I know, no one walks in Los Angeles, kingdom of the car, empire of the freeways. No one takes public transit, either, judging by the empty orange Metro buses and Rapid Rail commuter cars pulling out of the Mariposa/Nash Street station near my hotel. But I had a couple of hours to kill in the morning before my flight so I headed out for a walk.
After a 70-minute stroll I return, having passed all of seven people on the street. Now this is in a district of L.A. far from the movie dream factories, Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, Rodeo Drive or Santa Monica pier. I’m a seven-minute shuttle ride from LAX in El Segundo — “the most business friendly city” — according to banners flapping from lampposts. In other words, another concrete commercial no-man’s land no different from what you’d find in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Buffalo or Boston.
In L.A., you could call it paradise interrupted. There’s nary a palm tree in sight.
Starting about 9:30 on a cool, overcast Tuesday morn, the last week in November, my jaunt takes me a few blocks north on Mariposa Avenue to Sepulveda Boulevard, where I turn left and head west. Sepulveda is an eight, sometimes ten-lane flat, straight-arrow highway that’d pass for an interstate with stop lights back home. Crossing it on foot is worth your life. I didn’t try.
The sidewalk along Sepulveda serves a purpose I know not. It’s a long, lonely stretch of cement block dotted with empty bus shelters and randomly-placed brown metal benches that make no sense whatever other than effecting El Segundo’s “friendly” vibe. I’m naked out here, there’s not a person in sight. And it’s beyond me that someone would or could relax on one of these benches, reading a paper, the traffic roaring by.
This is L.A.’s back, back, back lot. On the blocks of Sepulveda I cover I pass by the Powerlight Solar Electric Energy compound and 20- to 25-story glass-paneled office boxes housing the likes of IBM, NCR, Xerox, Raytheon, Mattel, Oracle, SAIC, Sun Microsystems, Continental Datagraphics, Malaysia Airlines, Air New Zealand, Thai Airlines and Boeing.
Across the boulevard sits the mysterious International Rectifiers office, a hidden think tank for Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger wannabes? The nearby International Garden Center has rows of fresh-cut Christmas trees and “snow flocking,” which seems absurd of course to a northerner. But this is L.A. after all, with its facades and facelifts and history of nifty film fakery.
Katmandu Bedding and Furniture is in the middle of a mattress sale. Next door the Just Massage studio works you over for $45 an hour. In the parking lot of Ralph’s, a supermarket chain, Rebek’s Juice in a small squat building sells Energy Berry with mega-antioxidants for anti-aging.
If you look, you’ll find clues that yes, this is L.A. and not Houston. Like the little “L.A. Yoga” magazine stand outside Rebek’s. Or the pink, orange and purple flower bushes that pop up along the sidewalk. Or all the black or silver Hummers and Beamers and Lexuses on Sepulveda. Come to think of it, all the cars seem either black or silver. Or the young dude behind the counter at Border’s with the two steel studs protruding from each side below his lower lip and the shoulder-length black hair and the shaggy beard and the black tee-shirt with “think” on the front, while Elvis sings Christmas tunes from the ceiling and a black guy just in from Atlanta who says he’s a stand-up comic hits up another long-hair employee, apparently a guitarist in a band, for tickets to his upcoming gig and the café in the back serving Seattle’s Best has five or six people with open laptops setting up shop and it’s ten in the morning.
But the idea as I see it is not to notice. Not on Sepulveda with the obligatory McDonald’s and Starbucks and Subway and FedEx Kinko’s and strip malls and the Chevron station and food mart and the Public Storage row of sheds and the 24-hour Walgreen’s that just had its grand opening and the five-minute Express Car Wash and the Grand Café Bar and Grille. In the hour-plus I’m out and about I don’t see a single home, an apartment, a condo, not one sign of people going through their everyday living except for The Lakes at El Segundo golf course with middle-aged guys and women toting their clubs and a series of steel towers planted across the course carrying 20-30 slightly sagging power lines.
The sheer boredom of this barrenness dulls the senses. Which is fine I think with the sales grunts and grinders staying at my Hilton Garden Inn or the Marriott Courtyard next-door or the Homewood Studio Suites down the street. The idea is to get on with your business; get in and out, hopefully on an earlier flight or an upgrade to first class.
I’m out here for two nights, having spent $946.80 on airfare, 11 hours in the air, 6,000 miles roundtrip, $183.76 a night lodging, for two meetings, one lasting 90 minutes, the other maybe a half hour. The first meeting boils down to Bernard, the small, thin pleasantly determined Brit, asking and getting the same rates for his ads next year, $80,000 or so. The second is a bullshit session with Craig, cranky partner of a small agency out in the farmlands by Oxnard 60 miles from our first appointment, who drives a pickup to his office, wears jeans, a tee shirt and a ball cap. It’s a bullshit session because the contract between our magazine and his client was a done deal last week and the wiry, mustached, southern drawling Craig, who loves to drop “Fuck this” and “Fuck that” and “I remember that fuckin’ rep,” and many references to “Fuckin’ Charlotte” his client likes RDG, the magazine’s publisher, and RDG always gets a kick out of Craig and wants to drop by to thank him for the business.
I’ve been out to L.A. ten or twelve times in the more than 25 years I’ve been on the magazine. RDG, who was 8 years old when I started editing the magazine, might do that in 18 months. Completely shaved of head with a goatee and an easy grin, overweight and given to wearing ill-fitting suits and no longer a tie, he’s on a plane every week selling two magazines and 300 or 400 accounts. Do this for ten or twenty or thirty years, depending on one’s endurance and income expectations, and why not persevere comfortably numb and rather blind to where the road’s taken you this time out?
With RDG in the over-sized silver Lincoln Towne car rental, “grandpa’s car” he calls it, driving up I-405 and then Highway 101 through the San Fernando Valley suburbs to Ventura County and Oxnard and Craig it’s all business. From 9:30 in the morning till 5:30 in the evening when on our day is done and then RDG always, always calls his 8- and 5-year-old girls at his ex-wife’s home in Detroit. Otherwise, there’s no radio, no music, no news, no idea that off to our left a Super Scooper is dive bombing into Malibu’s Corral Canyon, dropping thousands of gallons of water on the remnants of a fire that destroyed 53 homes over the weekend with 2,000 firefighters battling the blaze at its height. The rental Lincoln is a sealed-tight sales mobile bubble; no noise, no smells, no notion we’re passing through canyon country with its cactus and coyotes and bobcats. Not when RDG has a list of 20-30 customer phone numbers on his lap as he drives and he makes call after call on his wireless headset and scrolls through emails on his Blackberry. “Did you get my proposal? Do you want me to send another?” “Is Jeff in?” “Have you made any decisions?” “We’re closing January next Monday.” “How about I call you in another six weeks?”
He’s in a zone, 35 years old, at the top of his game, his only apparent distraction a live-in girlfriend with two kids who’s pushing for marriage. His resistance is bound to crumble, he knows it. But most of all, he loves the game, chasing and closing deals. “I’ll sell anything,” he says over dinner. “A $750 ad, classified, it doesn’t matter.” From what I’ve seen over the years with sales reps, he’s in a definite minority. First sales trip I ever did the rep took the afternoon off to tour old mansions on Rhode Island’s coast. RDG bitches about one of our reps who he can’t get on the road enough, about former reps who wouldn’t travel or answer his calls, about competitors who don’t travel. “Frank, fuck, he just drives everywhere and sends accounts two-line emails. Jackie, you think she gets on a plane at her age? She just chats with her girlfriends on the phone. I’d be bored out of my mind.”
So if you’re doing something like RDG’s routine week after week, a place like our Hilton eases you along with its clean, simple, tan and brown, tile and brick fake fireplace in the lobby, a free water bottle and cookies at the counter, a gracious Mexican waiter in the restaurant — “Sorry to interrupt your reading sir, but I have a delicious dish for you” — a flat screen TV that swivels any which way you want in your room, five pillows piled high on your king-sized bed, a Cardio-Theatre 12-inch TV monitor attached to the treadmills in the fitness center and of course a USA Today at your door every morning.
Being dulled out and disengaged helps some when the inevitable occurs: flight delays, mechanical failures, missing crews, ice storms or clients who blow you off, stand you up, or take their money to a competitor. Here’s a for instance: “Bravo!” yells a guard as I go through security at LAX heading back home. “Freeze. Back against the wall, sir,” another guard instructs me. All the commotion instantly stops. Silence. Everyone stands in place, bewildered. “All clear!” someone yells 67 seconds later. One of the guards kept count. As in a game, the start button is pushed and all the travel players are off and running again. “She wants to get back into consulting,” I hear a guy say in passing. “When I’m back in the office tomorrow…” says a woman on her cell. Moving through the first-class cabin to my seat a gentleman by a window has this to say on his cell: “My heart’s not really into telling you how you screwed the thing up but that’s my assignment so for future reference please say I was an asshole, OK? Thank you.”
Taking care of business, as Elvis used to say.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Landlubbers
“So, Kate, how could we suck so bad at something so simple as rafting down a river?”
Kate, you see, was the only one among us with any nautical experience to speak of, having rowed varsity for Delaware’s crew team for a month or so last spring, before the 6 a.m. weight training sessions made it a job more than anything.
“Well, we had the crazy old man who thought he knew what he was jabbering about but didn’t know a thing, and he wouldn’t listen to me. His wife was basically dead weight. She didn’t touch an oar. So their side of the raft unbalanced us. Mom, ummm, she kind of got confused.
We were a tired, beat-up squad coming home from a bruising encounter. Heading south on the northeast extension of the PA turnpike, returning from “one of those awesome days we all dream about,” according to the Whitewater Challengers rafting brochure.
“I don’t think we ever once rowed in the same direction at the same time,” said mom. “Back stroke, forward stroke, back stroke, forward, I had trouble with that.”
“I think we were trying too hard,” said Kate. “And in rowing you have a coxswain telling you what to do. Dad, you didn’t even know port from starboard.”
What defense did I have? “I wasn’t going to tell Elva (the dead weight) to row if she didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t feel like it. And Josef, how can you push a little 67-year-old Hungarian refugee with that heavy accent?”
