toward Danville and the mighty rough road I’d been hearing about since my childhood. I didn’t have a recording of the Wreck of the Old 97, but kept hearing the song in my head every time a mileage sign for one of the cities came in view. It was a song I'd learned from my mother, who was raised in the Ozarks and had brothers who played country songs on their guitars. The road was not so rough, but the train tracks paralleled it on the right and The O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack was appropriately tragic in places. Interstate 29 ran down to the Dan River sheet factory (largest in the world, who knew?) and from there the Crooked Trail led west in the opposite direction of Steinbeck’s route, past Lovers’ Leap where I pulled over and had a short nap. Dozens of cars pulled into the precarious parking area near the sheer drop, with its promise of almost certain death to the heartbroken who jumped, many of them star-crossed couples.
I got back on the winding road, looking for a suitable place to stop for the night. Just outside of Glaxa there was a section of the New River Trail with a parking lot and small visitor center, restrooms, and picnic tables. I had a nice dinner of granola bars, cashews, and some of the Luray Caverns wine and set off down the trail to walk it off before dark. Fireflies drifted in and out of the bushes along the river, where the cliffs often soared hundreds of feet high from the water’s edge and all the totem animals appeared one by one. There were deer foraging on the opposite bank, a blue heron wading in the pebbly shallows, and even a rooster, the symbol of my poetic alter ego, strutting by from a neighboring farm. Signs along the way stated that the narrow swath of riparian land linked private properties and farms that were united in their effort to restore the New River and complete the rustic trail along its banks. It was a magical place.
But it was not a campsite. I put the Taj Mahal CD on and started west in the last of the sunset. By the time I arrived at Grayson Highlands just east of Abingdon, it was late enough that I had missed the bluegrass concert on the park stage. Everyone had left except the ranger and a couple of die-hard talkers and I was sorry I had missed it. Under the light of a half moon I parked at the edge of a tree-lined field. The branches tossed in the light wind; I read a little Grapes of Wrath by flashlight, and settled into the comfort of the body pillows and Mexican blankets under the moonroof.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Day 19: Ci Gits in the Limberlost
August 2: From Matthew’s Arm campground, Shenandoah to Luray Caverns to Limberlost Trail to Dark Hollow Falls and the Cave Cemetery to Waynesboro
Soundtrack: Townes Van Zandt Live; Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde; Brandenburg Concertos 1-4
“...I used to know St. Louis, even collected epitaphs.”
“Did you, sir? You’ll remember the queer one then.”
“If it’s the same one, I tried to memorize it. You mean that one that starts, ‘Alas that one whose darnthly joy...’”
“That’s it. Robert John Cresswell, died 1845 aged twenty-six.”
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
In the morning, 75º already with hundreds of birds calling invisibly from the canopy above, I sat at the picnic table, longing for coffee and drinking water, and got my first mosquito bite. Out came the Off and the park paper to plan my escape. A blurb about Luray Caverns captured my interest. Charlie and I never made a road trip without taking in a cave, so I drove down the mountain at 8:30, thinking to take in an early tour and stay cool. In the gift shop I changed my earrings for tiger swallowtail butterflies, bought a bottle of local wine, and walked around drinking coffee until the tour was called.
Luray is lovely, compact little cave, still growing and dripping water. At the bottom there is a programmable pipe organ made of stalactites where live concerts are staged, though we only got the automated demonstration and dropping water down the back of the neck from the ceiling. Your cave ticket buys another air-conditioned hour in the car museum next door, an unexpected diversion that displayed beautifully restored early 20th century vehicles and the local Black Maria from the Police Department up the road. When I left at noon it was 103º in the parking lot, but an hour later the temperature in Shenandoah was 88º.
Now the park card came into play and I consulted the park paper for hikes and peak experiences, with the standard issue park map as a guide. In Joshua Tree, we had pretty much hit all the viewpoints and one of the last things I did with Charlie was to watch a ranger slide show on the history of Desert Queen Ranch and walk the Jumbo Rocks Trail by the light of the full moon. Today there was a advertised ranger talk about the Girl of the Limberlost, one of my mother’s favorite books although I never had read it. (Her favorite author was Harold Bell Wright and I didn’t share her literary taste in general).
The prospective hikers met at 2:00 at the trailhead; it was 84º in the shade as six of us strangers started down a loop trail though cut and dying forests and saw the requisite fawn, chipmunks, woodpeckers, warblers, and terrapins on the way. The ranger, Ms. Ives, was married to a park botanist and explained to us that the naked standing trees (snags) that infested the park were hemlocks, being slowly wiped out by a pest that had worked its way south and was beginning to decimate the hemlocks in Great Smoky Mountains as well. In this part of the forest there had been so many standing trees that the Park Service became alarmed and went in to cut them down wholesale after a windstorm knocked a few over. The effect was like a logged-over forest with the logs left to decay and new species shooting up through the gray corpses of the dead. As for the “Girl of the Limberlost,” its lady author (an oxymoron according to Steinbeck) had simply appropriated the name for its “ring” and there was no such person. There had been people living in this neck of the woods, however and a few fruit trees and introduced shrubbery marked the site of their former homestead.
The other hikers were a schoolteacher from North Carolina who had been coming here for years on vacation and a couple with their grown son and his fiancee. From them I heard the first of the fallout stories from Katrina: the boy had been a graduate student at Tulane with a full scholarship to get his doctorate in medicine, but the funds had dried up after the hurricane, his program was canceled, and now he was casting about to find another way to pay for his medical training. We all wished each other luck, for the boy with his school, the teacher with her outing, me with my cross-country quest, and the ranger with encroaching non-native species; I drove on down Skyline Drive, past the Hawksbill, still 83º, at the top of the park, to where a sign for Dark Hollow Falls offered an opportinity for exercise and scenery.
Although the skies threatened, the cool wind was refreshing and the hike into shade was a welcome relief. With the rain parka tied around my waist, just in case, I set out. At the upper falls a few locals had brought their kids in bathing suits and they larked about; persevering, there was another falls below that was quieter. I sat on a rock looking into the jewel-like stones through clear water, wishing Charlie were along to enjoy it with me. Rain began to fall gently. The lower trail was sheltered with tall trees and in the occasional shower it was possible to stop under pine branches for a minute and stay fairly dry, but how to get back to the main road without getting soaked? I took a rutted trail that headed toward the Drive and found, instead, the Cave Family Cemetery on a grassy rise in the middle of the National Park.
Like Steinbeck and his ci gits, I seemed fated to uncover epitaphs, though there was no pale gentleman to interpret them on this trip. A neat grave with the dates June 14, 1958 – June 14, 1996 marked the short life of one M. Dale Foster with the cryptic(!) note, “A white piece of leather well put together.” I thought of Richard Cory, “Clean-favored and imperially slim.” Who but a suicide would die so early, and on their birthday. Maybe facing forty was too much.
It was a wet walk out of there, but the trail finally intersected the highway , which led to a Days Inn in Waynesboro, one of the many towns named for Mad Anthony. In the most generic and freeway-accessible of rooms, I found all kinds of treats for hikers, including money-saving coupons and free toothpaste and granola bars. Unfortunately, the hot water in my room was out, so I was moved down the line to another room, with an identical set of freebies. Life was sweet.
Soundtrack: Townes Van Zandt Live; Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde; Brandenburg Concertos 1-4
“...I used to know St. Louis, even collected epitaphs.”
“Did you, sir? You’ll remember the queer one then.”
“If it’s the same one, I tried to memorize it. You mean that one that starts, ‘Alas that one whose darnthly joy...’”
“That’s it. Robert John Cresswell, died 1845 aged twenty-six.”
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
In the morning, 75º already with hundreds of birds calling invisibly from the canopy above, I sat at the picnic table, longing for coffee and drinking water, and got my first mosquito bite. Out came the Off and the park paper to plan my escape. A blurb about Luray Caverns captured my interest. Charlie and I never made a road trip without taking in a cave, so I drove down the mountain at 8:30, thinking to take in an early tour and stay cool. In the gift shop I changed my earrings for tiger swallowtail butterflies, bought a bottle of local wine, and walked around drinking coffee until the tour was called.
Luray is lovely, compact little cave, still growing and dripping water. At the bottom there is a programmable pipe organ made of stalactites where live concerts are staged, though we only got the automated demonstration and dropping water down the back of the neck from the ceiling. Your cave ticket buys another air-conditioned hour in the car museum next door, an unexpected diversion that displayed beautifully restored early 20th century vehicles and the local Black Maria from the Police Department up the road. When I left at noon it was 103º in the parking lot, but an hour later the temperature in Shenandoah was 88º.
Now the park card came into play and I consulted the park paper for hikes and peak experiences, with the standard issue park map as a guide. In Joshua Tree, we had pretty much hit all the viewpoints and one of the last things I did with Charlie was to watch a ranger slide show on the history of Desert Queen Ranch and walk the Jumbo Rocks Trail by the light of the full moon. Today there was a advertised ranger talk about the Girl of the Limberlost, one of my mother’s favorite books although I never had read it. (Her favorite author was Harold Bell Wright and I didn’t share her literary taste in general).
The prospective hikers met at 2:00 at the trailhead; it was 84º in the shade as six of us strangers started down a loop trail though cut and dying forests and saw the requisite fawn, chipmunks, woodpeckers, warblers, and terrapins on the way. The ranger, Ms. Ives, was married to a park botanist and explained to us that the naked standing trees (snags) that infested the park were hemlocks, being slowly wiped out by a pest that had worked its way south and was beginning to decimate the hemlocks in Great Smoky Mountains as well. In this part of the forest there had been so many standing trees that the Park Service became alarmed and went in to cut them down wholesale after a windstorm knocked a few over. The effect was like a logged-over forest with the logs left to decay and new species shooting up through the gray corpses of the dead. As for the “Girl of the Limberlost,” its lady author (an oxymoron according to Steinbeck) had simply appropriated the name for its “ring” and there was no such person. There had been people living in this neck of the woods, however and a few fruit trees and introduced shrubbery marked the site of their former homestead.
The other hikers were a schoolteacher from North Carolina who had been coming here for years on vacation and a couple with their grown son and his fiancee. From them I heard the first of the fallout stories from Katrina: the boy had been a graduate student at Tulane with a full scholarship to get his doctorate in medicine, but the funds had dried up after the hurricane, his program was canceled, and now he was casting about to find another way to pay for his medical training. We all wished each other luck, for the boy with his school, the teacher with her outing, me with my cross-country quest, and the ranger with encroaching non-native species; I drove on down Skyline Drive, past the Hawksbill, still 83º, at the top of the park, to where a sign for Dark Hollow Falls offered an opportinity for exercise and scenery.
Although the skies threatened, the cool wind was refreshing and the hike into shade was a welcome relief. With the rain parka tied around my waist, just in case, I set out. At the upper falls a few locals had brought their kids in bathing suits and they larked about; persevering, there was another falls below that was quieter. I sat on a rock looking into the jewel-like stones through clear water, wishing Charlie were along to enjoy it with me. Rain began to fall gently. The lower trail was sheltered with tall trees and in the occasional shower it was possible to stop under pine branches for a minute and stay fairly dry, but how to get back to the main road without getting soaked? I took a rutted trail that headed toward the Drive and found, instead, the Cave Family Cemetery on a grassy rise in the middle of the National Park.
Like Steinbeck and his ci gits, I seemed fated to uncover epitaphs, though there was no pale gentleman to interpret them on this trip. A neat grave with the dates June 14, 1958 – June 14, 1996 marked the short life of one M. Dale Foster with the cryptic(!) note, “A white piece of leather well put together.” I thought of Richard Cory, “Clean-favored and imperially slim.” Who but a suicide would die so early, and on their birthday. Maybe facing forty was too much.
It was a wet walk out of there, but the trail finally intersected the highway , which led to a Days Inn in Waynesboro, one of the many towns named for Mad Anthony. In the most generic and freeway-accessible of rooms, I found all kinds of treats for hikers, including money-saving coupons and free toothpaste and granola bars. Unfortunately, the hot water in my room was out, so I was moved down the line to another room, with an identical set of freebies. Life was sweet.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Day 18: On the Road Again
August 1: New York to Roadside America to Shenandoah National Park
Soundtrack: Bartok, Sonata for Solo Violin ,WKCR; Gary Barsky, 91 AM (KZZO)
After dumping the last of my change into the meter next to the Rodeo Bar, I pulled into traffic ahead of the parking police, headed for the Holland Tunnel (with its No Bottled Gas prohibition that kept Steinbeck’s camper out). It was 93 degrees at 10:30 in the morning as I drove past a big red building with horns, around the Fashion Institute of Technology, and by the Handsome Dog Cafe, where the girl on the banner seemed to be sweltering already with the heat. The Bartok sonata on the radio was sad, the Statue of Liberty appeared briefly in the haze to the west and there were no more twin towers at the end of Manhattan.
This time I was careful and breezed through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, occasionally pulling off the road for gas and restrooms and enjoying the suburban ambiance along the turnpike. At Round Valley I found a filling station and a rustic detour around a meandering creek, past well-maintained stone cottages, and a burgeoning development of luxury farm-style houses set among rolling hills and bare graded lots. More Bartok, this time works for piano segued into a rant from a guy named Gary Brisky out of New Jersey who declared “Jerry Springer is worse than pornography” and carried on about Christie Brinkley’s problems with men. I usually don’t listen to talk radio, but he was a lively talker and kept it up until KZZO took over with classic rock. The gossip item reminded me that our friend Scott Harris once saw Christie Brinkley backstage at a Billy Joel concert and not, knowing who she was, said, “Now there’s a pretty girl!”
With no sign of the belching factories that Billy Joel sang about in Allentown, I stayed on U.S. 22 west until it merged with the 78. In Pennsylvania, there is an amazing attraction called Roadside America that recreates a miniature chunk of local countryside with attached souvenir shops and restrooms. The two Lauras and I had stopped there on the way to Fallingwater a few years before and it was charming. During an hour spent reading all the tiny signs and the history of its creation by two brothers over the course of 30 years, the lights dim and the stars come out. The Fallingwater Kaufmans are immortalized with a model department store, their house hovers over a real working waterfall, and the church in town plays Onward Christian Soldiers. Canned patriotic music comes on and the windows in all the little buildings and trains glow and I just sat and cried, the way you do when someone is gone. Charlie never saw Roadside America, corny as it is, and never would.
In the souvenir shop I bought a shoo-fly pie and a bag of pecans and made a meal of nuts and diet soda that fueled me for another hundred miles or so. When I started nodding, I pulled into the parking lot of a library off the turnpike and took a nap in the shade of the building with the windows open. The long days of summer meant light until nine or so and Shenandoah National Park was just ahead off Interstate 81.
All the way, it was around 96º and hit 100º in Harrisburg; the spectre of global warming oppressed the air all across the country; but, as one church in Virginia said “You think it’s hot here...”
It was cooler in Shenadoah National Park, but not a lot: 88 at the entrance and 78 by the time I found a space in Matthew’s Arm Campground. I confess to stopping for fast food at a Taco bell in Front Royal, a trim little National Park gateway town, but it was more for the restroom than the dining experience. My quest was not for cuisine, like a lot of road trippers, but to re-create the kind of trip I would have taken with my son. We would “get the good out” of the National Park pass, stop to hear a bird with a complicated song and look out over the Appalachians, have a smoke and a glass of wine at sunset. We would have put up the tent in Matthew’s Arm, sprayed down with Deepwoods Off and walked the nearest nature trail, maybe starting a fire for marshmallows in spite of the heat, but the most I could do on my own was settle into the bed in the HHR and read Grapes of Wrath by flashlight. It was too stifling to sleep with the windows closed, so I covered the car with a Mexican blanket and sprayed Off liberally, hoping it would repel bears, too.
Soundtrack: Bartok, Sonata for Solo Violin ,WKCR; Gary Barsky, 91 AM (KZZO)
After dumping the last of my change into the meter next to the Rodeo Bar, I pulled into traffic ahead of the parking police, headed for the Holland Tunnel (with its No Bottled Gas prohibition that kept Steinbeck’s camper out). It was 93 degrees at 10:30 in the morning as I drove past a big red building with horns, around the Fashion Institute of Technology, and by the Handsome Dog Cafe, where the girl on the banner seemed to be sweltering already with the heat. The Bartok sonata on the radio was sad, the Statue of Liberty appeared briefly in the haze to the west and there were no more twin towers at the end of Manhattan.
This time I was careful and breezed through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, occasionally pulling off the road for gas and restrooms and enjoying the suburban ambiance along the turnpike. At Round Valley I found a filling station and a rustic detour around a meandering creek, past well-maintained stone cottages, and a burgeoning development of luxury farm-style houses set among rolling hills and bare graded lots. More Bartok, this time works for piano segued into a rant from a guy named Gary Brisky out of New Jersey who declared “Jerry Springer is worse than pornography” and carried on about Christie Brinkley’s problems with men. I usually don’t listen to talk radio, but he was a lively talker and kept it up until KZZO took over with classic rock. The gossip item reminded me that our friend Scott Harris once saw Christie Brinkley backstage at a Billy Joel concert and not, knowing who she was, said, “Now there’s a pretty girl!”
With no sign of the belching factories that Billy Joel sang about in Allentown, I stayed on U.S. 22 west until it merged with the 78. In Pennsylvania, there is an amazing attraction called Roadside America that recreates a miniature chunk of local countryside with attached souvenir shops and restrooms. The two Lauras and I had stopped there on the way to Fallingwater a few years before and it was charming. During an hour spent reading all the tiny signs and the history of its creation by two brothers over the course of 30 years, the lights dim and the stars come out. The Fallingwater Kaufmans are immortalized with a model department store, their house hovers over a real working waterfall, and the church in town plays Onward Christian Soldiers. Canned patriotic music comes on and the windows in all the little buildings and trains glow and I just sat and cried, the way you do when someone is gone. Charlie never saw Roadside America, corny as it is, and never would.
In the souvenir shop I bought a shoo-fly pie and a bag of pecans and made a meal of nuts and diet soda that fueled me for another hundred miles or so. When I started nodding, I pulled into the parking lot of a library off the turnpike and took a nap in the shade of the building with the windows open. The long days of summer meant light until nine or so and Shenandoah National Park was just ahead off Interstate 81.
All the way, it was around 96º and hit 100º in Harrisburg; the spectre of global warming oppressed the air all across the country; but, as one church in Virginia said “You think it’s hot here...”
It was cooler in Shenadoah National Park, but not a lot: 88 at the entrance and 78 by the time I found a space in Matthew’s Arm Campground. I confess to stopping for fast food at a Taco bell in Front Royal, a trim little National Park gateway town, but it was more for the restroom than the dining experience. My quest was not for cuisine, like a lot of road trippers, but to re-create the kind of trip I would have taken with my son. We would “get the good out” of the National Park pass, stop to hear a bird with a complicated song and look out over the Appalachians, have a smoke and a glass of wine at sunset. We would have put up the tent in Matthew’s Arm, sprayed down with Deepwoods Off and walked the nearest nature trail, maybe starting a fire for marshmallows in spite of the heat, but the most I could do on my own was settle into the bed in the HHR and read Grapes of Wrath by flashlight. It was too stifling to sleep with the windows closed, so I covered the car with a Mexican blanket and sprayed Off liberally, hoping it would repel bears, too.
Day 17: Loose Ends in Terrible Heat
July 31: Last day in New York City: JFK Airport to Huntington Hartford Museum to Auto Club to Macy’s to Monster House
Talk about white-knuckled driving! Laura Anne and I took off for JFK in the dark and the whole way seemed to be over high narrow ramps that hung in the air over nothing, with everyone passing us speeding. She got off to L.A. without a hitch and all the gritty way back oil tanks and factories reminded me of driving with Tony Soprano. I parked the car in the $12 a day lot and consulted the AAA guide for the nearest auto club office, which turned out to be off Columbus Circle.
Like Sister Laura, I was accustomed to walking the distances in Manhattan, so in spite of 100º heat I started uptown. Islands of coolness beckoned: the underground mall that made the transition to Park Avenue, the Disney store, where the hottest item was the talking, moving Jack Sparrow doll for $75, and a shop that sold archival photos of the Rat Pack and stars of stage, screen, and television.
The spookiest block was the sidewalk where Anne Baxter collapsed from a stroke in 1986, another coincidental location that I knew from the Elizabeth Arden Red Door nearby. In the cool spot on the sidewalk, I leaned against a nearby building and cried silently for her and Charlie and all the beloved gone too soon.
On Columbus Circle I tried to gain access to the former Huntington Hartford Museum, which had been given to Farleigh Dickinson University and later became a visitor center for the City of New York. From a haughty and handsome concierge in the Warner Building I learned of the remodeling of the Edward Durrell Stone building that Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune and editor of Show Magazine in the 60’s, had commissioned to house his idea of modern art. Two of his most memorable exhibits had been a Faberge egg show and a Salvador Dali retrospective. Now the building was fenced off and guarded and rimmed with garbage, including the contents of someone’s purse thrown up against the fence in the back.
My connection with Hartford was through his estate in Hollywood, now Runyon Canyon Park, once the proposed site of an ambitious Frank Lloyd Wright Country Club and Hotel Complex. The chamber of commerce, local homeowners, and the principal of Hollywood High had successfully stymied the construction of the futuristic “play resort” in 1947. Although a Lloyd Wright-designed museum was also canceled, a pool house and stone caretaker’s building had remained at the site, along with the ruins of other buildings dating back to 1929 and added to in the ‘50’s. After Hartford abandoned it for other investments, the estate had sat empty for thirty years, becoming a park in 1984. This urban wilderness was the history-haunted canyon where most of Charlie’s ashes had been scattered, illegally, in 2003, the place he had come to love most in the world.
Huntington Hartford had managed to dispose of most of an 80 million dollar fortune, funding an artists’ colony in Pacific Palisades, buying an island in the Bahamas, and pumping more of his millions into the gorgeous but short-lived Show, best know as the inspiration for Playboy. Hartford’s saga was sad, but he lived on, now in his 90’s, somewhere in upstate New York. His name remained on none of his projects; even the theater he had founded in L.A. had been renamed for Ricardo Montalban. The current museum renovation would obscure the gleaming marble facade of the triangular-shaped skyscraper and open it as a state of the art design facility overlooking Central Park.
Two blocks on, the AAA office was secreted on the second floor of an office building at 1881 Broadway and 62nd I waited in air-conditioned comfort for the opportunity to get free guides and maps for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Middle Atlantic states, the Virginias, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all on the Steinbeck itinerary. The whole package, in plastic carrying bags, weighed about ten pounds, a burden I looked forward to carrying 40 blocks back to macy’s. My one purchase the day before had turned out not to fit and I needed to exchange it.
Navigating the subway to 34th Street meant a few more minutes of air conditioning. I traded the blouse that didn’t fit for a skirt that did and luxuriated in the coolness for a couple of hours; the macy’s bill was due on the first of August, but I forgot. to bring it with me and it would become an impetus for a quest later.
Late in the afternoon, as the day cooled and a short shower refreshed the air, I schlepped the en pounds of AAA Travel Guides back to 27th Street and moved my car into a secure spot around the corner. In the morning I would get one of the Rodeo Bar spots to load in my luggage. The inconvenience inherent in moving the car about to avoid tickets was one explanation for New Yorkers’ not keeping cars. Most of the cars parked on Laura’s street had out-of-state plates.
Laura had a Pink Panther reception to go to after work, so I took one of the free movie passes I had brought from some promotion in L.A. and went around the corner to a multiplex. The animated feature Monster House was a movie that I would need to add to my repertoire in teaching elementary school, although I had been displaced in the last round and I had no idea what grade level I would be teaching in the fall. Knowing the latest kidflicks was indispensable to connecting with my students; the lessons implicit in Finding Nemo (survival skills), Cars (Route 66), and Spongebob Squarepants (marine biology) could always be applied to the material at hand. Monster House was a story of childhood bonding, with the Freudian overtones of the house as a manifestation of the female persona. It reminded me a little of a cartoon ‘Burbs, but the neighborhood freaks were not really evil, just misunderstood.
Sister Laura’s cinematic experience, outdoors on the roof of a building in the heat of sundown, had not been as pleasant. She returned ahead of schedule, wilted from the heat and thirsty. After a few drinks, we turned in early. Tomorrow would begin the return leg of my cross-country travels, a perilous task not often undertaken by a woman alone, at least in the literary annals of the American Roadtrip.
Talk about white-knuckled driving! Laura Anne and I took off for JFK in the dark and the whole way seemed to be over high narrow ramps that hung in the air over nothing, with everyone passing us speeding. She got off to L.A. without a hitch and all the gritty way back oil tanks and factories reminded me of driving with Tony Soprano. I parked the car in the $12 a day lot and consulted the AAA guide for the nearest auto club office, which turned out to be off Columbus Circle.
Like Sister Laura, I was accustomed to walking the distances in Manhattan, so in spite of 100º heat I started uptown. Islands of coolness beckoned: the underground mall that made the transition to Park Avenue, the Disney store, where the hottest item was the talking, moving Jack Sparrow doll for $75, and a shop that sold archival photos of the Rat Pack and stars of stage, screen, and television.
The spookiest block was the sidewalk where Anne Baxter collapsed from a stroke in 1986, another coincidental location that I knew from the Elizabeth Arden Red Door nearby. In the cool spot on the sidewalk, I leaned against a nearby building and cried silently for her and Charlie and all the beloved gone too soon.