“He was a pisser,” laughed mom. “Telling every raft that we were racing for a case of beer. Calling that grim old guide with the bushy mustache wearing the silver metal helmet one of Hitler’s guards. Before he threw the buckets of water at the raft with the Japanese he told us, ‘Time to get ‘em back for Pearl Harbor’.”
“All I know is the picture they took of us from the trees or wherever they hid that camera, if you look nobody has their oar in the water except me. Did you notice?” I complained. “Not one oar in the water. Everyone’s holding on for life. I was doing all the work. Josef said, ‘Someone take out a life insurance policy on that man’. Steve, you look like a rangy young sophomore surfer dude with your shaggy blond hair and baggy trucks. I expected more out of you. Where’s your beaded necklace?”
“That picture was when we were going through the rapids,” said Steve. “You don’t need your oars in the water.”
“Dad, you looked like you’re falling out the back of the raft,” said Kate. “Mom, you looked like you’re trying to climb out.”
“I did fall out a couple of times,” I said. “Almost got slammed by the damn raft on the rocks ten minutes into the trip. See this knot on my shin?”
“I got run over too,” said Steve. “Couldn’t climb back in the boat.”
“The only time we went in a straight line was when I got out and pushed us,” I said.
“There were too many rafts out there,” said Steve. He was right. The only whitewater rafting in the entire Poconos seemed to be along a short stretch of the Lehigh River south of the town of Jim Thorpe. On this brilliant August Sunday when we were on the river, 400 rafts, red, blue, gray, green, from different adventure outfits, skittered about like absent-minded waterbugs. Every half mile or so we’d collide with another outfit’s party, gridlocked and blocking the river. The procession down the Lehigh was as disorderly and slow as a Mummer’s Parade; everyone dressed in blue life vests instead of feathers.
“I’ll never do it again,” declared Steve. “We’d start and stop. Start and stop. Then the guides made us wait. Who told us the whole thing would only take three or four hours?”
“It wasn’t exactly relaxing,” said Kate.
“The woman at Whitewater Challengers told us that,” said mom. “If she told the truth and said you’d leave at nine in the morning and get back at six at night, half the people wouldn’t go.”
“Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to do the day before soccer practice two-a-days begin,” frowned Steve.
“My ass was really starting to hurt, wasn’t yours?” asked mom. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of those rafts.”
“Josef said he was going to hang Elva by her ankles from their hotel balcony for suggesting the trip,” I said. “And we were on the supposedly ‘Easier Whitewater Rafting’ trip. Imagine the ‘Exhilarating’ trip. They’d still be searching for us. We really screwed up those last rapids. Went around the rocks totally ass-backwards. The young guide just smirked as we bounced by. Suburban flatlanders.”
“We went through all the rapids backwards,” noted Steve.
“The only thing we perfected was that spin move, you know, where we’d hit a rock dead on, then bounce around it sliding backwards and do a 360 to get turned around. Didn’t see anyone on the river spin out like we did,” I said.
“They didn’t have to,” said Kate. “Even the little kids, you know, the ones from some camp with that lazy, fat counselor who never stopped yakking, unless she was napping, she was so annoying, but even they rowed straighter than we did.”
“I think we tried too hard,” said mom.
“You’ll never get me back there,” said Steve.
“Come on, Steve, it was family bonding,” said mom.
And who ever said family bonding comes easy? No pain, no gain.
Kate, you see, was the only one among us with any nautical experience to speak of, having rowed varsity for Delaware’s crew team for a month or so last spring, before the 6 a.m. weight training sessions made it a job more than anything.
“Well, we had the crazy old man who thought he knew what he was jabbering about but didn’t know a thing, and he wouldn’t listen to me. His wife was basically dead weight. She didn’t touch an oar. So their side of the raft unbalanced us. Mom, ummm, she kind of got confused.
We were a tired, beat-up squad coming home from a bruising encounter. Heading south on the northeast extension of the PA turnpike, returning from “one of those awesome days we all dream about,” according to the Whitewater Challengers rafting brochure.
“I don’t think we ever once rowed in the same direction at the same time,” said mom. “Back stroke, forward stroke, back stroke, forward, I had trouble with that.”
“I think we were trying too hard,” said Kate. “And in rowing you have a coxswain telling you what to do. Dad, you didn’t even know port from starboard.”
What defense did I have? “I wasn’t going to tell Elva (the dead weight) to row if she didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t feel like it. And Josef, how can you push a little 67-year-old Hungarian refugee with that heavy accent?”
“He was a pisser,” laughed mom. “Telling every raft that we were racing for a case of beer. Calling that grim old guide with the bushy mustache wearing the silver metal helmet one of Hitler’s guards. Before he threw the buckets of water at the raft with the Japanese he told us, ‘Time to get ‘em back for Pearl Harbor’.”
“All I know is the picture they took of us from the trees or wherever they hid that camera, if you look nobody has their oar in the water except me. Did you notice?” I complained. “Not one oar in the water. Everyone’s holding on for life. I was doing all the work. Josef said, ‘Someone take out a life insurance policy on that man’. Steve, you look like a rangy young sophomore surfer dude with your shaggy blond hair and baggy trucks. I expected more out of you. Where’s your beaded necklace?”
“That picture was when we were going through the rapids,” said Steve. “You don’t need your oars in the water.”
“Dad, you looked like you’re falling out the back of the raft,” said Kate. “Mom, you looked like you’re trying to climb out.”
“I did fall out a couple of times,” I said. “Almost got slammed by the damn raft on the rocks ten minutes into the trip. See this knot on my shin?”
“I got run over too,” said Steve. “Couldn’t climb back in the boat.”
“The only time we went in a straight line was when I got out and pushed us,” I said.
“There were too many rafts out there,” said Steve. He was right. The only whitewater rafting in the entire Poconos seemed to be along a short stretch of the Lehigh River south of the town of Jim Thorpe. On this brilliant August Sunday when we were on the river, 400 rafts, red, blue, gray, green, from different adventure outfits, skittered about like absent-minded waterbugs. Every half mile or so we’d collide with another outfit’s party, gridlocked and blocking the river. The procession down the Lehigh was as disorderly and slow as a Mummer’s Parade; everyone dressed in blue life vests instead of feathers.
“I’ll never do it again,” declared Steve. “We’d start and stop. Start and stop. Then the guides made us wait. Who told us the whole thing would only take three or four hours?”
“It wasn’t exactly relaxing,” said Kate.
“The woman at Whitewater Challengers told us that,” said mom. “If she told the truth and said you’d leave at nine in the morning and get back at six at night, half the people wouldn’t go.”
“Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to do the day before soccer practice two-a-days begin,” frowned Steve.
“My ass was really starting to hurt, wasn’t yours?” asked mom. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of those rafts.”
“Josef said he was going to hang Elva by her ankles from their hotel balcony for suggesting the trip,” I said. “And we were on the supposedly ‘Easier Whitewater Rafting’ trip. Imagine the ‘Exhilarating’ trip. They’d still be searching for us. We really screwed up those last rapids. Went around the rocks totally ass-backwards. The young guide just smirked as we bounced by. Suburban flatlanders.”
“We went through all the rapids backwards,” noted Steve.
“The only thing we perfected was that spin move, you know, where we’d hit a rock dead on, then bounce around it sliding backwards and do a 360 to get turned around. Didn’t see anyone on the river spin out like we did,” I said.
“They didn’t have to,” said Kate. “Even the little kids, you know, the ones from some camp with that lazy, fat counselor who never stopped yakking, unless she was napping, she was so annoying, but even they rowed straighter than we did.”
“I think we tried too hard,” said mom.
“You’ll never get me back there,” said Steve.
“Come on, Steve, it was family bonding,” said mom.
And who ever said family bonding comes easy? No pain, no gain.
Time Out for Bonding
Spending a couple of nights in a Holiday Inn Express for a weekend of NASCAR races is not exactly the most popular form of teenage entertainment in the Northeast suburbs. But my son Steve is a 15-year-old hooked on NASCAR, so off we’ll go. But Steve has other plans as well, a movie with friends before we depart Friday eve.
His mother’s concern, it seems, is does dad have enough sleep in him to make the drive down to Chestertown, MD, our hotel locale, leaving about 9 or thereabouts. Mapquest says the drive should take 1 hour, 52 minutes. Total estimated distance: 90.85 miles. Shouldn’t be a problem. So what if I’m usually in bed reading some book or magazine by 9:30. So what it’s too damn bad Steve is three months short of being able to drive. My problem could well be reading the small print and numbers on the map, in the dark, with squinting eyes and no GPS. Where the hell’s Chesterton anyway?
It’s where the closest hotel exists that I could find for the Big Dover Monster Mile weekend. If the room didn’t cost $200 a night, I’d have cancelled Friday night and driven straight to the track Saturday for the afternoon Busch Series race. In fact, Steve asked if we could do just that a couple of nights ago. Alas, too late. Past the cancellation deadline.
So this compromise. Steve gets to go to the movies with who? Whom? A girlfriend? A gang? It’s a mystery, of course.
“Ready to go, Steve?” mom asks. To the movies, that is. “I’ll take him,” she says. “It’s a mom thing.”
I just wonder, has Steve done any packing whatsoever for the weekend? “No, I was going to do it while he was at the movies,” says his dutiful mom.
OK. I think I’ll just sit in the rocker here and have a couple bourbons. Don’t worry about a couple of shots of Kentucky’s finest. First, it’ll kill some time. Two, I’ll shower before we leave. And I’ll take a jumbo cup of java from Wawa before we try to find Chestertown.
“Choppa, choppa,” yells mom. “We gotta go. Movie’s almost starting?”
Just wait. Daughter Kate is showing me how download a ringtone for my new cellphone. Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” “C’mon, let’s go,” yells mom. The car’s running.
Just wondering. How’s Steve getting back from the movie?
“That’ll be figured out later,” says mom. Figured out later. It’s like a mantra.
One more act of practicality before hitting the Kentucky firewater. Call the reservation desk down in Chestertown. “Looks like we won’t be rolling in ‘til about 11:30 tonight. Just want to be sure we’ll have a room.” “Yessir. Your reservation’s guaranteed.” “Thanks.”
We pull out from the driveway about 9:30 pm. Steve climbs in the back seat to “chill” about 9:40. Around 10 three lanes on I-95 merge into one and it’s a crawl. On the tape deck Paul Simon sings about his nine-year-old traveling companion from his first marriage going to Graceland with him. Steve toured Graceland once. He might have seven or eight. Other than Elvis’s Jungle Room, all Steve wanted to know is “when’s this tour over?”
“Is this it?” he asks when we pull into the Holiday Inn Express about 11:30 pm. “How come you kept stalling out all the time?” Got a new clutch put in and yeah, it was touchy and I drove it like a teenager.
“All right if I take a whiz here?” Steve asks, hopping out of the car. What is it about young males pissing wherever they feel like it? I whizzed off the side of Jersey Turnpike one time in rush hour so who am I to tell him to hold it in?
“You do snore a lot, dad,” the boy says next morning upon rising. “Good thing you brought your earplugs.”
Steve does geometry homework, God bless him, and I drive and check out Chestertown, Maryland. It’s Eastern Shore rural upscale you could say. We’ll miss the diesel tractor pull this afternoon. Dollar discount stores in strip malls ring the downtown village green that’s circled by brick sidewalks. Then there the street, Philosopher’s Terrace, Idiot’s Books, an Intuitive Gardens service, “Unwind your mind” with a Swedish Deep Tissue therapist, and a farm house with pond going for $3 million from Select Realty.
Says a middle-aged woman in a wide-brim straw hat sipping coffee outside Play It Again, Sam: “In the evening we all sit around an parse over the news and have a glass of wine and fall asleep.”
OK, enough parsing, let’s go racing. Steve and I cruise past cornfields, yard sales and large rain puddles. I decide to ask him about last night’s movie. “What did you see?” “The Bourne movie.” “Not with girls, did you, that’s not a chick flick.” He smiles. “I don’t think you know who they are?” “They who, the girls?” He smiles.
This is delicate, dicey territory with a 15-year-old. “Can I get a name? Of the girl you went with.” “Mackenzie.” Ah, how far to venture? “She play sports, music? What’s she do out of school?” “She plays soccer.”
The inquisition shall end there. This is a road trip, not a torture trip. Thirteen yellow flags slow the RoadLoans.com 200 Busch Series race until almost the sun sets on Saturday afternoon. The Dover Raceway is maybe one-third full for this “B” series race. We catch dinner at a nearby TGIF Friday’s on Route 13 and get back to the hotel to watch three hours of college football on the Vizio flat screens. Good games. Kentucky 41, Arkansas 29. Georgia 26, Alabama 23, OT. Wisconsin 17, Iowa. 13.
Along the way, in the dark flatlands, Steve asks some hard questions: “(Since the race is in Delaware) What does DuPont make?” “How do you think we will get out of the Iraq war?” He answers that one himself: “There is no easy way to get out of a war, is there?”
Sunday the raceway is jammed with 120,000 fans. I wear an AC Milan Italian soccer league jersey to see if even one motor head in 120,000 know their soccer. Turns out two do: “AC Milan sucks!” yells one. The other, shirtless, eyes glazed, leaving after the racing, blurts, “Is that a soccer shirt? I always get lost at this point coming out of races.” He is, as kids would say, way lost.
Steve and I barely speak to each other during the race. For one thing, it’s so frickin’ loud. And we’re the equivalent of 15 stories up, a good 150 feet above the track. Plus the crowd around you at a NASCAR race is always entertaining. Steve calls it a traveling circus. I say it’s like a state fair fueled by beer, great quantities of beer. Two wide-assed guys sit in front of us. One’s tee shirt reads, “The Beer’s Prayer — Our lager, which art in barrel…” The other’s displays the Periodic Table of Fish Lures & Flies” in great detail. To the left of them sits a fellow with a black Mohawk, so black it’s got to be dyed.
We save our race analysis for the ride home. Steve does some English homework with one of the inside lights on. Mostly we play old hip hop cassette tapes of mine, but Steve, the iPod download boy, has trouble with retro tape player technology. He can’t figure how to insert a cassette, but he can set the correct time on my cell phone in maybe a minute. Would’ve taken me an hour.
Nearing home around 8:30 pm I need some loud tunes to fight the weekend fatigue factor setting in. Steve looks at my tape collection from the late ‘90s and hasn’t a clue what to play. “I got one for you.” It’s the Stones’ “Get yer Ya’s Ya’s Out,” recorded in Madison Square Garden November 27th and 28th, 19 frickin’ 69. My god, 38 years ago, 22 years before Steve was born. I talk about Keith Richards’ Swiss blood transfusions and the driving brilliance of Charlie Watts and the blues, how the Stones listened to the blues in their formative years. “I remember going to blues concerts with your mom. You know, blues fans are like NASCAR fans. Different. Strange looking longhairs and bikers. I’d say, ‘Where are these people during the week? You don’t see ‘em at the mall.’ Like NASCAR fans.”
Ah, there’s so much more to lecture on about the Stones, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. “Where’s the House of Blues?” asks Steve. But I stop. When I was 15, I wasn’t musing over music made 22 years ago in 1933. Not Duke Ellington , not Louis Armstrong, not yet. “It’s a pretty good album,” says Steve of “Yer Ya’s Ya’s.” We’ll leave it at that. When bonding, like many things, it’s what you don’t say sometimes that helps cement the bond.
His mother’s concern, it seems, is does dad have enough sleep in him to make the drive down to Chestertown, MD, our hotel locale, leaving about 9 or thereabouts. Mapquest says the drive should take 1 hour, 52 minutes. Total estimated distance: 90.85 miles. Shouldn’t be a problem. So what if I’m usually in bed reading some book or magazine by 9:30. So what it’s too damn bad Steve is three months short of being able to drive. My problem could well be reading the small print and numbers on the map, in the dark, with squinting eyes and no GPS. Where the hell’s Chesterton anyway?
It’s where the closest hotel exists that I could find for the Big Dover Monster Mile weekend. If the room didn’t cost $200 a night, I’d have cancelled Friday night and driven straight to the track Saturday for the afternoon Busch Series race. In fact, Steve asked if we could do just that a couple of nights ago. Alas, too late. Past the cancellation deadline.
So this compromise. Steve gets to go to the movies with who? Whom? A girlfriend? A gang? It’s a mystery, of course.
“Ready to go, Steve?” mom asks. To the movies, that is. “I’ll take him,” she says. “It’s a mom thing.”
I just wonder, has Steve done any packing whatsoever for the weekend? “No, I was going to do it while he was at the movies,” says his dutiful mom.
OK. I think I’ll just sit in the rocker here and have a couple bourbons. Don’t worry about a couple of shots of Kentucky’s finest. First, it’ll kill some time. Two, I’ll shower before we leave. And I’ll take a jumbo cup of java from Wawa before we try to find Chestertown.
“Choppa, choppa,” yells mom. “We gotta go. Movie’s almost starting?”
Just wait. Daughter Kate is showing me how download a ringtone for my new cellphone. Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” “C’mon, let’s go,” yells mom. The car’s running.
Just wondering. How’s Steve getting back from the movie?
“That’ll be figured out later,” says mom. Figured out later. It’s like a mantra.
One more act of practicality before hitting the Kentucky firewater. Call the reservation desk down in Chestertown. “Looks like we won’t be rolling in ‘til about 11:30 tonight. Just want to be sure we’ll have a room.” “Yessir. Your reservation’s guaranteed.” “Thanks.”
We pull out from the driveway about 9:30 pm. Steve climbs in the back seat to “chill” about 9:40. Around 10 three lanes on I-95 merge into one and it’s a crawl. On the tape deck Paul Simon sings about his nine-year-old traveling companion from his first marriage going to Graceland with him. Steve toured Graceland once. He might have seven or eight. Other than Elvis’s Jungle Room, all Steve wanted to know is “when’s this tour over?”
“Is this it?” he asks when we pull into the Holiday Inn Express about 11:30 pm. “How come you kept stalling out all the time?” Got a new clutch put in and yeah, it was touchy and I drove it like a teenager.
“All right if I take a whiz here?” Steve asks, hopping out of the car. What is it about young males pissing wherever they feel like it? I whizzed off the side of Jersey Turnpike one time in rush hour so who am I to tell him to hold it in?
“You do snore a lot, dad,” the boy says next morning upon rising. “Good thing you brought your earplugs.”
Steve does geometry homework, God bless him, and I drive and check out Chestertown, Maryland. It’s Eastern Shore rural upscale you could say. We’ll miss the diesel tractor pull this afternoon. Dollar discount stores in strip malls ring the downtown village green that’s circled by brick sidewalks. Then there the street, Philosopher’s Terrace, Idiot’s Books, an Intuitive Gardens service, “Unwind your mind” with a Swedish Deep Tissue therapist, and a farm house with pond going for $3 million from Select Realty.
Says a middle-aged woman in a wide-brim straw hat sipping coffee outside Play It Again, Sam: “In the evening we all sit around an parse over the news and have a glass of wine and fall asleep.”
OK, enough parsing, let’s go racing. Steve and I cruise past cornfields, yard sales and large rain puddles. I decide to ask him about last night’s movie. “What did you see?” “The Bourne movie.” “Not with girls, did you, that’s not a chick flick.” He smiles. “I don’t think you know who they are?” “They who, the girls?” He smiles.
This is delicate, dicey territory with a 15-year-old. “Can I get a name? Of the girl you went with.” “Mackenzie.” Ah, how far to venture? “She play sports, music? What’s she do out of school?” “She plays soccer.”
The inquisition shall end there. This is a road trip, not a torture trip. Thirteen yellow flags slow the RoadLoans.com 200 Busch Series race until almost the sun sets on Saturday afternoon. The Dover Raceway is maybe one-third full for this “B” series race. We catch dinner at a nearby TGIF Friday’s on Route 13 and get back to the hotel to watch three hours of college football on the Vizio flat screens. Good games. Kentucky 41, Arkansas 29. Georgia 26, Alabama 23, OT. Wisconsin 17, Iowa. 13.