On Columbus Circle I tried to gain access to the former Huntington Hartford Museum, which had been given to Farleigh Dickinson University and later became a visitor center for the City of New York. From a haughty and handsome concierge in the Warner Building I learned of the remodeling of the Edward Durrell Stone building that Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune and editor of Show Magazine in the 60’s, had commissioned to house his idea of modern art. Two of his most memorable exhibits had been a Faberge egg show and a Salvador Dali retrospective. Now the building was fenced off and guarded and rimmed with garbage, including the contents of someone’s purse thrown up against the fence in the back.
My connection with Hartford was through his estate in Hollywood, now Runyon Canyon Park, once the proposed site of an ambitious Frank Lloyd Wright Country Club and Hotel Complex. The chamber of commerce, local homeowners, and the principal of Hollywood High had successfully stymied the construction of the futuristic “play resort” in 1947. Although a Lloyd Wright-designed museum was also canceled, a pool house and stone caretaker’s building had remained at the site, along with the ruins of other buildings dating back to 1929 and added to in the ‘50’s. After Hartford abandoned it for other investments, the estate had sat empty for thirty years, becoming a park in 1984. This urban wilderness was the history-haunted canyon where most of Charlie’s ashes had been scattered, illegally, in 2003, the place he had come to love most in the world.
Huntington Hartford had managed to dispose of most of an 80 million dollar fortune, funding an artists’ colony in Pacific Palisades, buying an island in the Bahamas, and pumping more of his millions into the gorgeous but short-lived Show, best know as the inspiration for Playboy. Hartford’s saga was sad, but he lived on, now in his 90’s, somewhere in upstate New York. His name remained on none of his projects; even the theater he had founded in L.A. had been renamed for Ricardo Montalban. The current museum renovation would obscure the gleaming marble facade of the triangular-shaped skyscraper and open it as a state of the art design facility overlooking Central Park.
Two blocks on, the AAA office was secreted on the second floor of an office building at 1881 Broadway and 62nd I waited in air-conditioned comfort for the opportunity to get free guides and maps for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Middle Atlantic states, the Virginias, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all on the Steinbeck itinerary. The whole package, in plastic carrying bags, weighed about ten pounds, a burden I looked forward to carrying 40 blocks back to macy’s. My one purchase the day before had turned out not to fit and I needed to exchange it.
Navigating the subway to 34th Street meant a few more minutes of air conditioning. I traded the blouse that didn’t fit for a skirt that did and luxuriated in the coolness for a couple of hours; the macy’s bill was due on the first of August, but I forgot. to bring it with me and it would become an impetus for a quest later.
Late in the afternoon, as the day cooled and a short shower refreshed the air, I schlepped the en pounds of AAA Travel Guides back to 27th Street and moved my car into a secure spot around the corner. In the morning I would get one of the Rodeo Bar spots to load in my luggage. The inconvenience inherent in moving the car about to avoid tickets was one explanation for New Yorkers’ not keeping cars. Most of the cars parked on Laura’s street had out-of-state plates.
Laura had a Pink Panther reception to go to after work, so I took one of the free movie passes I had brought from some promotion in L.A. and went around the corner to a multiplex. The animated feature Monster House was a movie that I would need to add to my repertoire in teaching elementary school, although I had been displaced in the last round and I had no idea what grade level I would be teaching in the fall. Knowing the latest kidflicks was indispensable to connecting with my students; the lessons implicit in Finding Nemo (survival skills), Cars (Route 66), and Spongebob Squarepants (marine biology) could always be applied to the material at hand. Monster House was a story of childhood bonding, with the Freudian overtones of the house as a manifestation of the female persona. It reminded me a little of a cartoon ‘Burbs, but the neighborhood freaks were not really evil, just misunderstood.
Sister Laura’s cinematic experience, outdoors on the roof of a building in the heat of sundown, had not been as pleasant. She returned ahead of schedule, wilted from the heat and thirsty. After a few drinks, we turned in early. Tomorrow would begin the return leg of my cross-country travels, a perilous task not often undertaken by a woman alone, at least in the literary annals of the American Roadtrip.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Day 16: Souvenirs and Sushi
July 30: Westminster to Amherst to New York City
Soundtrack: Conversation
At least since the sixties, the interstate has been the system that all state roads and, more recently many suburban roads have chosen to emulate. Why have a two land, easy-moving local road, in other words, when you can have something fast and frenetic and well, kike an interstate!
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country
We woke to a "continental breakfast" of coffee and donut holes, one small box to feed the 18 units of the motel. The weather had cleared again, but heat and humidity had set in by 10 and there was no pool to linger for. We took off so fast that Laura Anne forgot her leftover fettucine in the refrigerator, excited by the prospect of doing some of the driving on the interstate. We had planned to go to Amherst to find Emily Dickinson's house, but the town sprawled for miles around the green lawns of the University and we drove around looking for signs that never materialized: foiled again.
Now our goal was to get back in time for Laura Anne to buy New York City souvenirs on her way out of town. Since we could take interstates all the way, Laura Anne got to drive through the rest of Connecticut and on to Massachusetts. Springfield was the largest and most interesting city we passed by, with its gigantic silvery Basketball Hall of Fame. The shining chrome sphere was in contrast to most of the other buildings, which were brick and several stories tall, a combination that makes Angelenos nervous. But then there probably aren’t many earthquakes in Springfield, Massachusetts.
We made good time and the distance wasn’t much farther than going from Houston to Austin, so we arrived with most of the afternoon left to cruise down 34th Street to Macy’s and browse the shops on the way that sold miniature Empire State Buildings and Statue of Liberties and I Heart New York memorabilia. It was Sunday and parking was catch as catch can when people moved out of their hoarded spaces in the neighborhood; we snagged a spot near Sister Laura’s apartment, unloaded, snacked and started out walking. By the time we got to Macy’s we were dripping with sweat and pleased to find a Starbuck’s in the Junior Department that served frozen drinks. While the Lauras shopped, I luxuriated in the air conditioning and a raspberry tea concoction that threatened brain freeze with every strawfull. A few years earlier when I visited Laura. we had spent an entire Labor Day staying cool in Macy’s and Bed Bath and Beyond. Marathon shopping was one of the thrills of New York City, a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s, even if we did graze the lower end of the consumer chain.
As for the souvenir shops, Laura Anne found shot glasses and lighters and pins for all her friends back in L.A. and bought a cityscape from a vendor on the street. I got an Empire State Building towel to cover the car-bed and broken heart salt and pepper shakers for the cover of this book.
Sister Laura took us to a Japanese restaurant called East around the corner from her place, a rabbit warren of dark bamboo rooms upstairs in on Third Avenue. Downstairs it had a sushi bar on a conveyor belt, which apparently was its claim to fame. Very tasty!
Laura Anne was going to catch a plane at 8:00 the next morning and fly to L.A. for her first week of film school, so we would have to be on the road by 5; we packed up her new treasures and turned in early. Tomorrow would be my last day in New York City, time to hit the Triple A for maps and brochures, and Sister Laura would be back on the chain gang at BBC America.
Soundtrack: Conversation
At least since the sixties, the interstate has been the system that all state roads and, more recently many suburban roads have chosen to emulate. Why have a two land, easy-moving local road, in other words, when you can have something fast and frenetic and well, kike an interstate!
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country
We woke to a "continental breakfast" of coffee and donut holes, one small box to feed the 18 units of the motel. The weather had cleared again, but heat and humidity had set in by 10 and there was no pool to linger for. We took off so fast that Laura Anne forgot her leftover fettucine in the refrigerator, excited by the prospect of doing some of the driving on the interstate. We had planned to go to Amherst to find Emily Dickinson's house, but the town sprawled for miles around the green lawns of the University and we drove around looking for signs that never materialized: foiled again.
Now our goal was to get back in time for Laura Anne to buy New York City souvenirs on her way out of town. Since we could take interstates all the way, Laura Anne got to drive through the rest of Connecticut and on to Massachusetts. Springfield was the largest and most interesting city we passed by, with its gigantic silvery Basketball Hall of Fame. The shining chrome sphere was in contrast to most of the other buildings, which were brick and several stories tall, a combination that makes Angelenos nervous. But then there probably aren’t many earthquakes in Springfield, Massachusetts.
We made good time and the distance wasn’t much farther than going from Houston to Austin, so we arrived with most of the afternoon left to cruise down 34th Street to Macy’s and browse the shops on the way that sold miniature Empire State Buildings and Statue of Liberties and I Heart New York memorabilia. It was Sunday and parking was catch as catch can when people moved out of their hoarded spaces in the neighborhood; we snagged a spot near Sister Laura’s apartment, unloaded, snacked and started out walking. By the time we got to Macy’s we were dripping with sweat and pleased to find a Starbuck’s in the Junior Department that served frozen drinks. While the Lauras shopped, I luxuriated in the air conditioning and a raspberry tea concoction that threatened brain freeze with every strawfull. A few years earlier when I visited Laura. we had spent an entire Labor Day staying cool in Macy’s and Bed Bath and Beyond. Marathon shopping was one of the thrills of New York City, a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s, even if we did graze the lower end of the consumer chain.
As for the souvenir shops, Laura Anne found shot glasses and lighters and pins for all her friends back in L.A. and bought a cityscape from a vendor on the street. I got an Empire State Building towel to cover the car-bed and broken heart salt and pepper shakers for the cover of this book.
Sister Laura took us to a Japanese restaurant called East around the corner from her place, a rabbit warren of dark bamboo rooms upstairs in on Third Avenue. Downstairs it had a sushi bar on a conveyor belt, which apparently was its claim to fame. Very tasty!
Laura Anne was going to catch a plane at 8:00 the next morning and fly to L.A. for her first week of film school, so we would have to be on the road by 5; we packed up her new treasures and turned in early. Tomorrow would be my last day in New York City, time to hit the Triple A for maps and brochures, and Sister Laura would be back on the chain gang at BBC America.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Day 15: No Time for New Hampshire
July 29: New London to Salem, Massachusetts to Gloucester to Massachusetts
I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure,,,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey
Soundtrack: Radio potluck, rockabye Sweet Baby James
There must have been a continental breakfast in New London - isn’t there always at these franchises? We were not exactly “on the water, “ but a river called Thames on the map edged past to the west, stitching a pocket of trees and grass just off the freeway. And there was always the pool... Laura Anne and I took a swim and then we pulled out onto the 95 with the remains of the morning.
Edging up the coast in sunlit splendor, we bypassed Providence and Boston and turned into Salem before noon. There was a marvelous summer art exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum that somehow distracted us from the witchy enticements at every bend in the twisted streets. Room after room shone with paintings of seashores and meadows and storms and pretty girls in their summer dresses by Evergood and Hartley and Bellows and scattered local artists; we wandered from room to room for hours. Coming out, I saw another blue HHR, with another middle-aged schoolteacher at the wheel, larking about the country I presumed. With its Maritime Museum and Witch Hunt histories, House of Seven Gables and Marblehead Light, Salem must be a magnet for teachers collecting brochures. We were too late for the House of Seven Gables tour, but took pictures of each other mugging outside the building. So far we had not connected with the dark side of the New England Myth.
Now we were really hungry and nothing but lobster would do. We started north up the coast and found the suitably quaint seaport of Gloucester and a venerable seafood restaurant with a view of the ocean. I had a lobster pie, sort of like a Newberg with a crust and delicious bits of lobster floating in a tasty sauce. Laura Anne had lobster fettucine, which, as usual, she couldn’t finish and we took the leftovers for later. A local rock band was setting up to play in the corner, which would have been fun, but we wanted to start the loop back toward Amherst and Emily Dickinson Country.
This time we took the State 128 inland which connected with the old reliable Interstate 95 for a while, branching off into State 2 and veering west. Surprise! Just as a glorious golden sunset was cutting misty rays through the tall forest, we arrived (too late for the tour) at Walden Pond. The gates were about to close and rangers were stationed at the exits. Family groups of tourists who had been enjoying the little strip of State Reservation, hard won from developers, headed back to their cars with historically significant smiles, beaming in the rapturous light.
We slowed down for the crowd, absorbing the psychic energy of the place second hand. Somewhere nearby there was a rude bridge that arched a flood and memorials to Minute Men and other historic figures, but the sun was sinking and we had yet to locate lodging for the night. We would have to bypass New Hampshire, where a tantalizing brochure from the motel rack had promised the opportunity to "explore the mysteries" at the "American Stonehenge" (featured on The History Channel) and where Steinbeck had encountered a farmer curious about his "rig," Rocinante.