Along the way, in the dark flatlands, Steve asks some hard questions: “(Since the race is in Delaware) What does DuPont make?” “How do you think we will get out of the Iraq war?” He answers that one himself: “There is no easy way to get out of a war, is there?”
Sunday the raceway is jammed with 120,000 fans. I wear an AC Milan Italian soccer league jersey to see if even one motor head in 120,000 know their soccer. Turns out two do: “AC Milan sucks!” yells one. The other, shirtless, eyes glazed, leaving after the racing, blurts, “Is that a soccer shirt? I always get lost at this point coming out of races.” He is, as kids would say, way lost.
Steve and I barely speak to each other during the race. For one thing, it’s so frickin’ loud. And we’re the equivalent of 15 stories up, a good 150 feet above the track. Plus the crowd around you at a NASCAR race is always entertaining. Steve calls it a traveling circus. I say it’s like a state fair fueled by beer, great quantities of beer. Two wide-assed guys sit in front of us. One’s tee shirt reads, “The Beer’s Prayer — Our lager, which art in barrel…” The other’s displays the Periodic Table of Fish Lures & Flies” in great detail. To the left of them sits a fellow with a black Mohawk, so black it’s got to be dyed.
We save our race analysis for the ride home. Steve does some English homework with one of the inside lights on. Mostly we play old hip hop cassette tapes of mine, but Steve, the iPod download boy, has trouble with retro tape player technology. He can’t figure how to insert a cassette, but he can set the correct time on my cell phone in maybe a minute. Would’ve taken me an hour.
Nearing home around 8:30 pm I need some loud tunes to fight the weekend fatigue factor setting in. Steve looks at my tape collection from the late ‘90s and hasn’t a clue what to play. “I got one for you.” It’s the Stones’ “Get yer Ya’s Ya’s Out,” recorded in Madison Square Garden November 27th and 28th, 19 frickin’ 69. My god, 38 years ago, 22 years before Steve was born. I talk about Keith Richards’ Swiss blood transfusions and the driving brilliance of Charlie Watts and the blues, how the Stones listened to the blues in their formative years. “I remember going to blues concerts with your mom. You know, blues fans are like NASCAR fans. Different. Strange looking longhairs and bikers. I’d say, ‘Where are these people during the week? You don’t see ‘em at the mall.’ Like NASCAR fans.”
Ah, there’s so much more to lecture on about the Stones, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. “Where’s the House of Blues?” asks Steve. But I stop. When I was 15, I wasn’t musing over music made 22 years ago in 1933. Not Duke Ellington , not Louis Armstrong, not yet. “It’s a pretty good album,” says Steve of “Yer Ya’s Ya’s.” We’ll leave it at that. When bonding, like many things, it’s what you don’t say sometimes that helps cement the bond.
The Lost Art of Conversation
Art forms rise and fall. Evolve, peak, and peter out. And so it goes.
At first man grunted. Eventually he conversed. And wrote and mailed and waited for letters. But all that might as well have taken place on another planet. This is what I discovered after a recent three-day spring break road trip with my 20-year-old daughter: After the ancient house phone died of neglect. After mobile phones and emails lost their lure. Beyond what now seems the old art of instant messaging, the world belongs to the nimble-fingered text messengers.
Kate and I were in the car traveling through Virginia for three days, the first three days of April, and though her purple cell phone (“I need a new one dad”) was always by her side, not once did she use it to actually call someone.
I take that back.
Once or twice she phoned her mother. And on the last day, about an hour from home on the PA Turnpike, she spoke with her roommate. “Only because she called me first,” according to Kate.
Otherwise, Kate was in more or less constant contact with friends up and down the East Coast by texting them. “I don’t like talking to people,” Kate confessed. “No unless I have to. Especially boys. They have nothing to say.”
Except Kevin, her old boyfriend. “He’s the only one I could actually talk to.” Once on vacation in the wilds of southern Utah, we had to drive 30 miles into the small town of Kanab each evening so she could get cell phone reception and whisper to Kevin from the back of our rented SUV.
But that seems long ago and far away. Now thousands of years of communication have been reduced to, or returned to, mysterious hieroglyphics:
ayt.
afaik. jk. pos.
np.
break sucks.
ruok?
rme. bored2death.
gal. hf.
em. pir. prw.
f2f p911? jw.
imo. kpc lotta work. iykwim.
weg. eod.
need gbh.
ilu.
gmta. ilu.
b4n.
ptb. aeap.
lu.
Lu2.
Translation:
Are you there?
Are far as I know. Just kidding. Parent over shoulder.
No problem.
Spring break sucks.
Are you OK?
Rolling my eyes. I’m bored to death.
Get a life. Have fun.
Excuse me? Parents in room. Parents are watching.
Face to face parent alert? Just wondering.
I my opinion, keeping parents clueless is a lot of work. If you know what I mean.
Wicked evil grin. End of discussion.
I need a great big hug.
I love you.
Great minds think alike. I love you.
Bye for now.
Please text back. As early as possible.
Love you.
Love you, too.
Every two or three minutes Kate would take her cell out of the glove compartment to check a new text. I’d never hear a beep, ring or buzz. Maybe she knew intuitively when a text was coming in. She’d quickly punch out a reply and put the cell back in the compartment.
On our brief road trip to Charlottesville and UVA, Monticello, Appomattox, Va Tech and my writing friend Professor Geller’s hilltop ranch lodge, I must admit Kate had no trouble hold a conversation. We discussed the former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer’s secret fondness for have prostitutes pee on him; the prospects of Obama actually winning the election; how the north, with its factories versus the south and its farms, was bound to win the Civil War; how we have no clue where brother/son Steve will wind up in college; the charm, and expense, of quilts; why Jefferson needed slave labor to operation his plantation; Tupac versus Biggie Smalls, who’s better; how lucky Jack Johnson is to live the surfer dude life in Hawaii and actually have a way of making in living with his music, and so on.
Still I wondered, if you’re not trapped behind the windshield with dad… “So Kate, what do you and your friends talk about when you’re actually face to face?”
“If it’s somebody I don’t know, it’s the usual questions. Where are you from? What’s your major? Where do you live? If we’re at a party, nobody talks anyway. It’s too loud.”
I was thinking while Kate talks. Let’s see: Automated teller machines handle our transactions. A computerized voice makes and confirms my flight or train reservations. The doc’s office has an automated prescription refill service. Pharmacy has automated prescription ordering. I always get automated receptionists. You can buy anything online. Buy or rent a house or a car online. Plan a vacation. Plan your retirement. Drive anywhere at the beck and call of the droning voice directions from the GPS.
“I don’ like talking to people if I can help it,” Kate says again.
“What if you get lost or can’t find what you need?”
“You ask them for me, OK? Will you?”
My faith in all things not texted or automated was restored less than an hour after we returned home. Kate retreated to her bedroom and I could hear her end of a cell conversation, must have been with that lasted a good hour-plus. Later that night a girlfriend from high school came over and they stayed up until three in the morning talking. “Yeah,” said Kate, “we talked like real human beings.”
The art of conversation may be at the tipping point, edging close to the abyss of automated voice programming and texting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, texting your wedding vows, texting your way through a job interview. “It’s just more efficient, dad. More to the point. And if you don’t have anything to say, you don’t say it.”
Just turn off your cell.
But we’re not there yet, thank god.
At first man grunted. Eventually he conversed. And wrote and mailed and waited for letters. But all that might as well have taken place on another planet. This is what I discovered after a recent three-day spring break road trip with my 20-year-old daughter: After the ancient house phone died of neglect. After mobile phones and emails lost their lure. Beyond what now seems the old art of instant messaging, the world belongs to the nimble-fingered text messengers.
Kate and I were in the car traveling through Virginia for three days, the first three days of April, and though her purple cell phone (“I need a new one dad”) was always by her side, not once did she use it to actually call someone.
I take that back.
Once or twice she phoned her mother. And on the last day, about an hour from home on the PA Turnpike, she spoke with her roommate. “Only because she called me first,” according to Kate.
Otherwise, Kate was in more or less constant contact with friends up and down the East Coast by texting them. “I don’t like talking to people,” Kate confessed. “No unless I have to. Especially boys. They have nothing to say.”
Except Kevin, her old boyfriend. “He’s the only one I could actually talk to.” Once on vacation in the wilds of southern Utah, we had to drive 30 miles into the small town of Kanab each evening so she could get cell phone reception and whisper to Kevin from the back of our rented SUV.
But that seems long ago and far away. Now thousands of years of communication have been reduced to, or returned to, mysterious hieroglyphics:
ayt.
afaik. jk. pos.
np.
break sucks.
ruok?
rme. bored2death.
gal. hf.
em. pir. prw.
f2f p911? jw.
imo. kpc lotta work. iykwim.
weg. eod.
need gbh.
ilu.
gmta. ilu.
b4n.
ptb. aeap.
lu.
Lu2.
Translation:
Are you there?
Are far as I know. Just kidding. Parent over shoulder.
No problem.
Spring break sucks.
Are you OK?
Rolling my eyes. I’m bored to death.
Get a life. Have fun.
Excuse me? Parents in room. Parents are watching.
Face to face parent alert? Just wondering.
I my opinion, keeping parents clueless is a lot of work. If you know what I mean.
Wicked evil grin. End of discussion.
I need a great big hug.
I love you.
Great minds think alike. I love you.
Bye for now.
Please text back. As early as possible.
Love you.
Love you, too.
Every two or three minutes Kate would take her cell out of the glove compartment to check a new text. I’d never hear a beep, ring or buzz. Maybe she knew intuitively when a text was coming in. She’d quickly punch out a reply and put the cell back in the compartment.
On our brief road trip to Charlottesville and UVA, Monticello, Appomattox, Va Tech and my writing friend Professor Geller’s hilltop ranch lodge, I must admit Kate had no trouble hold a conversation. We discussed the former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer’s secret fondness for have prostitutes pee on him; the prospects of Obama actually winning the election; how the north, with its factories versus the south and its farms, was bound to win the Civil War; how we have no clue where brother/son Steve will wind up in college; the charm, and expense, of quilts; why Jefferson needed slave labor to operation his plantation; Tupac versus Biggie Smalls, who’s better; how lucky Jack Johnson is to live the surfer dude life in Hawaii and actually have a way of making in living with his music, and so on.
Still I wondered, if you’re not trapped behind the windshield with dad… “So Kate, what do you and your friends talk about when you’re actually face to face?”
“If it’s somebody I don’t know, it’s the usual questions. Where are you from? What’s your major? Where do you live? If we’re at a party, nobody talks anyway. It’s too loud.”
I was thinking while Kate talks. Let’s see: Automated teller machines handle our transactions. A computerized voice makes and confirms my flight or train reservations. The doc’s office has an automated prescription refill service. Pharmacy has automated prescription ordering. I always get automated receptionists. You can buy anything online. Buy or rent a house or a car online. Plan a vacation. Plan your retirement. Drive anywhere at the beck and call of the droning voice directions from the GPS.
“I don’ like talking to people if I can help it,” Kate says again.
“What if you get lost or can’t find what you need?”
“You ask them for me, OK? Will you?”
My faith in all things not texted or automated was restored less than an hour after we returned home. Kate retreated to her bedroom and I could hear her end of a cell conversation, must have been with that lasted a good hour-plus. Later that night a girlfriend from high school came over and they stayed up until three in the morning talking. “Yeah,” said Kate, “we talked like real human beings.”
The art of conversation may be at the tipping point, edging close to the abyss of automated voice programming and texting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, texting your wedding vows, texting your way through a job interview. “It’s just more efficient, dad. More to the point. And if you don’t have anything to say, you don’t say it.”
Just turn off your cell.
But we’re not there yet, thank god.
Appy Who?
“Where is Appalachian State?”
“I dunno.”
“Boone, North Carolina.”
“Where’s Boone, North Carolina?”
“I dunno.”
“Do you pronounce it Appa-latch – ian or Appa-lay-ian State?”
“I think it’s Appa-latch-ian.”
This little tale should be about Delaware, or as an App State student had painted on her bare midriff, “Dela-where?” Apparently neither side was sure of the other. Our weekend road trip, with Kate, Steve and Kate’s look-alike roomie Alix, took us in mid-December to Chattanooga, Tennessee to see the Blue Hens battle the App State Mountaineers on a clear, 50-degree Friday night for the 2008 NCAA Division I Football Championship.
But for all intents and purposes, this was a home game for App State. Seventy percent of the 23,010 fans packing sold-out Finley Stadium were screaming Mountaineer Maniacs, according to a newspaper report the next day. Boone, it turns out, located in western North Carolina’s “High Country,” named after Daniel Boone and with a population of about 14,000, is but a four or five hour drive (269 miles) over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Chattanooga. Its mascot, Yosef, no, not the Hebrew slave from the Torah, but one serious hillbilly from a deep hollow, struts around in blue jean overhauls, yellow-and-black checkered flannel shirt, scraggly gray beard and mustache, floppy wide-brim hat and corncob pipe. And their fans are damn proud of him, judging from all the cars and pickups plastered with huge logos of his snarling face. We saw grown men, students and five-year-old boys dressed just like ole Yosef.
On one side of the stands the maniacs, clad in black and yellow, would yell, “App!”
“State!” came the booming answer from the opposite side of the field.
“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”
This chant, midway through the third quarter, roared on for what seemed forever. At least ten minutes. Of course by that time the game was 35-14 in favor of the Mountaineers. U Del students — give ‘em credit, they stood on the aluminum benches the whole damn game — were reduced to ridicule.
“Go back to your hillbilly shack and smoke some more dope!”
“Get your 2.0 grade points off the field!”
“In five years you’ll be working for us!”
“What’s the three fingers for?” (App State was on its way to winning its third straight national championship.) “Is that how many spliffs you can smoke at once?”
“This has got to be the worst officiated game in the history of football!”
“They screwed us when they said Omar didn’t score on that play in the first quarter. That changed the whole game. I’ve gotta see that replay on TV.”
“I’m not watching this game again. I’m burning my tape.”
Appy scored the first three times it got the ball, going up 21-0 with less than five minutes gone in the second quarter. One was a 99-yard drive that started after Delaware failed to punch it in from less than a yard out on third and fourth down, following the refs’ ruling that Omar’s knee hit the ground before he lunged over the goal line. That would be the aforementioned screw job. It took Appy all of one minute and 26 seconds to go those 99 yards.
Then right before halftime, Delaware finally got on the board, making it 21-7, with about a minute left in the half. “They’ve got to get out of the half without App State scoring again,” said Steve. He was right, but Delaware got it wrong. It took Appy a mere 21 seconds to score this time. Going 72 yards in two plays.
The guy in front of Steve, with the blue Delaware jersey and the flaming yellow spiked hair wig, sat down for the first time and buried his head in his hands.
Before the opening kickoff, the vastly outnumbered but determined U Del fans yelled again and again, “We’re not Michigan! We’re not Michigan!” This cheer alluded to the almost exact similarity between Delaware and Michigan football helmets, blue with three yellow stripes and yellow wing tips, and App State’s opening season 35-32 upset of Michigan that shocked the football world and put Appy on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Down 28-7 going into the half, someone in back of us muttered, “We are Michigan.”
Actually, it would get worse. In the second half App State went up 35-7. Then Omar scored to make it 35-14. But ASU put two more touchdowns on the board to go up 49-14.
“Look. K.C. (Delaware’s coach) has put his mic behind his neck. It’s that bad. He doesn’t even want to talk to anybody.”
“Where the hell was Flacco all night?” (Joe Flacco, Delaware’s six-foot five-inch towering quarterback, expected to be drafted next spring by the NFL, didn’t complete 50 percent of his passes tonight.)
Meanwhile, some U Del fans were damning App State’s flashy sophomore quarterback, Armanti Edwards, with faint praise indeed. “Look how skinny his legs are. My wrists are bigger than his calves.” Once Edwards had his helmet knocked off. “Look at that prison hairdo!” Kate turned and said, “Don’t they know every team has guys with dreadlocks now?”
When you’re getting blown out of a championship game, everyone is fair game for abuse: the other team, of course, the refs of course, your coach, your quarterback. Even Delaware’s band.
“Their band is way better than ours.”
“Where’s our band been all night? Maybe the wind’s blowing the wrong way, but I haven’t heard ‘em all night.” “The halftime show was terrible.”
We left, along with most of the 3,000 or so Delaware fans, mid-way through the fourth quarter when Appy scored to make it 42-14. “Tra-vel safe-ly, tra-vel safe-ly,” the App State fans serenaded us on the way out. Our timing was good. We missed the Mountaineer Maniacs storming the field with about three minutes left. They completely surrounded it except for the Delaware bench. Then when Delaware scored on a kickoff return, we missed the sight of the return man crossing the goal line and hurling the ball, apparently aiming for an App State fan, but instead nailing a policeman.
It was that kind of night for Delaware.
“I dunno.”
“Boone, North Carolina.”
“Where’s Boone, North Carolina?”
“I dunno.”
“Do you pronounce it Appa-latch – ian or Appa-lay-ian State?”
“I think it’s Appa-latch-ian.”
This little tale should be about Delaware, or as an App State student had painted on her bare midriff, “Dela-where?” Apparently neither side was sure of the other. Our weekend road trip, with Kate, Steve and Kate’s look-alike roomie Alix, took us in mid-December to Chattanooga, Tennessee to see the Blue Hens battle the App State Mountaineers on a clear, 50-degree Friday night for the 2008 NCAA Division I Football Championship.
But for all intents and purposes, this was a home game for App State. Seventy percent of the 23,010 fans packing sold-out Finley Stadium were screaming Mountaineer Maniacs, according to a newspaper report the next day. Boone, it turns out, located in western North Carolina’s “High Country,” named after Daniel Boone and with a population of about 14,000, is but a four or five hour drive (269 miles) over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Chattanooga. Its mascot, Yosef, no, not the Hebrew slave from the Torah, but one serious hillbilly from a deep hollow, struts around in blue jean overhauls, yellow-and-black checkered flannel shirt, scraggly gray beard and mustache, floppy wide-brim hat and corncob pipe. And their fans are damn proud of him, judging from all the cars and pickups plastered with huge logos of his snarling face. We saw grown men, students and five-year-old boys dressed just like ole Yosef.
On one side of the stands the maniacs, clad in black and yellow, would yell, “App!”
“State!” came the booming answer from the opposite side of the field.
“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”
This chant, midway through the third quarter, roared on for what seemed forever. At least ten minutes. Of course by that time the game was 35-14 in favor of the Mountaineers. U Del students — give ‘em credit, they stood on the aluminum benches the whole damn game — were reduced to ridicule.
“Go back to your hillbilly shack and smoke some more dope!”
“Get your 2.0 grade points off the field!”
“In five years you’ll be working for us!”
“What’s the three fingers for?” (App State was on its way to winning its third straight national championship.) “Is that how many spliffs you can smoke at once?”
“This has got to be the worst officiated game in the history of football!”
“They screwed us when they said Omar didn’t score on that play in the first quarter. That changed the whole game. I’ve gotta see that replay on TV.”
“I’m not watching this game again. I’m burning my tape.”
Appy scored the first three times it got the ball, going up 21-0 with less than five minutes gone in the second quarter. One was a 99-yard drive that started after Delaware failed to punch it in from less than a yard out on third and fourth down, following the refs’ ruling that Omar’s knee hit the ground before he lunged over the goal line. That would be the aforementioned screw job. It took Appy all of one minute and 26 seconds to go those 99 yards.
Then right before halftime, Delaware finally got on the board, making it 21-7, with about a minute left in the half. “They’ve got to get out of the half without App State scoring again,” said Steve. He was right, but Delaware got it wrong. It took Appy a mere 21 seconds to score this time. Going 72 yards in two plays.
The guy in front of Steve, with the blue Delaware jersey and the flaming yellow spiked hair wig, sat down for the first time and buried his head in his hands.
Before the opening kickoff, the vastly outnumbered but determined U Del fans yelled again and again, “We’re not Michigan! We’re not Michigan!” This cheer alluded to the almost exact similarity between Delaware and Michigan football helmets, blue with three yellow stripes and yellow wing tips, and App State’s opening season 35-32 upset of Michigan that shocked the football world and put Appy on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Down 28-7 going into the half, someone in back of us muttered, “We are Michigan.”