Although we carried a tent and camp chairs, Sister Laura was not too gone on camping out. We only had one mattress, though the star pillows could be used as one in a pinch; we hadn’t had time to try out that concept yet. So we cruised State Highway 2, finally settling on a long white Cape Cod clapboard style place with a covered porch, high on a hill just off the road. It had a green roof and shutters and backed up to a dense stand of evergreens, just outside the tiny town of Westminster. We had the last room on the row, actually a suite, with 2 tvs and 2 refrigerators and 2 double beds, forming a sort of L at the end of the veranda.
There was a back door to the room, and windows looking out into the forest primeval that made mysterious noises all night long. What was out there - lions? tiger? bears? That's what Sister Laura would say, but, safe in the cozy air-conditioned rooms, we had the luxury of imagination without peril and June bugs hitting the lamplit screens, that sweet sound of summer.
I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure,,,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey
Soundtrack: Radio potluck, rockabye Sweet Baby James
There must have been a continental breakfast in New London - isn’t there always at these franchises? We were not exactly “on the water, “ but a river called Thames on the map edged past to the west, stitching a pocket of trees and grass just off the freeway. And there was always the pool... Laura Anne and I took a swim and then we pulled out onto the 95 with the remains of the morning.
Edging up the coast in sunlit splendor, we bypassed Providence and Boston and turned into Salem before noon. There was a marvelous summer art exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum that somehow distracted us from the witchy enticements at every bend in the twisted streets. Room after room shone with paintings of seashores and meadows and storms and pretty girls in their summer dresses by Evergood and Hartley and Bellows and scattered local artists; we wandered from room to room for hours. Coming out, I saw another blue HHR, with another middle-aged schoolteacher at the wheel, larking about the country I presumed. With its Maritime Museum and Witch Hunt histories, House of Seven Gables and Marblehead Light, Salem must be a magnet for teachers collecting brochures. We were too late for the House of Seven Gables tour, but took pictures of each other mugging outside the building. So far we had not connected with the dark side of the New England Myth.
Now we were really hungry and nothing but lobster would do. We started north up the coast and found the suitably quaint seaport of Gloucester and a venerable seafood restaurant with a view of the ocean. I had a lobster pie, sort of like a Newberg with a crust and delicious bits of lobster floating in a tasty sauce. Laura Anne had lobster fettucine, which, as usual, she couldn’t finish and we took the leftovers for later. A local rock band was setting up to play in the corner, which would have been fun, but we wanted to start the loop back toward Amherst and Emily Dickinson Country.
This time we took the State 128 inland which connected with the old reliable Interstate 95 for a while, branching off into State 2 and veering west. Surprise! Just as a glorious golden sunset was cutting misty rays through the tall forest, we arrived (too late for the tour) at Walden Pond. The gates were about to close and rangers were stationed at the exits. Family groups of tourists who had been enjoying the little strip of State Reservation, hard won from developers, headed back to their cars with historically significant smiles, beaming in the rapturous light.
We slowed down for the crowd, absorbing the psychic energy of the place second hand. Somewhere nearby there was a rude bridge that arched a flood and memorials to Minute Men and other historic figures, but the sun was sinking and we had yet to locate lodging for the night. We would have to bypass New Hampshire, where a tantalizing brochure from the motel rack had promised the opportunity to "explore the mysteries" at the "American Stonehenge" (featured on The History Channel) and where Steinbeck had encountered a farmer curious about his "rig," Rocinante.
Although we carried a tent and camp chairs, Sister Laura was not too gone on camping out. We only had one mattress, though the star pillows could be used as one in a pinch; we hadn’t had time to try out that concept yet. So we cruised State Highway 2, finally settling on a long white Cape Cod clapboard style place with a covered porch, high on a hill just off the road. It had a green roof and shutters and backed up to a dense stand of evergreens, just outside the tiny town of Westminster. We had the last room on the row, actually a suite, with 2 tvs and 2 refrigerators and 2 double beds, forming a sort of L at the end of the veranda.
There was a back door to the room, and windows looking out into the forest primeval that made mysterious noises all night long. What was out there - lions? tiger? bears? That's what Sister Laura would say, but, safe in the cozy air-conditioned rooms, we had the luxury of imagination without peril and June bugs hitting the lamplit screens, that sweet sound of summer.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Day 14: With Aunt Laura in Connecticut
July 28: New York to New Jersey to Easton and New London, Connecticut
Soundtrack: Beatles, One; New Haven radio
When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in Travels With Charley, he crossed long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
The nature of parking on East 27th Street decreed that we move the HHR by nine in the morning, so Laura, Laura and I packed in our duffles and cooler and headed out through the tunnels, one jump ahead of the meter readers. We promptly got lost in Jersey. After going too far west and then too far south, we finally connected with the road to Connecticut. Clouds gathered and full-scale rain hit by the time we had crossed the state line. In the picturesque town of Greenwich, we checked the public library for a restroom and the location of Anne Baxter’s grave, supposedly in Easton, Connecticut where she had lived for a short time with her last husband, David Klee. We found one but not the other, although we got directions to the Easton Cemetery. We headed north on gray highways through the little town. The rain intensified, and we nearly missed the entrance to the graveyard in the downpour.
There were puddles on the gravel road between the graves as we pulled in, scouting for tombstones engraved with the name KLEE. With a loud drumming on the wet lawn, a doe leapt up suddenly from grazing on the cemetery grass and bounded toward the brook beyond the trees; Charlie’s totem animal again. We got out umbrellas and walked up and down the rows, soaking our shoes, finding nothing but the sad tombstone of a boy named Bobby who died at 22, decorated with his toy cars. Charlie had no grave, only a circle of stones in his beloved “meadow,” the former Red Car Right-of-Way and the vegetable immortality of being scattered in two beautiful urban parks.
After slogging around in Easton Cemetery for half an hour, we finally had to give up. (Further investigation after Sister Laura got back to her office computer and consulted imdb reveled that Anne Baxter really was buried at Taliesen and somehow we had missed her.) We worked our way south to the coast 95 and red highway 1 that wove parallel to it, closer to the ocean. In and out of rain, Laura Anne drove the Interstate while I scanned the maps for a prospective peak experience. Like Steinbeck, we skirted the larger towns, in this case Bridgeport and New Haven and looked for someplace quaint. I had never been to New England; though Sister Laura and I had fantasized about retracing H.P. Lovecraft’s steps in Providence, we had decided the rail trip was too expensive several years before. What I knew of New England was strictly from literature: besides Lovecraft, I'd read a lot of Hawthorne and Melville and Washington Irving, so naturally there was a certain gothic bias to my perception. I knew there should be bright shorelines and sailing and lobster and seaside cottages, et cetera, and maybe we would find some.
Leaving the 95, we turned south on a road that promised these things, but it all seemed like Anywhere, U.S.A., winding lanes with ordinary houses and no quaint bed and breakfasts to be found. Billboards on the Interstate weren’t much help and as it grew dark we finally settled on a Hampton Inn next to a broad inlet called that promised at least a view of water. We couldn’t really see the Thames for the trees, so we decided to cross the 95 again to check out the Atlantic.
When we consulted Travels With Charley later that evening, to see if we were on the right track we realized that we were just outside of New London, the town where Steinbeck had talked to a young sailor about nuclear submarines. Headed south toward the coast for dinner, we passed the vestiges of naval installations, still in evidence after 40 years. There were no peak experiences, no lobster, but we had good seafood at a local joint over the water, watching the reflected lights and planning ahead to witch-hunting in Salem. Lovecraft notwithstanding, we would follow Steinbeck’s example and bypass the eldritch lure of populous Providence and Boston for the charm of the little whaling towns up the shore.
Soundtrack: Beatles, One; New Haven radio
When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in Travels With Charley, he crossed long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
The nature of parking on East 27th Street decreed that we move the HHR by nine in the morning, so Laura, Laura and I packed in our duffles and cooler and headed out through the tunnels, one jump ahead of the meter readers. We promptly got lost in Jersey. After going too far west and then too far south, we finally connected with the road to Connecticut. Clouds gathered and full-scale rain hit by the time we had crossed the state line. In the picturesque town of Greenwich, we checked the public library for a restroom and the location of Anne Baxter’s grave, supposedly in Easton, Connecticut where she had lived for a short time with her last husband, David Klee. We found one but not the other, although we got directions to the Easton Cemetery. We headed north on gray highways through the little town. The rain intensified, and we nearly missed the entrance to the graveyard in the downpour.
There were puddles on the gravel road between the graves as we pulled in, scouting for tombstones engraved with the name KLEE. With a loud drumming on the wet lawn, a doe leapt up suddenly from grazing on the cemetery grass and bounded toward the brook beyond the trees; Charlie’s totem animal again. We got out umbrellas and walked up and down the rows, soaking our shoes, finding nothing but the sad tombstone of a boy named Bobby who died at 22, decorated with his toy cars. Charlie had no grave, only a circle of stones in his beloved “meadow,” the former Red Car Right-of-Way and the vegetable immortality of being scattered in two beautiful urban parks.
After slogging around in Easton Cemetery for half an hour, we finally had to give up. (Further investigation after Sister Laura got back to her office computer and consulted imdb reveled that Anne Baxter really was buried at Taliesen and somehow we had missed her.) We worked our way south to the coast 95 and red highway 1 that wove parallel to it, closer to the ocean. In and out of rain, Laura Anne drove the Interstate while I scanned the maps for a prospective peak experience. Like Steinbeck, we skirted the larger towns, in this case Bridgeport and New Haven and looked for someplace quaint. I had never been to New England; though Sister Laura and I had fantasized about retracing H.P. Lovecraft’s steps in Providence, we had decided the rail trip was too expensive several years before. What I knew of New England was strictly from literature: besides Lovecraft, I'd read a lot of Hawthorne and Melville and Washington Irving, so naturally there was a certain gothic bias to my perception. I knew there should be bright shorelines and sailing and lobster and seaside cottages, et cetera, and maybe we would find some.
Leaving the 95, we turned south on a road that promised these things, but it all seemed like Anywhere, U.S.A., winding lanes with ordinary houses and no quaint bed and breakfasts to be found. Billboards on the Interstate weren’t much help and as it grew dark we finally settled on a Hampton Inn next to a broad inlet called that promised at least a view of water. We couldn’t really see the Thames for the trees, so we decided to cross the 95 again to check out the Atlantic.
When we consulted Travels With Charley later that evening, to see if we were on the right track we realized that we were just outside of New London, the town where Steinbeck had talked to a young sailor about nuclear submarines. Headed south toward the coast for dinner, we passed the vestiges of naval installations, still in evidence after 40 years. There were no peak experiences, no lobster, but we had good seafood at a local joint over the water, watching the reflected lights and planning ahead to witch-hunting in Salem. Lovecraft notwithstanding, we would follow Steinbeck’s example and bypass the eldritch lure of populous Providence and Boston for the charm of the little whaling towns up the shore.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Day 13: The Cloisters
July 27: A Resting Place
Soundtrack: Carmina Burana
To wake up in Sister Laura’s tiny apartment in New York, surrounded by the photos and souvenirs of a life lived watching movies, was always surreal and delightful. Black and white glossies of the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jeremy Brett, and David Suchet looked down from the walls; my favorite was a magazine ad for Barney’s with Dean Stockwell in a suit. She had cupboards full of toys gleaned from years of Sci Fi Conventions and movie promotions and kachina dolls collected from curio shops out west.
While watching Catherine Deneuve in The Young Girls of Rochefort, we put together an exotic picnic of hummus and pita bread and baba ganouch, and baklava and left the parking space round the corner from the Rodeo before our quarters ran out. In Chelsea we picked up Barb and started uptown for the Cloisters; it seemed to take forever, but we finally got close enough to park in a lot facing the Hudson and walk over to Fort Tryon Park. We took the tour of the gardens and rooms filled with hangings and medieval artifacts. I was surprised to learn that the building was not brought over stone by stone from Europe but designed to look as if it were and built by wealthy philanthropist.
Twenty years before, Doug and I had brought Charlie to the Cloisters for a Fourth of July picnic, with salmon mousse (!) and champagne on the lawn, before Laura Anne was born. Unlike the characters in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, we were not gathered up by the Grim Reaper.
Charlie had rolled down the grassy hill above the castle and later we took a taxi over to watch the Macy’s fireworks on the other side of the island. It was a rarity in our lives - a trip for pure pleasure, not part of a tour or a gig - just to give Charlie a chance to see his aunt in New York City. Although Laura and I had made the trip by train the year I finished Americorps service, finishing my degree left no time make the cross-country trip with Charlie. The last time we would travel together, in 1999, was to Uxmal in Mexico so that I could research a paper on MesoAmerican Art. Charlie was working on a report on Malcolm X and we had used the Thanksgiving weekend to finish our classwork for the fall semester. It was a lovely getaway, but disappointing since some of the ruins were being excavated. We took dozens of slides for my project and hoped to return when the Pyramid of the Magician was open for tours.
After I started working as a teacher in 2000, Charlie began to gradually show signs of a mental illness that his doctors at Kaiser Permanente couldn’t seem to get under control. With the ensuing roller coaster ride in an out of sanity, there never seemed to be enough time for us to travel the therapeutic “road away from Here” that Steinbeck took in 1960.
So Laura was taking this part of the trip in his place and we still had to decide what to do with the last of his ashes. Laura and Laura and Barb sat in the shade by the high stone wall talking while I walked around, looking at the garden that edged the grounds toward Riverside Drive. I tried to interest them in scattering the ashes in the gardens, but they weren’t into it. There was an enormous oak tree set back near the western wall that seemed perfect to me, behind some hedges so no one would notice. So I went back to the HHR and got the little ceramic vial we had brought all the way from L.A. and walked round and round and round the tree, leaving the last of Charlie in this beautiful place with a view of the sunset over the Hudson River.
That evening we went downtown to a screening of Woody Allen’s Scoop, which turned out to be eerily appropriate. It wasn’t until much later that I found a snapshot of Charlie, age three, standing smiling and happy in an arched window at the edge of the Cloisters garden, not far from the big oak tree.
Soundtrack: Carmina Burana
To wake up in Sister Laura’s tiny apartment in New York, surrounded by the photos and souvenirs of a life lived watching movies, was always surreal and delightful. Black and white glossies of the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jeremy Brett, and David Suchet looked down from the walls; my favorite was a magazine ad for Barney’s with Dean Stockwell in a suit. She had cupboards full of toys gleaned from years of Sci Fi Conventions and movie promotions and kachina dolls collected from curio shops out west.
While watching Catherine Deneuve in The Young Girls of Rochefort, we put together an exotic picnic of hummus and pita bread and baba ganouch, and baklava and left the parking space round the corner from the Rodeo before our quarters ran out. In Chelsea we picked up Barb and started uptown for the Cloisters; it seemed to take forever, but we finally got close enough to park in a lot facing the Hudson and walk over to Fort Tryon Park. We took the tour of the gardens and rooms filled with hangings and medieval artifacts. I was surprised to learn that the building was not brought over stone by stone from Europe but designed to look as if it were and built by wealthy philanthropist.
Twenty years before, Doug and I had brought Charlie to the Cloisters for a Fourth of July picnic, with salmon mousse (!) and champagne on the lawn, before Laura Anne was born. Unlike the characters in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, we were not gathered up by the Grim Reaper.
Charlie had rolled down the grassy hill above the castle and later we took a taxi over to watch the Macy’s fireworks on the other side of the island. It was a rarity in our lives - a trip for pure pleasure, not part of a tour or a gig - just to give Charlie a chance to see his aunt in New York City. Although Laura and I had made the trip by train the year I finished Americorps service, finishing my degree left no time make the cross-country trip with Charlie. The last time we would travel together, in 1999, was to Uxmal in Mexico so that I could research a paper on MesoAmerican Art. Charlie was working on a report on Malcolm X and we had used the Thanksgiving weekend to finish our classwork for the fall semester. It was a lovely getaway, but disappointing since some of the ruins were being excavated. We took dozens of slides for my project and hoped to return when the Pyramid of the Magician was open for tours.
After I started working as a teacher in 2000, Charlie began to gradually show signs of a mental illness that his doctors at Kaiser Permanente couldn’t seem to get under control. With the ensuing roller coaster ride in an out of sanity, there never seemed to be enough time for us to travel the therapeutic “road away from Here” that Steinbeck took in 1960.
So Laura was taking this part of the trip in his place and we still had to decide what to do with the last of his ashes. Laura and Laura and Barb sat in the shade by the high stone wall talking while I walked around, looking at the garden that edged the grounds toward Riverside Drive. I tried to interest them in scattering the ashes in the gardens, but they weren’t into it. There was an enormous oak tree set back near the western wall that seemed perfect to me, behind some hedges so no one would notice. So I went back to the HHR and got the little ceramic vial we had brought all the way from L.A. and walked round and round and round the tree, leaving the last of Charlie in this beautiful place with a view of the sunset over the Hudson River.
That evening we went downtown to a screening of Woody Allen’s Scoop, which turned out to be eerily appropriate. It wasn’t until much later that I found a snapshot of Charlie, age three, standing smiling and happy in an arched window at the edge of the Cloisters garden, not far from the big oak tree.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Day 12: Vintage Entertainment
July 26: New York City
Soundtrack: Hootenanny Hoot
For weeks I had studied maps, large and small, but maps are not reality at all – they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to a rail.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
Despite listening to screams and arguments off and on all night from Brokeback Mountain, Sister Laura managed to get up and go to work at BBC America. I moved the car into a garage up the street and got coffees from the Starbucks down on Third Avenue. But even the house blend wasn’t strong enough to get Laura Anne and me out of the air-conditioned apartment before noon.
Luckily there was an entertaining film on tv: the 1963 Hootenanny Hoot, starring Peter Breck and Ruta Lee with vintage performances by Johnny Cash, Sheb Wooley, Judy Henske, and the Brothers Four, pumping up the folk craze for all they were worth. This was a period I remembered as the time I tried to get my father to buy me a guitar so I could be cool, but he got me a bigger accordion instead. I tried to play the requisite Bob Dylan and Highwaymen and Peter Paul and Mary material on my grandmother’s mandolin, but it wasn’t sufficiently cool for high school. (Forget the accordion!) So I learned the folk repertoire well enough I could host a radio show later at Pacifica Houston. Hootenanny Hoot was quite a flashback for me and Laura dug it since she was a big Johnny Cash fan. I think Charlie would have made us change the station; he didn’t have much tolerance for folk or country.
We decided to maintain continuity by checking out some more vintage entertainment at the Museum of Radio, Television, and Film. The trek uptown was a bit grueling in 90-degree heat, but the place was blessedly air conditioned and we spent the rest of the day watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, a Dick Cavett show with Bob Dylan, a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary narrated by Anne Baxter, and screenings of I Love Lucy and All in the Family, with guest star Sammy Davis Junior.
After happy hour at the Rodeo, taquitos and quesadillas, virgin and not-so virginal margaritas, I moved the car out of a parking garage in time for the free street parking. Laura and Laura and I looked over the Rand McNally maps to get an idea of New England so we could approximate the first leg of Steinbeck’s trip. We knew Connecticut was on the itinerary and then Massachusetts and as close as we could get to Maine. Making it to Maine would be quite a feat in the three-day weekend we had ahead, since the next day was dedicated to having a picnic at the Cloisters with Laura’s friend Barb and a taking in a free screening in the evening.
Our Daddy would have drawn a red line for the route like Kerouac had tried to at first, and he would have held to it; we’d been there for the first 20 years of family vacations and that was one thing we were sure we DIDN’T want to do.
Soundtrack: Hootenanny Hoot
For weeks I had studied maps, large and small, but maps are not reality at all – they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to a rail.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
Despite listening to screams and arguments off and on all night from Brokeback Mountain, Sister Laura managed to get up and go to work at BBC America. I moved the car into a garage up the street and got coffees from the Starbucks down on Third Avenue. But even the house blend wasn’t strong enough to get Laura Anne and me out of the air-conditioned apartment before noon.
Luckily there was an entertaining film on tv: the 1963 Hootenanny Hoot, starring Peter Breck and Ruta Lee with vintage performances by Johnny Cash, Sheb Wooley, Judy Henske, and the Brothers Four, pumping up the folk craze for all they were worth. This was a period I remembered as the time I tried to get my father to buy me a guitar so I could be cool, but he got me a bigger accordion instead. I tried to play the requisite Bob Dylan and Highwaymen and Peter Paul and Mary material on my grandmother’s mandolin, but it wasn’t sufficiently cool for high school. (Forget the accordion!) So I learned the folk repertoire well enough I could host a radio show later at Pacifica Houston. Hootenanny Hoot was quite a flashback for me and Laura dug it since she was a big Johnny Cash fan. I think Charlie would have made us change the station; he didn’t have much tolerance for folk or country.
We decided to maintain continuity by checking out some more vintage entertainment at the Museum of Radio, Television, and Film. The trek uptown was a bit grueling in 90-degree heat, but the place was blessedly air conditioned and we spent the rest of the day watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, a Dick Cavett show with Bob Dylan, a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary narrated by Anne Baxter, and screenings of I Love Lucy and All in the Family, with guest star Sammy Davis Junior.
After happy hour at the Rodeo, taquitos and quesadillas, virgin and not-so virginal margaritas, I moved the car out of a parking garage in time for the free street parking. Laura and Laura and I looked over the Rand McNally maps to get an idea of New England so we could approximate the first leg of Steinbeck’s trip. We knew Connecticut was on the itinerary and then Massachusetts and as close as we could get to Maine. Making it to Maine would be quite a feat in the three-day weekend we had ahead, since the next day was dedicated to having a picnic at the Cloisters with Laura’s friend Barb and a taking in a free screening in the evening.
Our Daddy would have drawn a red line for the route like Kerouac had tried to at first, and he would have held to it; we’d been there for the first 20 years of family vacations and that was one thing we were sure we DIDN’T want to do.
Day 11: New York State of Mind
July 25 - Utica, New York to the Adirondacks to Saratoga Springs to New York City
Soundtrack: Offspring, Smash; The Beetles, Best of 1964-1969, local radio
I pulled into a rest stop outside Utica on the New York Thruway, a toll road that seemed to charge by the mile. More than just bathrooms and drinking fountains, the place was a great wooden vault with restaurants and souvenir shops, all caged and closed for the night, and a lone custodian sweeping in a corner. The bathroom was the important thing. I took a nap until dawn in the parking lot so it would be handy.
Determined to get off without shelling out more change, I looked up the State 12 exit and went north onto green-dotted road 8 toward the hills and lakes of the New York State of mind. On the Rand McNally map, the blue highways were gray and the next level up was red with green dots for the scenic route. We favored the red-and-green highways because they were usually beautiful AND paved.
Conveniently, the local station cued the Billy Joel song and we were set; when Laura woke up, she resumed her sound track, but I kept switching to local radio which was largely country and faded in and out through the hills.
These were the Adirondacks, rolling countryside with tiny rustic towns built right up to the road, perfect little 2-story cottages surrounded by flower gardens and winding country lanes, like the one I turned off on accidentally, drove ten miles in a scenic circle and ended up at the same turnoff. After a few hours cruising the verges of lakes in and out of shade trees and I was ready to sell out in the Mojave Desert and move to one of these mini-utopias. What a lovely feminist fantasy, to walk away from the domestic scene in California and reinvent myself in a new kind of paradise.
Laura took it as a bad joke. She thought I was trying to get away from her, not just exercising my escapist fantasies, which had, on occasion, come true. The house in Joshua Tree was a fantasy come true, the “place to live...off in the land somewhere” that I wrote about in college, when I was her age. That dream hadn’t been achieved until I graduated from Cal State thirty years later. Because I was teaching in the City and could ony make it out on weekends, I gave this time for solitude and contemplation to Charlie, hoping he would use it to find himself. He was going to college in this best of all possible places, next door to the National Park. I came out the desert to escape from the city over summers and holidays and our lives there were slow-moving, full of books and movies on tv, and long walks on dirt roads in the cool of the evening. He would surf the internet and do his college homework and I would make out lesson plans and correct papers and enter grades. Now the red house in Joshua Tree sat empty, the wind scoured its redwood finish and wore the window screens away, the pipes froze and cracked in winter, and the dream had died with Charlie.
Why wouldn’t I want to escape? These quaint country houses basking in the heat of summer beckoned with the idea of new lives to be lived. These mountains were a new paradise, far from the bare stones and the sad stories in California. Laura’s anger, so unexpected, came out of a feeling that by settling here I would be abandoning her and her aspirations of film school and a fairytale career in the Industry.
O.K., O.K., I was being self-indulgent, reacting to this magical place. North of the road was an enormous wilderness of mountains and lakes that we barely grazed as we headed east on state road 29 into Sara toga Springs. We parked on the main street of the picturesque town, where a Starbuck’s offered caffeine and a restroom accessible to all. Sitting outside at a wire table, we watched the mostly affluent-looking passersby and fortified ourselves for the trek down the Hudson. We had the salmon from the night before in the cooler and needed to get bread, mustard and wine for a picnic on the river.
Here things became a bit tricky, because in the gentrified stores of downtown Sara toga Springs, even the cheapest loaf of bread and jar of mustard would have set us back at least 5 bucks. We finally settled on French bread from the La Brea Bakery in L.A. and found a state liquor store for the jug of wine. After a lengthy discussion on Lake Country vintages with a young salesman, the best buy again turned out to be from California. As for the mustard, we ended up at a general store on the road down the river where a small jar of brown mustard was only $2.49. In this case, it was the principal of the thing. We were saving our cash for NEW YORK CITY!