Actually, it would get worse. In the second half App State went up 35-7. Then Omar scored to make it 35-14. But ASU put two more touchdowns on the board to go up 49-14.
“Look. K.C. (Delaware’s coach) has put his mic behind his neck. It’s that bad. He doesn’t even want to talk to anybody.”
“Where the hell was Flacco all night?” (Joe Flacco, Delaware’s six-foot five-inch towering quarterback, expected to be drafted next spring by the NFL, didn’t complete 50 percent of his passes tonight.)
Meanwhile, some U Del fans were damning App State’s flashy sophomore quarterback, Armanti Edwards, with faint praise indeed. “Look how skinny his legs are. My wrists are bigger than his calves.” Once Edwards had his helmet knocked off. “Look at that prison hairdo!” Kate turned and said, “Don’t they know every team has guys with dreadlocks now?”
When you’re getting blown out of a championship game, everyone is fair game for abuse: the other team, of course, the refs of course, your coach, your quarterback. Even Delaware’s band.
“Their band is way better than ours.”
“Where’s our band been all night? Maybe the wind’s blowing the wrong way, but I haven’t heard ‘em all night.” “The halftime show was terrible.”
We left, along with most of the 3,000 or so Delaware fans, mid-way through the fourth quarter when Appy scored to make it 42-14. “Tra-vel safe-ly, tra-vel safe-ly,” the App State fans serenaded us on the way out. Our timing was good. We missed the Mountaineer Maniacs storming the field with about three minutes left. They completely surrounded it except for the Delaware bench. Then when Delaware scored on a kickoff return, we missed the sight of the return man crossing the goal line and hurling the ball, apparently aiming for an App State fan, but instead nailing a policeman.
It was that kind of night for Delaware.
Almost History
Last Saturday night… I had just put down a beer when the phone rings. “Hello, dad, can you come pick us up. Mike’s car ran off the road.”
“Are you OK? Is everyone alright?”
“Yeah. I might have a black eye but everyone’s alright.”
Off I go, figuring to find some kids next to a car stuck in the mud. As I get close to where they’re supposed to be, a line of idling cars is backed up. Sirens wail and it looks like a couple of fire engines and police cars are up ahead, strobes flashing. Shadowy figures are setting down flares.
I pull into a driveway, hop out of the car, and jog down to ask a patrolman directing traffic where the kids are. He points down an embankment. Three or four teens are shivering in the snow, next to a smashed, totaled sedan flipped on the passenger side. I ask where Kate, my daughter, is. They point to the ambulance.
She’s sitting inside, getting her “vitals” measured. “You sure you feel alright?” the EMT asks. Her face is pale. “If you get home and start feeling bad, call 911 or you can go to the hospital,” says the EMT, smiling. As Saturday night calls go, this one is a relief. Close, but amazingly, no injuries.
“Dad, I thought I was going to die,” said Kate. “Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. All I heard was breaking glass.
“I think Mike saved my life,” Kate said as we drove home. “He told me to put on my seat belt. I wasn’t going to because it was a short drive. But he made me.”
If I hadn’t seen the run-over mail box, the grazed telephone pole, the uprooted and hammered speed limit pole, and the severed wires that sent a transformer crashing to the ground, I don’t think I would’ve appreciated how close her escape was. The kids told the story one way to the police (“The car pulled out in front of me, sir”), for the parents (“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry”) and for each other (“It happened right by the high school. We knocked the lights out while the play was going on! I was never so scared in my life.”)
“Why did the police ask so many questions,” asked Kate.
“I’m going to get a five-hour lecture tomorrow,” said one of the boys in the car. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.” “That’s just the way my parents are.”
“Don’t think about,” a parent told me after hearing the story. “Those things happen. That’s why you wear seat belts. That’s about all you can say.”
Kate and her girlfriend said they’d never get in a car again unless their mom or dad was driving. That was right after the crash. A day later, spirits returning, she protested new rules about when and where she could drive with friends. Controls, more rules, this is what her close call got her. But I could have been driving her honesty with me into hiding.
What do we take from close calls? Everyone reacts with their own philosophy. All we can do is try to nurture the right response.
“What did you learn from it?” I asked Kate. “What do you mean?” “What would you do different the next time?” “Oh. I don’t know. I mean nobody did anything wrong.”
“What about wearing seat belts?” “Duh, well of course.”
Concessions and lessons come hard. We drove back to the crash scene the next day and I deliberately slowed to the speed limit — 35 mph. “Oh, we were definitely going faster than this. A lot faster,” she said.
Of course a line of cars was stacked up behind me. No one goes the speed limit on this stretch of road. When we got out to look at the damage from the night before, cars whizzed by going 50, 60 mph. “Look, everyone’s speeding,” Kate said.
“Are you OK? Is everyone alright?”
“Yeah. I might have a black eye but everyone’s alright.”
Off I go, figuring to find some kids next to a car stuck in the mud. As I get close to where they’re supposed to be, a line of idling cars is backed up. Sirens wail and it looks like a couple of fire engines and police cars are up ahead, strobes flashing. Shadowy figures are setting down flares.
I pull into a driveway, hop out of the car, and jog down to ask a patrolman directing traffic where the kids are. He points down an embankment. Three or four teens are shivering in the snow, next to a smashed, totaled sedan flipped on the passenger side. I ask where Kate, my daughter, is. They point to the ambulance.
She’s sitting inside, getting her “vitals” measured. “You sure you feel alright?” the EMT asks. Her face is pale. “If you get home and start feeling bad, call 911 or you can go to the hospital,” says the EMT, smiling. As Saturday night calls go, this one is a relief. Close, but amazingly, no injuries.
“Dad, I thought I was going to die,” said Kate. “Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. All I heard was breaking glass.
“I think Mike saved my life,” Kate said as we drove home. “He told me to put on my seat belt. I wasn’t going to because it was a short drive. But he made me.”
If I hadn’t seen the run-over mail box, the grazed telephone pole, the uprooted and hammered speed limit pole, and the severed wires that sent a transformer crashing to the ground, I don’t think I would’ve appreciated how close her escape was. The kids told the story one way to the police (“The car pulled out in front of me, sir”), for the parents (“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry”) and for each other (“It happened right by the high school. We knocked the lights out while the play was going on! I was never so scared in my life.”)
“Why did the police ask so many questions,” asked Kate.
“I’m going to get a five-hour lecture tomorrow,” said one of the boys in the car. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.” “That’s just the way my parents are.”
“Don’t think about,” a parent told me after hearing the story. “Those things happen. That’s why you wear seat belts. That’s about all you can say.”
Kate and her girlfriend said they’d never get in a car again unless their mom or dad was driving. That was right after the crash. A day later, spirits returning, she protested new rules about when and where she could drive with friends. Controls, more rules, this is what her close call got her. But I could have been driving her honesty with me into hiding.
What do we take from close calls? Everyone reacts with their own philosophy. All we can do is try to nurture the right response.
“What did you learn from it?” I asked Kate. “What do you mean?” “What would you do different the next time?” “Oh. I don’t know. I mean nobody did anything wrong.”
“What about wearing seat belts?” “Duh, well of course.”
Concessions and lessons come hard. We drove back to the crash scene the next day and I deliberately slowed to the speed limit — 35 mph. “Oh, we were definitely going faster than this. A lot faster,” she said.
Of course a line of cars was stacked up behind me. No one goes the speed limit on this stretch of road. When we got out to look at the damage from the night before, cars whizzed by going 50, 60 mph. “Look, everyone’s speeding,” Kate said.
Lightning Strikes
Came home from a run in Valley Forge Park one evening not long ago and as I got out of the car a neighbor came up on me quickly. My daughter had fallen off a bike, she said, and was at a dentist with her mom getting her teeth checked out. Turns out Kate busted her jaw in four places, necessitating a steel wiring job that made her "look like a monster," as she put it after surgery.
I've been writing about workplace injuries for years, but working in the friendly confines of a publishing company has not been conducive to first-hand reporting. After this wipe-out on the home front a couple of themes from past writing unfortunately came to life.
How fast the routine can turn into a night to remember, for example. A kid goes for a ride around the block with friends before dinner like a hundred nights before. Then she comes running home crying, bleeding, holding her head. Lightning strikes, and it's never expected.
All the doctors and nurses said it could've been worse if she hadn't been wearing a helmet. Too bad it wasn't a football helmet with face cage and chin strap — might have saved the jaw. Still, the protective equipment worked like an insurance policy you never expect to cash in on.
After Kate came home from the hospital and phone calls from family, friends, and neighbors tailed off, the finger-pointing began. Who's fault was this accident? After the worry subsides the anger kicks in. Was it the neighbor who was timing the kids to see how fast they'd go around the block? Kate and her friends were vague about what happened, not wanting to "get in trouble."
Accidents will happen, said some consoling friends. President Clinton said the same thing after tumbling down a few steps and ripping up his knee. But there are explanations, usually more than one.
The corner Kate skidded out on had loose gravel and could use some repairs — poor community housekeeping you might say.
She was on a friend's bike she hadn't ridden before, in a sense operating unfamiliar equipment.
The kids were racing — a fine form of peer pressure.
The worse the accident, the stronger the anger, guilt and other feelings. I have an inkling of how that works now. And also fresh respect for how fragile we are.
I've been writing about workplace injuries for years, but working in the friendly confines of a publishing company has not been conducive to first-hand reporting. After this wipe-out on the home front a couple of themes from past writing unfortunately came to life.
How fast the routine can turn into a night to remember, for example. A kid goes for a ride around the block with friends before dinner like a hundred nights before. Then she comes running home crying, bleeding, holding her head. Lightning strikes, and it's never expected.
All the doctors and nurses said it could've been worse if she hadn't been wearing a helmet. Too bad it wasn't a football helmet with face cage and chin strap — might have saved the jaw. Still, the protective equipment worked like an insurance policy you never expect to cash in on.