The picnic was at Castleton-on-Hudson, a swath of green lawn with rest areas in sight of the River. We walked about a little, but the river was edged with boat launching docks and we couldn’t really put our hands in the water. The bridge over the Hudson beckoned and the 9 west ran closer to the river than the 9 on the east side, so we crossed over, thinking there might be a way to scatter Charlie’s ashes so he would drift down to the ocean. But there was no stopping on the bridge, so we headed south for New York, sidetripping into the Catskills to experience Woodstock, a place so perfect even the address signs and mailboxes at the ends of the long forested drives were decorative.
Heading into New York, red highway 9 got itself tangled with toll road 87 and we accidentally got onto the 287 south of Nyack trying to get away from it all. Then we had to catch Interstate 80 to get back in the right direction and spent an hour or so groping through Paterson, New Jersey, Kerouac and Ginsberg territory, a landscape unexpectedly picturesque for New Jersey.
Finally the exit for the George Washington Bridge loomed ahead; we couldn’t avoid paying a toll if we wanted to drive onto Manhattan. The bridge in this case felt more like a tunnel; the narrow roads pumped up my adrenaline with fear of clipping other motorists at 50 mph emerging onto the Franklin Roosevelt Drive. We made it! Turning off onto 20th Street was like coming off a roller coaster ride; we circled Sister Laura’s block a few times looking for a place to park the HHR and we were there.
Sister Laura has lived in a tiny apartment around the corner from the Rodeo Cafe and Bar on East Third for over 20 years. Every inch of wall space in the efficiency is covered with videos and dvds and photos of her media heroes. Her captain’s bed is on one end of the room and the shower, kitchenette, and bathroom are on the other. There is a futon on the wall by the window with the air conditioner and a closet, desk, and rolling tv stand on the other side of the room. Only the essentials.
The three of us walked down to the nearby supermarket, a rarity in Manhattan, and bought crudités and delicacies to round out our supper of champagne and pate on crackers: an impromptu feast. On the way back we passed a band loading in at the backdoor of the Rodeo Bar. A nice young fellow named Sean Kershaw (no relation to the Cajun fiddler) invited us to catch his act later and we said we’d try.
That night we watched Heath Ledger as Casanova and gormandized like Renaissance Italians; we hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet and were going to break that out, too, but Laura Anne fell asleep right away, so Sister Laura and I snuck down to the bar.
Wot Larx! After a couple of plastic cups of lukewarm white wine I was ready to PARTY and danced with a 30ish dude in a stingy brim hat and an unseasonable suit until both of us were sweating like the proverbial c & w porkers. I missed the floor collapsed conveniently into my folding chair. The band knew Hank Williams stuff and Johnny Cash and even John Prine. HOO-HAH! That was some fun. All we had to do was take the elevator up to bed, but we still tried to watch Brokeback Mountain, which cycled on noisily through the night from Wyoming to Texas and back again.
Soundtrack: Offspring, Smash; The Beetles, Best of 1964-1969, local radio
I pulled into a rest stop outside Utica on the New York Thruway, a toll road that seemed to charge by the mile. More than just bathrooms and drinking fountains, the place was a great wooden vault with restaurants and souvenir shops, all caged and closed for the night, and a lone custodian sweeping in a corner. The bathroom was the important thing. I took a nap until dawn in the parking lot so it would be handy.
Determined to get off without shelling out more change, I looked up the State 12 exit and went north onto green-dotted road 8 toward the hills and lakes of the New York State of mind. On the Rand McNally map, the blue highways were gray and the next level up was red with green dots for the scenic route. We favored the red-and-green highways because they were usually beautiful AND paved.
Conveniently, the local station cued the Billy Joel song and we were set; when Laura woke up, she resumed her sound track, but I kept switching to local radio which was largely country and faded in and out through the hills.
These were the Adirondacks, rolling countryside with tiny rustic towns built right up to the road, perfect little 2-story cottages surrounded by flower gardens and winding country lanes, like the one I turned off on accidentally, drove ten miles in a scenic circle and ended up at the same turnoff. After a few hours cruising the verges of lakes in and out of shade trees and I was ready to sell out in the Mojave Desert and move to one of these mini-utopias. What a lovely feminist fantasy, to walk away from the domestic scene in California and reinvent myself in a new kind of paradise.
Laura took it as a bad joke. She thought I was trying to get away from her, not just exercising my escapist fantasies, which had, on occasion, come true. The house in Joshua Tree was a fantasy come true, the “place to live...off in the land somewhere” that I wrote about in college, when I was her age. That dream hadn’t been achieved until I graduated from Cal State thirty years later. Because I was teaching in the City and could ony make it out on weekends, I gave this time for solitude and contemplation to Charlie, hoping he would use it to find himself. He was going to college in this best of all possible places, next door to the National Park. I came out the desert to escape from the city over summers and holidays and our lives there were slow-moving, full of books and movies on tv, and long walks on dirt roads in the cool of the evening. He would surf the internet and do his college homework and I would make out lesson plans and correct papers and enter grades. Now the red house in Joshua Tree sat empty, the wind scoured its redwood finish and wore the window screens away, the pipes froze and cracked in winter, and the dream had died with Charlie.
Why wouldn’t I want to escape? These quaint country houses basking in the heat of summer beckoned with the idea of new lives to be lived. These mountains were a new paradise, far from the bare stones and the sad stories in California. Laura’s anger, so unexpected, came out of a feeling that by settling here I would be abandoning her and her aspirations of film school and a fairytale career in the Industry.
O.K., O.K., I was being self-indulgent, reacting to this magical place. North of the road was an enormous wilderness of mountains and lakes that we barely grazed as we headed east on state road 29 into Sara toga Springs. We parked on the main street of the picturesque town, where a Starbuck’s offered caffeine and a restroom accessible to all. Sitting outside at a wire table, we watched the mostly affluent-looking passersby and fortified ourselves for the trek down the Hudson. We had the salmon from the night before in the cooler and needed to get bread, mustard and wine for a picnic on the river.
Here things became a bit tricky, because in the gentrified stores of downtown Sara toga Springs, even the cheapest loaf of bread and jar of mustard would have set us back at least 5 bucks. We finally settled on French bread from the La Brea Bakery in L.A. and found a state liquor store for the jug of wine. After a lengthy discussion on Lake Country vintages with a young salesman, the best buy again turned out to be from California. As for the mustard, we ended up at a general store on the road down the river where a small jar of brown mustard was only $2.49. In this case, it was the principal of the thing. We were saving our cash for NEW YORK CITY!
The picnic was at Castleton-on-Hudson, a swath of green lawn with rest areas in sight of the River. We walked about a little, but the river was edged with boat launching docks and we couldn’t really put our hands in the water. The bridge over the Hudson beckoned and the 9 west ran closer to the river than the 9 on the east side, so we crossed over, thinking there might be a way to scatter Charlie’s ashes so he would drift down to the ocean. But there was no stopping on the bridge, so we headed south for New York, sidetripping into the Catskills to experience Woodstock, a place so perfect even the address signs and mailboxes at the ends of the long forested drives were decorative.
Heading into New York, red highway 9 got itself tangled with toll road 87 and we accidentally got onto the 287 south of Nyack trying to get away from it all. Then we had to catch Interstate 80 to get back in the right direction and spent an hour or so groping through Paterson, New Jersey, Kerouac and Ginsberg territory, a landscape unexpectedly picturesque for New Jersey.
Finally the exit for the George Washington Bridge loomed ahead; we couldn’t avoid paying a toll if we wanted to drive onto Manhattan. The bridge in this case felt more like a tunnel; the narrow roads pumped up my adrenaline with fear of clipping other motorists at 50 mph emerging onto the Franklin Roosevelt Drive. We made it! Turning off onto 20th Street was like coming off a roller coaster ride; we circled Sister Laura’s block a few times looking for a place to park the HHR and we were there.
Sister Laura has lived in a tiny apartment around the corner from the Rodeo Cafe and Bar on East Third for over 20 years. Every inch of wall space in the efficiency is covered with videos and dvds and photos of her media heroes. Her captain’s bed is on one end of the room and the shower, kitchenette, and bathroom are on the other. There is a futon on the wall by the window with the air conditioner and a closet, desk, and rolling tv stand on the other side of the room. Only the essentials.
The three of us walked down to the nearby supermarket, a rarity in Manhattan, and bought crudités and delicacies to round out our supper of champagne and pate on crackers: an impromptu feast. On the way back we passed a band loading in at the backdoor of the Rodeo Bar. A nice young fellow named Sean Kershaw (no relation to the Cajun fiddler) invited us to catch his act later and we said we’d try.
That night we watched Heath Ledger as Casanova and gormandized like Renaissance Italians; we hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet and were going to break that out, too, but Laura Anne fell asleep right away, so Sister Laura and I snuck down to the bar.
Wot Larx! After a couple of plastic cups of lukewarm white wine I was ready to PARTY and danced with a 30ish dude in a stingy brim hat and an unseasonable suit until both of us were sweating like the proverbial c & w porkers. I missed the floor collapsed conveniently into my folding chair. The band knew Hank Williams stuff and Johnny Cash and even John Prine. HOO-HAH! That was some fun. All we had to do was take the elevator up to bed, but we still tried to watch Brokeback Mountain, which cycled on noisily through the night from Wyoming to Texas and back again.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Day 10: Over the Falls
July 24: Flint, Michigan to Canada to Niagara Falls
We saw it all. We saw the souvenir shops and sitting
on the mist above the falls the brilliant signs
saying hotels to love in, cigarettes to smoke,
souvenirs for proof; we give you anything you want...
Alan Dugan “Niagara Falls” (1947)
Niagara Falls is very nice. It’s like a large version of the old Bond sign on Times Square. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
Soundtrack: Pearl Jam; Fiona Apple, Tidal; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas soundtrack (again)
Waking in Flint, Michigan, across the road from the GM Plant, the limitations of our Day’s Inn were soon apparent. In the dark it seemed to be a well groomed, pleasant accommodation, constructed in a u-shape around a courtyard pool and grassy area. By daylight, the swimming pool was defunct and covered with a tarp, the concrete facade was crumbling at the edges, and the restaurant was actually a rowdy sports bar that opened to early drinkers at 8 in the morning. Several of the patrons claimed to have been laid off at the GM plant, including the desk clerk at the motel. We had looked forward to visiting the GM factory and seeing where the HHR came from, but most of the tours listed in the visitors’ brochure had not actually been given for ten years and the ones that remained did not start until after Labor Day. My plan for contacting the General Motors community relations department and getting sponsored for the remainder of the trip were summarily dashed.
I made a mental note to rent Roger and Me and bone up on how this sorry state of things had come to pass.
For now, all we could do was enjoy the continental breakfast, hang out until the Law and Order rerun on t.v. was over, and pack up for the trip to Canada that Steinbeck had been denied because he forgot to vaccinate his Charley. The day was surreally bright, with the sunroof open onto pure blue and the tree-lined streets of Michigan gliding by. Before we left the states there was, of course the matter of the pin button for Michigan, and we stopped into a thrift shop to find one, but no luck.
As we got gas, the attendant was adding 10¢ more to the price board for every grade. I drank a diet coke to wake up for Canada, but again, not much luck, and after the bridge Laura took over, pronouncing the place “boooring.” I couldn’t stay awake to alleviate the boredom the way Charlie always did – with lively game of Guess My Animal, our version of 20 Questions.
And so it went until Niagara Falls, where all tourism broke loose, with mega-hotels, crowded restaurants and parking a mile away down an albeit scenic drive. One more we crossed into the States, and the contrast to the Canadian circus was amazing. In state parks on the northern and southern edges of the falls, we walked along cliffside trails overlooking a great vortex upstream from the falls and dined in splendor overlooking the sunset and the nightly light show from the Canadian side. The portion of salmon on my salad was sufficient for lunch the next day, we took one last look over the edge and left more than satisfied. Now that was a peak experience!
After dark. the industrial jungle south of the Falls beguiled me with other lights on towers and factory smokestacks. It took an hour or so to get back on the road to New York City; the night stretched out a broken line that glowed in the dark between the lanes as I drove our self-sufficient little chamber on to our destination. Laura stretched out in the back, relaxing on the star pillows as if she were in her own bed. The only element missing was Charlie, reduced to ashes and memories.
We saw it all. We saw the souvenir shops and sitting
on the mist above the falls the brilliant signs
saying hotels to love in, cigarettes to smoke,
souvenirs for proof; we give you anything you want...