After Kate came home from the hospital and phone calls from family, friends, and neighbors tailed off, the finger-pointing began. Who's fault was this accident? After the worry subsides the anger kicks in. Was it the neighbor who was timing the kids to see how fast they'd go around the block? Kate and her friends were vague about what happened, not wanting to "get in trouble."
Accidents will happen, said some consoling friends. President Clinton said the same thing after tumbling down a few steps and ripping up his knee. But there are explanations, usually more than one.
The corner Kate skidded out on had loose gravel and could use some repairs — poor community housekeeping you might say.
She was on a friend's bike she hadn't ridden before, in a sense operating unfamiliar equipment.
The kids were racing — a fine form of peer pressure.
The worse the accident, the stronger the anger, guilt and other feelings. I have an inkling of how that works now. And also fresh respect for how fragile we are.
Between Angels and the GPS
"This is all about safety and security," I declared to my wife as the mission unfolded.
Whenever your 18-year-old daughter is traveling back roads far from home you better be talking safety and security. I've railed against crotchety lectures for years, but when it comes to your own kid, I see nothing wrong with exerting some command and control.
At least taking a stab at it.
The mission in this case was one of those teenage declarations of independence. And as history teaches us, declarations of independence carry with them an element of risk. This one was no different.
Kate was on a mission, your typical determined teenager, to drive to visit her boyfriend at his college some 200 miles away. MapQuest pegged the driving time at four hours and six minutes.
So before mission launch, naturally we reviewed the safety/security checklist:
Gas tank full? Yes.
Cell phone charged? Yes.
Seat belts buckled? Check.
Global positioning system operational? Not installed in this typical college freshman's used compact.
Should we rent a car with GSP? "Dad, you've got to be kidding."
Co-pilot, navigator, another warm body along for the ride? Negative. No room at the inn. Boyfriend's roommates won't allow it. Everyone eligible bailed. Pick your excuse. This would be a solo adventure
We reviewed the MapQuest directions. Too complicated for my liking, vague, confusing and open to multiple interpretations, like federal regulations. Too many turns, merges, towards, becomes — as in MD-5 becomes MD-5 S becomes MD-235 S. Twenty-eight steps, all told.
Kate was resolutely confident. "I get it, dad. Not a problem."
As she pulled away from the house, I thought of Peter Sandman, the risk communications expert, who recalled in an interview his eldest daughter once informing him: "Dad, if I’m optimizing only for safety then I'll never get out of the driveway. (Peter was paraphrasing I'm sure.) I have to compromise safety with getting somewhere.” Said Peter: "She was just flat out right. No one wants to optimize safety by shutting down."
Don't you hate it when the kids are "just flat out right"?
You can't shut 'em down; you just turn 'em over to the angels, as my brother says, who's raised a couple of hard-headed teenage boys.
Kate's mission from Philadelphia down to the southern tip of Maryland's western shore on the Chesapeake Bay went according to plan for, oh, about three hours.
Then my cell rang.
"Uh, dad, I missed my exit."
Outside it was becoming dark. I knew she had left too late. I stammered to her mother: "Why'd you let me let her leave when we knew it was getting too late?"
Our dining room became NASA's mission control, or the command bunker from the TV series "24." I only wish we had a counter-terrorist unit's cutting edge computerized surveillance tracking equipment. Instead, an old road atlas map of Maryland would have to do.
"OK, where are you?" I asked, my failing baby boomer eyes squinting at the impossibly small route numbers.
Turns out she was somewhere between Odenton and Bowie in Maryland. I was ready to abort the mission. But getting her to re-trace her steps, in the dark, to get back home would be no less risky than getting her on the road to her destination. Time for another safety/security check:
Windows rolled up? Check.
Doors locked? Check.
Cell phone battery OK? Check.
Night vision contacts in? Check.
From our mission control dining room table, her mom and I directed her, like some wayward astronaut in the night, back on course. But to confirm she was indeed on the right road (of course there were no road signs when needed) she'd have to pull into a 7-11 and ask at the counter. This was not my idea of "optimizing for safety." I didn't like the picture in my mind of this 18-year-old girl, tanned and looking fresh from spring break, stopping her car anywhere in the dark to question strangers.
"Keep your cell phone with you, Kate. What are you doing?" "I'm getting out of the car." "Now what are you doing?" "I'm waiting in line." "And now?" "Still waiting, dad."
How would the master risk communicator Peter Sandman have handled this?
We ended up on the cell phone with Kate for two hours, until the moment she drove into the Pizza Hut parking lot and saw her boyfriend's car, waiting to lead her the rest of the way. "Are you sure it's his?" "Yep." "Check again. Do you see him?" "Dad!" said Kate, exasperated.
I put away the map and stared at the clock. It was after ten. Somewhere between the angels and the GPS, I thought, there are things about your kid’s life you just can't control.
Whenever your 18-year-old daughter is traveling back roads far from home you better be talking safety and security. I've railed against crotchety lectures for years, but when it comes to your own kid, I see nothing wrong with exerting some command and control.
At least taking a stab at it.
The mission in this case was one of those teenage declarations of independence. And as history teaches us, declarations of independence carry with them an element of risk. This one was no different.
Kate was on a mission, your typical determined teenager, to drive to visit her boyfriend at his college some 200 miles away. MapQuest pegged the driving time at four hours and six minutes.
So before mission launch, naturally we reviewed the safety/security checklist:
Gas tank full? Yes.
Cell phone charged? Yes.
Seat belts buckled? Check.
Global positioning system operational? Not installed in this typical college freshman's used compact.
Should we rent a car with GSP? "Dad, you've got to be kidding."
Co-pilot, navigator, another warm body along for the ride? Negative. No room at the inn. Boyfriend's roommates won't allow it. Everyone eligible bailed. Pick your excuse. This would be a solo adventure
We reviewed the MapQuest directions. Too complicated for my liking, vague, confusing and open to multiple interpretations, like federal regulations. Too many turns, merges, towards, becomes — as in MD-5 becomes MD-5 S becomes MD-235 S. Twenty-eight steps, all told.
Kate was resolutely confident. "I get it, dad. Not a problem."
As she pulled away from the house, I thought of Peter Sandman, the risk communications expert, who recalled in an interview his eldest daughter once informing him: "Dad, if I’m optimizing only for safety then I'll never get out of the driveway. (Peter was paraphrasing I'm sure.) I have to compromise safety with getting somewhere.” Said Peter: "She was just flat out right. No one wants to optimize safety by shutting down."
Don't you hate it when the kids are "just flat out right"?
You can't shut 'em down; you just turn 'em over to the angels, as my brother says, who's raised a couple of hard-headed teenage boys.
Kate's mission from Philadelphia down to the southern tip of Maryland's western shore on the Chesapeake Bay went according to plan for, oh, about three hours.
Then my cell rang.
"Uh, dad, I missed my exit."
Outside it was becoming dark. I knew she had left too late. I stammered to her mother: "Why'd you let me let her leave when we knew it was getting too late?"
Our dining room became NASA's mission control, or the command bunker from the TV series "24." I only wish we had a counter-terrorist unit's cutting edge computerized surveillance tracking equipment. Instead, an old road atlas map of Maryland would have to do.
"OK, where are you?" I asked, my failing baby boomer eyes squinting at the impossibly small route numbers.
Turns out she was somewhere between Odenton and Bowie in Maryland. I was ready to abort the mission. But getting her to re-trace her steps, in the dark, to get back home would be no less risky than getting her on the road to her destination. Time for another safety/security check:
Windows rolled up? Check.
Doors locked? Check.
Cell phone battery OK? Check.
Night vision contacts in? Check.
From our mission control dining room table, her mom and I directed her, like some wayward astronaut in the night, back on course. But to confirm she was indeed on the right road (of course there were no road signs when needed) she'd have to pull into a 7-11 and ask at the counter. This was not my idea of "optimizing for safety." I didn't like the picture in my mind of this 18-year-old girl, tanned and looking fresh from spring break, stopping her car anywhere in the dark to question strangers.
"Keep your cell phone with you, Kate. What are you doing?" "I'm getting out of the car." "Now what are you doing?" "I'm waiting in line." "And now?" "Still waiting, dad."
How would the master risk communicator Peter Sandman have handled this?
We ended up on the cell phone with Kate for two hours, until the moment she drove into the Pizza Hut parking lot and saw her boyfriend's car, waiting to lead her the rest of the way. "Are you sure it's his?" "Yep." "Check again. Do you see him?" "Dad!" said Kate, exasperated.
I put away the map and stared at the clock. It was after ten. Somewhere between the angels and the GPS, I thought, there are things about your kid’s life you just can't control.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Choosing Day
That’s Walt Whitman’s term, by the way, not mine. Election Day fun, Kate coming home to vote for the first time and all, started the night before, about 8:15 pm. “Ah, dad, I’m up around Temple,” she calls on her cell. “We want to get to South Street and cheese steaks. I’m not where I should be, right?”
Roger that. Somehow, someway she’s one block off Broad Street in a bombed-out neighborhood. I hear J, her boyfriend, over the cell, “K, you have no idea where you are.”
“Whatever it takes, K, get back on Broad,” I say. Silence. “Are you on heading for City Hall? Do you see City Hall?” Silence. “I think so.” Then J says, “Mr. Johnson, we’re OK. We just got turned around.”
Election Day morning, nearing noon, I open the door to my home office, aka sleepover central, and it’s clear Kate is not ready to pull any levers. She’s propped up on pillows on the floor, playing a Super Mario video game. Still in her jammies. “Well, I’m going to vote now, Kate. I’ve seen some long lines at the polls. You can go with mom later.”
As an exercise in political awareness or whatever, Steve has the day off from school. Had to step over him to get the morning coffee. He likes to sleep on the floor when he can sleep in, with the dogs in front of the TV, which often will still be on from the night before. So what do you do when you’re trapped in a 1950s ranch house, with three kids sleeping on floor? You get out of Dodge. After checking to see that Kate wasn’t awake enough to decide who the next most powerful man in the world should be, I escape for a few hours. Came home to find Steve on his cell, trying to make something of his day off. “I don’t know man, I’m kind of broke, too. Yeah. Well, peace.” Then he returns to ESPN’s Sports Center.