Alan Dugan “Niagara Falls” (1947)
Niagara Falls is very nice. It’s like a large version of the old Bond sign on Times Square. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
Soundtrack: Pearl Jam; Fiona Apple, Tidal; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas soundtrack (again)
Waking in Flint, Michigan, across the road from the GM Plant, the limitations of our Day’s Inn were soon apparent. In the dark it seemed to be a well groomed, pleasant accommodation, constructed in a u-shape around a courtyard pool and grassy area. By daylight, the swimming pool was defunct and covered with a tarp, the concrete facade was crumbling at the edges, and the restaurant was actually a rowdy sports bar that opened to early drinkers at 8 in the morning. Several of the patrons claimed to have been laid off at the GM plant, including the desk clerk at the motel. We had looked forward to visiting the GM factory and seeing where the HHR came from, but most of the tours listed in the visitors’ brochure had not actually been given for ten years and the ones that remained did not start until after Labor Day. My plan for contacting the General Motors community relations department and getting sponsored for the remainder of the trip were summarily dashed.
I made a mental note to rent Roger and Me and bone up on how this sorry state of things had come to pass.
For now, all we could do was enjoy the continental breakfast, hang out until the Law and Order rerun on t.v. was over, and pack up for the trip to Canada that Steinbeck had been denied because he forgot to vaccinate his Charley. The day was surreally bright, with the sunroof open onto pure blue and the tree-lined streets of Michigan gliding by. Before we left the states there was, of course the matter of the pin button for Michigan, and we stopped into a thrift shop to find one, but no luck.
As we got gas, the attendant was adding 10¢ more to the price board for every grade. I drank a diet coke to wake up for Canada, but again, not much luck, and after the bridge Laura took over, pronouncing the place “boooring.” I couldn’t stay awake to alleviate the boredom the way Charlie always did – with lively game of Guess My Animal, our version of 20 Questions.
And so it went until Niagara Falls, where all tourism broke loose, with mega-hotels, crowded restaurants and parking a mile away down an albeit scenic drive. One more we crossed into the States, and the contrast to the Canadian circus was amazing. In state parks on the northern and southern edges of the falls, we walked along cliffside trails overlooking a great vortex upstream from the falls and dined in splendor overlooking the sunset and the nightly light show from the Canadian side. The portion of salmon on my salad was sufficient for lunch the next day, we took one last look over the edge and left more than satisfied. Now that was a peak experience!
After dark. the industrial jungle south of the Falls beguiled me with other lights on towers and factory smokestacks. It took an hour or so to get back on the road to New York City; the night stretched out a broken line that glowed in the dark between the lanes as I drove our self-sufficient little chamber on to our destination. Laura stretched out in the back, relaxing on the star pillows as if she were in her own bed. The only element missing was Charlie, reduced to ashes and memories.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Day 9: The Wright Spirit Takes Over
July 23: Racine, Wisconsin to Chicago to Lake Michigan to Flint, Michigan
Reality is spirit– the essence brooding just behind all aspect. Seize it!
Frank Lloyd Wright
Soundtrack: Beck, Odelay; Anthony Castellano’s Mix for Laura; Pearl Jam; franchise radio: the River
I caught up with the laundry at the Knight’s Inn in Racine, which had a washer and dryer and a little room to sit and read On the Road. As soon as I realized I was at the location of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. I asked the desk clerk, who was very knowledgeable about the town, and she drew me a map of how to get to the factory.
We took off after the the clothes were dry, unhampered by a swimming pool or jacuzzi, and headed toward Lake Michigan. I had intended to take the ferry across the Lake and miss Chicago, but this was to be another day of Wright sites and a validation of Steinbeck’s mid-west anchor point. It would also be a day of allergic reactions to medications and we would cut back on the antibiotic Laura was taking and the Ibuprofen the HMO had prescribed for my hip problems. Laura got a rash all over and my hands and feet began to itch terrifically, so we halved the dosage, which made perfect sense since we were both short people, under 5’4”. (According to Randy Newman, we were the ones with no reason to live, not Charlie, who took after his grandfather and was nearly 6 feet tall.)
There was more to the Johnson’s Wax Building than I remembered from the drawings, including a great golden scalloped canopy as we pulled into the turnout, but the facility was not open for tours. We had to appreciate it from a distance and turn around in the driveway. Back we drove through the streets of nineteenth century, mostly brick, buildings and south down the shore of Lake Michigan.
Unfortunately, the lake remained mostly in the far distance, even along the famous Lakeshore Drive into Chicago. Laura liked the lushness of the landscape and the tiny towns heading south into the city. We stopped at Glencoe and had ice cream at a little shop across from a park on the rail line. Though we never found the Botanic Gardens, Laura was amused by a sign for Roy Radigan’s Wonderful Food.
The way into Oak Park to see the Frank Lloyd Wright houses was through a seemingly interminable ghetto. Laura slept through this tedium of crosstown traffic while I listened to a man on pubic radio read his own story about feeling helpless having to trust his son’s life to a hospital. This was a familiar feeling.
We finally arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio around 4:00, too late to take the last tour. So we walked around the block and looked at the Huertley House and the Gale House and two hybrid Victorians around the corner, soaking up the atmosphere under these broad tree-shaded avenues in the cooling afternoon.
Doug and I had brought Charlie here when he was three and we had a 2-hour layover on a flight back from New York City. We had jumped into a taxicab and had the driver show us all the Frank Lloyd Wright houses he could find in the neighborhood. We held Charlie up to the window to see, whether he really understood or not. He had been visiting Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Los Angeles since he was 10 months old, and when I was a docent at Hollyhock House he had played on Sugartop’s porch while I took the tour groups through.
But I had always seen Chicago on the run – as a stopping point cross-country to New York. Once Laura and I had walked around Downtown in between legs of a train trip and gone to the top of Sears Tower. Once I had spent a glorious afternoon at the Art Museum and seen the Auditorium Building and early Wright and Sullivan sites by the long park that edged Lake Michigan. Always we were on a tight schedule, unlike Steinbeck, who used Chicago as an excuse to break from his cross-country camp-out and check into a good hotel with his wife. This trip, we were expected in New York by the 25th to have time to hang out with Sister Laura.
After our walk through Oak Park, we were on the move, or as Laura Anne said, “rushing through,” though we got lost among warehouses on the way out of town and took forever finding on-ramps and exits to the 90. Not that we really wanted the Interstate just yet. Route 12 followed the lake to Michigan City, birthplace of Wright's granddaughter Anne Baxter, where there was a nuclear power facility and National Lakeshore that we never located in the thick woods that buffered it from the town. The suburban closeness of Michigan City to Chicago marked Catherine Wright’s first steps away from her hometown after marrying Kenneth Baxter, who was working in a car dealership when Anne was born in 1923. As the Depression dried up the demand for automobiles and the repeal of Prohibition opened other markets, he took a job with Four Roses, later Seagram’s and they moved to New York. Anne studied with Maria Ospenskaya and was on-stage from the age of 11.
Route 12 wove in and out of little towns, of which Gary and Michigan City were the largest, and merged with Interstate 94 into Michigan. Along this shore the factories were soon replaced by lakeside towns with bars and antique shops and pizza joints lit in neon as the sun sank. A sign on a church warned: “HELL IS HOTTER THAN AN INDIANA SUMMER,” an oblique reference to the sin of global warming.
At the side of the road, a skeletal motel revealed the cellular concrete structure of the common 2-story plan for lodging, the way earthquakes laid open office buildings in L.A. and exposed their inner grid. Toward the lake, the architecture was more inviting: rustic summer cottages lined the streets down to the town of Union Pier, where we stopped for a picnic and a taste of the local ambiance.
As the sun went down, people were leaving the crowded beach with towels wrapped around them, some walking back in clusters to houses nearby or to cars that lined the little lane leading to the lakefront. Laura danced and whirled in the sand and then we sat eating crackers and cheese, watching the sun drop like a red rubber ball into Lake Michigan. The warmth of the day rose up through the sand; we lingered as lights came on in the houses and folks lucky enough to live here sipped drinks on their porches, laughing in the cooling breeze.
Finally, we took our things back to the car and headed back to Interstate 94, which connected with 69 to Flint, Michigan. I wanted to take the HHR back to its origins and that was the city I always associated with Chevrolet, so I told Laura to drive until she saw the General Motors plant. I lay down in the back while she “drove all night on the 69.”
At 2 in the morning I took over and pulled into the enormous parking lot of the General Motors Plant outside Flint. Everything was dark and empty, just a few cars at the edge of the long building that claimed to be a headquarters. I decided, after driving for two days straight, to stay at the Days Inn across the street, where three of the 2-story motel grids we had seen in Indiana were arranged in a U around a dewy expanse of lawn.
Reality is spirit– the essence brooding just behind all aspect. Seize it!
Frank Lloyd Wright
Soundtrack: Beck, Odelay; Anthony Castellano’s Mix for Laura; Pearl Jam; franchise radio: the River
I caught up with the laundry at the Knight’s Inn in Racine, which had a washer and dryer and a little room to sit and read On the Road. As soon as I realized I was at the location of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. I asked the desk clerk, who was very knowledgeable about the town, and she drew me a map of how to get to the factory.
We took off after the the clothes were dry, unhampered by a swimming pool or jacuzzi, and headed toward Lake Michigan. I had intended to take the ferry across the Lake and miss Chicago, but this was to be another day of Wright sites and a validation of Steinbeck’s mid-west anchor point. It would also be a day of allergic reactions to medications and we would cut back on the antibiotic Laura was taking and the Ibuprofen the HMO had prescribed for my hip problems. Laura got a rash all over and my hands and feet began to itch terrifically, so we halved the dosage, which made perfect sense since we were both short people, under 5’4”. (According to Randy Newman, we were the ones with no reason to live, not Charlie, who took after his grandfather and was nearly 6 feet tall.)
There was more to the Johnson’s Wax Building than I remembered from the drawings, including a great golden scalloped canopy as we pulled into the turnout, but the facility was not open for tours. We had to appreciate it from a distance and turn around in the driveway. Back we drove through the streets of nineteenth century, mostly brick, buildings and south down the shore of Lake Michigan.
Unfortunately, the lake remained mostly in the far distance, even along the famous Lakeshore Drive into Chicago. Laura liked the lushness of the landscape and the tiny towns heading south into the city. We stopped at Glencoe and had ice cream at a little shop across from a park on the rail line. Though we never found the Botanic Gardens, Laura was amused by a sign for Roy Radigan’s Wonderful Food.
The way into Oak Park to see the Frank Lloyd Wright houses was through a seemingly interminable ghetto. Laura slept through this tedium of crosstown traffic while I listened to a man on pubic radio read his own story about feeling helpless having to trust his son’s life to a hospital. This was a familiar feeling.
We finally arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio around 4:00, too late to take the last tour. So we walked around the block and looked at the Huertley House and the Gale House and two hybrid Victorians around the corner, soaking up the atmosphere under these broad tree-shaded avenues in the cooling afternoon.
Doug and I had brought Charlie here when he was three and we had a 2-hour layover on a flight back from New York City. We had jumped into a taxicab and had the driver show us all the Frank Lloyd Wright houses he could find in the neighborhood. We held Charlie up to the window to see, whether he really understood or not. He had been visiting Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Los Angeles since he was 10 months old, and when I was a docent at Hollyhock House he had played on Sugartop’s porch while I took the tour groups through.
But I had always seen Chicago on the run – as a stopping point cross-country to New York. Once Laura and I had walked around Downtown in between legs of a train trip and gone to the top of Sears Tower. Once I had spent a glorious afternoon at the Art Museum and seen the Auditorium Building and early Wright and Sullivan sites by the long park that edged Lake Michigan. Always we were on a tight schedule, unlike Steinbeck, who used Chicago as an excuse to break from his cross-country camp-out and check into a good hotel with his wife. This trip, we were expected in New York by the 25th to have time to hang out with Sister Laura.
After our walk through Oak Park, we were on the move, or as Laura Anne said, “rushing through,” though we got lost among warehouses on the way out of town and took forever finding on-ramps and exits to the 90. Not that we really wanted the Interstate just yet. Route 12 followed the lake to Michigan City, birthplace of Wright's granddaughter Anne Baxter, where there was a nuclear power facility and National Lakeshore that we never located in the thick woods that buffered it from the town. The suburban closeness of Michigan City to Chicago marked Catherine Wright’s first steps away from her hometown after marrying Kenneth Baxter, who was working in a car dealership when Anne was born in 1923. As the Depression dried up the demand for automobiles and the repeal of Prohibition opened other markets, he took a job with Four Roses, later Seagram’s and they moved to New York. Anne studied with Maria Ospenskaya and was on-stage from the age of 11.
Route 12 wove in and out of little towns, of which Gary and Michigan City were the largest, and merged with Interstate 94 into Michigan. Along this shore the factories were soon replaced by lakeside towns with bars and antique shops and pizza joints lit in neon as the sun sank. A sign on a church warned: “HELL IS HOTTER THAN AN INDIANA SUMMER,” an oblique reference to the sin of global warming.
At the side of the road, a skeletal motel revealed the cellular concrete structure of the common 2-story plan for lodging, the way earthquakes laid open office buildings in L.A. and exposed their inner grid. Toward the lake, the architecture was more inviting: rustic summer cottages lined the streets down to the town of Union Pier, where we stopped for a picnic and a taste of the local ambiance.
As the sun went down, people were leaving the crowded beach with towels wrapped around them, some walking back in clusters to houses nearby or to cars that lined the little lane leading to the lakefront. Laura danced and whirled in the sand and then we sat eating crackers and cheese, watching the sun drop like a red rubber ball into Lake Michigan. The warmth of the day rose up through the sand; we lingered as lights came on in the houses and folks lucky enough to live here sipped drinks on their porches, laughing in the cooling breeze.
Finally, we took our things back to the car and headed back to Interstate 94, which connected with 69 to Flint, Michigan. I wanted to take the HHR back to its origins and that was the city I always associated with Chevrolet, so I told Laura to drive until she saw the General Motors plant. I lay down in the back while she “drove all night on the 69.”
At 2 in the morning I took over and pulled into the enormous parking lot of the General Motors Plant outside Flint. Everything was dark and empty, just a few cars at the edge of the long building that claimed to be a headquarters. I decided, after driving for two days straight, to stay at the Days Inn across the street, where three of the 2-story motel grids we had seen in Indiana were arranged in a U around a dewy expanse of lawn.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Day 8: Mementos Mori
July 22: Houston, Minnesota to Taliesen to the House on the Rock to Racine, Wisconsin
there is a town I dream into
that might be Caldwell, Idaho
that might be Santa Monica
or Thibodeaux
may be you know...
Maybe you've been the place I mean...
Maybe you've walked there in your sleep
lalo kikiriki, Dreams of the Everyday Housewife
Soundtrack: Garden State soundtrack, Beck, Sea Changes and Odelay; Good Stuff for Laura mix
I sat in the parking lot of the coffee shop across from the hardware store mural until the sky grew lighter, then went for a walk though the sleeping town. It reminded me of Caldwell, Idaho, where I went to college, down to the clapboard houses and trim lawns and the city park with a B-52 jet mounted pointing at the sky. Since there were no bathrooms open anywhere, I decided to explore in the car. Up and down foggy streets I cruised, finding shut up coffee shops, body shops, and fairgrounds but no open filling stations. I pulled into the parking lot of a park with recycled art in its native plant garden, a sign at the fairgrounds proclaiming a “hoedown” next week, and (glory be!) a hot water shower in the restroom.
Rather than wake Laura, I napped for another hour and then woke her up to shower and change. On a wire overhead, starlings gathered like a scene from The Birds and the sky glowered, but eventually both cleared and we went back into town to gas up. The gas station attendant was an affable young man, doing a job Charlie could have done, and he reminded me of him. For $8 Laura bought a Hoedown button that would have let her in both days if we could stay, and we took the 16 to the green-dotted 26 south out of Houston in search of the Mississippi River, a suitable bridge, and maybe even breakfast.
Crossing at Reno after being just over a levee for 14 miles without a glimpse of the river, we found a picturesqe erector set bridge that took us into prime riverview fishing territory on the Wisconsin side. We stopped at a fish camp that was serving breakfast at the bar, frequented by vacationers in their skimpy and colorful attire: feathered fishing hats and cargo shorts. A couple of well-bruised local drunks having beer with their eggs and related the previous night’s escapades.
Finally in the rolling hills of Frank Lloyd Wright country, the green-dotted 60 followed the Wisconsin River east through farmland to Taliesen. We signed up for the Studio Tour, one of several options, and followed a docent up and down stairs and back ways, through the drafting room and into the little theater like the one at Taliesen West. Wright was criticized for using his tuition-paying apprentices to run the day to day operations of the Fellowship, but for many young people just out of school the responsibilities of participating in such an enterprise was a education in itself. At least that was the idea. Some students became so rooted to the land and the organic ideal that they never left and they made the yearly trek to Arizona like an extended family. I had spent 17 years as a docent at Hollyhock House and 10 at the Ennis house before the 1993 earthquake shook loose so many elements of each that they couldn’t be visited by the public. Here we were, finally, at the original Taliesen. The landscape was so unlike the compound in Scottsdale that it was a shock: the river and the green hills and the huge trees, stained green on their north sides, were emblematic of fertility and richness that only a rain-drenched country could provide. With or without the architecture, the place was spectacular, but we would soon find that architecture did make a difference when we went south to the House on the Rock.
We bought souvenir house letters for our Eric Lloyd Wright project next door in L.A. and stopped by the little cemetery on the way out. One of the goals of our trip was to put flowers on Anne Baxter’s grave and we read all the headstones looking for her. Among all the Wrights children and aunts and cousins, we couldn’t find her, and I had heard she was buiried by her last husband in Connecticut. But Laura was particularly moved by Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s grave under a big tree, green with moss and vegetable immortality. Frank Lloyd Wright’s headstone was a tall, pointed rock, nearby. Rain began to fall softly as we headed south on Wisconsin 23 to the House on the Rock; the storm darkened the sky overhead and we were caught in rain and hail so violent that we had to take shelter under an overpass. From Laura’s journal:
We are south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. The sky is screaming a wild thunderstorm and spitting bits ice on all the little people in their fancy cars loaded with diapers and trail mix.
I love rain.
Mother Nature laughs above us now, knowing she is a goddess. Every icy diamond that falls rough from the sky, that slaps the wind and lands upon our heads, is an omen. Each one says, BEWARE: The bitch is back and she does bite.
There is no way I can collect this storm in my 2 oz. shampoo bottle; it travels south now as we go east I wave goodbye and waltz in the sun. Rain is a wonderful thing. Yes it does kill, but it has personality.
The House on the Rock had become so overgrown with landscaping that it was very hard to see, but that didn’t stop the proprietors of the attraction from charging arms and legs for looking at it. There were four separate tours with separate charges for each, and though something of a curiosity, it was mostly a collection of mechanical bands and oddities jumbled together every which way. The most inspirational thing about it was how the owner/builder had financed it all - by asking his neighbors and passers-by to give him a dollar to look at his latest improvement and selling souvenirs. You had to admire his ingenuity and the narrow wing of the place that took off over a bosky dell on seemingly thin air.
Near Madison we stopped out of the rain for a Grand Slam and a mediocre grilled cheese at Denny’s. This was disappointing since we were in Wisconsin and one would expect the cheese to be exceptional. The waitress admired the Frida Kahlo necklace, saying it was an antique and probably very valuable. Fortified with coffee and carbohydrates, we took Interstate 94 and the rain kept up all the way into Milwaukee.
I was looking forward to a civilized evening and a shortcut across Lake Michigan on the Muskegan Ferry, but we couldn’t find a hotel and ended up in a Knight’s Inn in Racine, where the office window was made of duct tape and most of the patrons were bikers. It wasn’t until I was doing laundry the next morning that it hit me: we were just minutes away from Wright’s Johnson Wax Building and, unavoidably, Chicago had become part of our itinerary, just like it was for Steinbeck.
there is a town I dream into
that might be Caldwell, Idaho
that might be Santa Monica
or Thibodeaux
may be you know...
Maybe you've been the place I mean...
Maybe you've walked there in your sleep
lalo kikiriki, Dreams of the Everyday Housewife
Soundtrack: Garden State soundtrack, Beck, Sea Changes and Odelay; Good Stuff for Laura mix
I sat in the parking lot of the coffee shop across from the hardware store mural until the sky grew lighter, then went for a walk though the sleeping town. It reminded me of Caldwell, Idaho, where I went to college, down to the clapboard houses and trim lawns and the city park with a B-52 jet mounted pointing at the sky. Since there were no bathrooms open anywhere, I decided to explore in the car. Up and down foggy streets I cruised, finding shut up coffee shops, body shops, and fairgrounds but no open filling stations. I pulled into the parking lot of a park with recycled art in its native plant garden, a sign at the fairgrounds proclaiming a “hoedown” next week, and (glory be!) a hot water shower in the restroom.
Rather than wake Laura, I napped for another hour and then woke her up to shower and change. On a wire overhead, starlings gathered like a scene from The Birds and the sky glowered, but eventually both cleared and we went back into town to gas up. The gas station attendant was an affable young man, doing a job Charlie could have done, and he reminded me of him. For $8 Laura bought a Hoedown button that would have let her in both days if we could stay, and we took the 16 to the green-dotted 26 south out of Houston in search of the Mississippi River, a suitable bridge, and maybe even breakfast.
Crossing at Reno after being just over a levee for 14 miles without a glimpse of the river, we found a picturesqe erector set bridge that took us into prime riverview fishing territory on the Wisconsin side. We stopped at a fish camp that was serving breakfast at the bar, frequented by vacationers in their skimpy and colorful attire: feathered fishing hats and cargo shorts. A couple of well-bruised local drunks having beer with their eggs and related the previous night’s escapades.
Finally in the rolling hills of Frank Lloyd Wright country, the green-dotted 60 followed the Wisconsin River east through farmland to Taliesen. We signed up for the Studio Tour, one of several options, and followed a docent up and down stairs and back ways, through the drafting room and into the little theater like the one at Taliesen West. Wright was criticized for using his tuition-paying apprentices to run the day to day operations of the Fellowship, but for many young people just out of school the responsibilities of participating in such an enterprise was a education in itself. At least that was the idea. Some students became so rooted to the land and the organic ideal that they never left and they made the yearly trek to Arizona like an extended family. I had spent 17 years as a docent at Hollyhock House and 10 at the Ennis house before the 1993 earthquake shook loose so many elements of each that they couldn’t be visited by the public. Here we were, finally, at the original Taliesen. The landscape was so unlike the compound in Scottsdale that it was a shock: the river and the green hills and the huge trees, stained green on their north sides, were emblematic of fertility and richness that only a rain-drenched country could provide. With or without the architecture, the place was spectacular, but we would soon find that architecture did make a difference when we went south to the House on the Rock.
We bought souvenir house letters for our Eric Lloyd Wright project next door in L.A. and stopped by the little cemetery on the way out. One of the goals of our trip was to put flowers on Anne Baxter’s grave and we read all the headstones looking for her. Among all the Wrights children and aunts and cousins, we couldn’t find her, and I had heard she was buiried by her last husband in Connecticut. But Laura was particularly moved by Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s grave under a big tree, green with moss and vegetable immortality. Frank Lloyd Wright’s headstone was a tall, pointed rock, nearby. Rain began to fall softly as we headed south on Wisconsin 23 to the House on the Rock; the storm darkened the sky overhead and we were caught in rain and hail so violent that we had to take shelter under an overpass. From Laura’s journal:
We are south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. The sky is screaming a wild thunderstorm and spitting bits ice on all the little people in their fancy cars loaded with diapers and trail mix.
I love rain.
Mother Nature laughs above us now, knowing she is a goddess. Every icy diamond that falls rough from the sky, that slaps the wind and lands upon our heads, is an omen. Each one says, BEWARE: The bitch is back and she does bite.
There is no way I can collect this storm in my 2 oz. shampoo bottle; it travels south now as we go east I wave goodbye and waltz in the sun. Rain is a wonderful thing. Yes it does kill, but it has personality.
The House on the Rock had become so overgrown with landscaping that it was very hard to see, but that didn’t stop the proprietors of the attraction from charging arms and legs for looking at it. There were four separate tours with separate charges for each, and though something of a curiosity, it was mostly a collection of mechanical bands and oddities jumbled together every which way. The most inspirational thing about it was how the owner/builder had financed it all - by asking his neighbors and passers-by to give him a dollar to look at his latest improvement and selling souvenirs. You had to admire his ingenuity and the narrow wing of the place that took off over a bosky dell on seemingly thin air.
Near Madison we stopped out of the rain for a Grand Slam and a mediocre grilled cheese at Denny’s. This was disappointing since we were in Wisconsin and one would expect the cheese to be exceptional. The waitress admired the Frida Kahlo necklace, saying it was an antique and probably very valuable. Fortified with coffee and carbohydrates, we took Interstate 94 and the rain kept up all the way into Milwaukee.
I was looking forward to a civilized evening and a shortcut across Lake Michigan on the Muskegan Ferry, but we couldn’t find a hotel and ended up in a Knight’s Inn in Racine, where the office window was made of duct tape and most of the patrons were bikers. It wasn’t until I was doing laundry the next morning that it hit me: we were just minutes away from Wright’s Johnson Wax Building and, unavoidably, Chicago had become part of our itinerary, just like it was for Steinbeck.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)