Kate casts her ballot and she and J head back to the U of Del running late, and thus smack into rush hour traffic. They pull out of the driveway and Steve wheels right in, Wawa sandwich crammed in his mouth. Does he have plans for tonight? One sure bet: he won’t be hanging on the election returns.
That’s a pastime for pre-Internet adults. Katie Couric interviews PA Governor Rendall about 8:30 pm. “McCain will be buried in this state,” the guv grins ear to ear. The pundits pontificate on the national significance of the Philadelphia “exburbs” voting in record numbers and swinging PA’s Electoral College votes to the Big O, which might push him over the top. They get down to the specifics of small towns 15, 20, 30 miles surrounding downtown. Who’d of thunk it, Audubon at Ground Zero of the presidential election.
In another room, Steve’s watching the Suns and Nets on ESPN, or The Family Guy, or The Office, He handles the remote like a wizard, whizzing through hundreds of channels. Some textbooks and notebooks open on the sofa. “What’d ya, think about the election, Steve?” I ask. “Looks like it’s going to be a landslide,” he replies, not taking his eyes off the screen. How the hell does he know what’s going on? Ah, but the kids always know more than they let on.
Roger that. Somehow, someway she’s one block off Broad Street in a bombed-out neighborhood. I hear J, her boyfriend, over the cell, “K, you have no idea where you are.”
“Whatever it takes, K, get back on Broad,” I say. Silence. “Are you on heading for City Hall? Do you see City Hall?” Silence. “I think so.” Then J says, “Mr. Johnson, we’re OK. We just got turned around.”
Election Day morning, nearing noon, I open the door to my home office, aka sleepover central, and it’s clear Kate is not ready to pull any levers. She’s propped up on pillows on the floor, playing a Super Mario video game. Still in her jammies. “Well, I’m going to vote now, Kate. I’ve seen some long lines at the polls. You can go with mom later.”
As an exercise in political awareness or whatever, Steve has the day off from school. Had to step over him to get the morning coffee. He likes to sleep on the floor when he can sleep in, with the dogs in front of the TV, which often will still be on from the night before. So what do you do when you’re trapped in a 1950s ranch house, with three kids sleeping on floor? You get out of Dodge. After checking to see that Kate wasn’t awake enough to decide who the next most powerful man in the world should be, I escape for a few hours. Came home to find Steve on his cell, trying to make something of his day off. “I don’t know man, I’m kind of broke, too. Yeah. Well, peace.” Then he returns to ESPN’s Sports Center.
Kate casts her ballot and she and J head back to the U of Del running late, and thus smack into rush hour traffic. They pull out of the driveway and Steve wheels right in, Wawa sandwich crammed in his mouth. Does he have plans for tonight? One sure bet: he won’t be hanging on the election returns.
That’s a pastime for pre-Internet adults. Katie Couric interviews PA Governor Rendall about 8:30 pm. “McCain will be buried in this state,” the guv grins ear to ear. The pundits pontificate on the national significance of the Philadelphia “exburbs” voting in record numbers and swinging PA’s Electoral College votes to the Big O, which might push him over the top. They get down to the specifics of small towns 15, 20, 30 miles surrounding downtown. Who’d of thunk it, Audubon at Ground Zero of the presidential election.
In another room, Steve’s watching the Suns and Nets on ESPN, or The Family Guy, or The Office, He handles the remote like a wizard, whizzing through hundreds of channels. Some textbooks and notebooks open on the sofa. “What’d ya, think about the election, Steve?” I ask. “Looks like it’s going to be a landslide,” he replies, not taking his eyes off the screen. How the hell does he know what’s going on? Ah, but the kids always know more than they let on.
Into Oregon
Part of Oregon’s attraction has always been so far away. Even in 2008, if you stay off the interstates and away from the malls and the chains, you don’t travel far to find how untrammeled and wild much of the state remains. Yellow-and-black highway sign alone language tells the tale: “Rocks.” “Open Range.” “Snow Zone.” “Tsunami Area.” “Elk.” “Deer.” “Logging Trucks.” “Rough Road.” “Snowmobiling.” “Truck Rollover Danger.”
Hazards obviously aren’t what they were in 1846, but still, signs warn you: “Search and rescue or recovery costs will be paid by you or your heirs.” “Ocean bacteria levels have been measured high.” “Don’t pass snow removal trucks on right.” “Sharp turns ahead.” “Steep drop off.” On the back of a parking meter in Portland: “Hate is Hazardous.”
Oregon feels more remote and barren, more dangerous for a visiting Easterner, in February. No tourists beyond the snow enthusiasts. No one hundred-plus windsurfers out on the Columbia River by Hood River. February is not the postcard month for sun and color. What you will find: 111 inches of snow on the ground at Crater Lake. Roiling seas and storms off the Pacific pounding away at rocky beaches. Roads closed. Away from interstate commerce there’s a stillness that comes with deep snow. Plenty of hotel/motel vacancy signs. Along with rain, fog, and low-hanging cloud cover.
I lucked out. The road to Crater Lake is closed about 50 percent of the days in winter, according the lonely gift shop cashier the day I visited. That day the sky was such a peacock blue it was startling, with all shades of blue mirrored across the smooth as glass lake. I had the lake to myself, standing atop a 30-foot high snowy hill. No wind. Pure serenity, if not for the constant churn of an orange snow removal truck.
Next day on Mount Hood it was 62 degrees, zero wind, blinding sun, and ski instructors wearing tee shirts.
Very easily I could’ve flown the 2,860 miles from Philadelphia and seen neither the lake nor the mountain, if the winter clouds and fog and mist rolled in as usual. When the sun disappears the only colors in the gloom are black rocks and rivers, brown trees, dirt, various shades of gray — and most fortunately the green of the fir and pine woods. Deep dark forest green radiates a richness when the sun shines. The skies, rivers and lakes take on a brilliant blue, snow glistens and shadows dance. If you’re not so lucky with the weather, bring along only black and white film and do your Ansel Adams best.
No matter the time of year, Oregon offers up its craggy Pacific coastline, sand dunes and sea lion dens, the Cascade Range, the Columbia River Gorge, fossil beds, lava beds, buttes, caves, canyons, forests as far as the eyes can see, high desert country, grasslands and waterfalls. Most of all is space, the openness, and quiet solitude. It is a delightful peacefulness to roam an empty two-lane blacktop, with 30-40 mile vistas off in any direction, under an immense sky, on a day with ample sun.
It’s more than enough to lure a romantic and gridlocked Easterner like me almost 3,000 miles. So too the wind surfers, mountain climbers, hikers, runners, cyclists, skiers, hunters, fishermen, snowmobilers, sea captains, snow boarders, clam diggers, naturalists, spiritualists, individualists, nomads, ranchers, farmers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, artists, craftspeople, bead stringers, all “gone crazy.” Each bring their own reasons for coming here..
Lewis and Clark’s expedition came through the Cascade Mountains in canoes down the Columbia River past what’s now Portland in December 1805. For my mode of transport I choose a Toyota Rav4, a compact SUV with four-wheel drive, light gold before covered with road grit, from Dollar Car Rental at the Portland airport.
My solo expedition begins with a few days in Portland, taking care of business, since my magazine covered the airfare. The assignment: report on the annual gathering of the National Hearing Conservation Association, about 300 noise, sound and audiology techies, all seemingly on a first-name basis with each other. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant calls Portland “its own universe. Still a frontier town.” Several of his free-form films (“Elephant,” “The Last Days,” “Paranoid Park”) have been shot around Portland. The city of 568,380 or so doesn’t appear an outpost, with its sleek, glassy modern skyline. But at street level there is a certain “free form” to it. Folks meandering streets and parks and riding the transit make Portland seem to be America’s largest college town. Casual, hang loose, hip, funky, nerdy. There’s many a book reader holed up here. One bookstore in Eugene offers free buttons: “Readin’ in the rain 2008. Read more!” Portland also has a strong skateboard culture, featured in Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park.” And girls in vintage long sweaters, short skirts, black tights, scarves and sandals or boots. Guys in mirrored shades. Guys in black chic. Goth girls. Of course if you hang at Powell’s City of Books, the department store-sized bookstore at NW 10th and Burnside, you’ll see this laid-back fashion parade day and night. In wintertime, though, Portland takes on The North Face conformity. It pours rain days on end, just like the winter of 1805-06, when Lewis and Clark camped further west in what’s now Astoria.
Friday afternoon I escape my cushy downtown riverfront Marriott, take rail transit to Powell’s, then return, hop in my rental, and cruise out through the Gorge in the cloudy afternoon fading light to Hood River, about a 100-mile roundtrip. Cross the Columbia to into Washington and almost immediately get called out by a relaxed police officer in shades, sitting in his black and white patrol car. He observes that I’m standing on railroad tracks snapping photos, right beyond a “Warning: No Trespassing” sign. “Two or three photographers have been killed here,” he says. Then with a slight smile: “We try to keep people alive.”
I’ve brought my old manual Nikon fm 10, with two lenses: a 35-70mm standard lens and a 60-300mm zoom. Since I’m not digital, I’ve got film canisters with ISO speeds from 100 to 800, depending on the light. I don’t carry much else. About 20 CDs, a backpack with two books I won’t open, and a large Under Armour gym bag with gloves, thick socks, heat packets, wool cap, jeans, couple of shirts and tees, hygiene essentials, and a cardboard box to keep the conference business attire somewhat professional.
I bring along a few basic rules as well: don’t check bags at an airport, exit the interstates soon as possible, stay away from malldom, no global positioning system and its pushbutton predestination — let’s improvise — and try not to retrace your steps. Eighty to 90-percent of this trip of about 700-800 miles total will be on two-lane state roads. I don’t step near a mall, take a few wrong turns without the GPS, and rarely go down the same road twice. Mission accomplished.
The Gorge, even on a solid gray day, is flat-out grand. Sharp-rising cliffs and forests with moss-covered white ash, pines and varieties of fir. You smell the pines and feel the dampness. Falls rush over rocks, plunging hundreds of feet, flowing down through stone-strewn creeks. The view from the Washington side is preferable to me, though you’re further from the falls. This is mandolin pickin’ and grinnin’ country, or Merle Haggard or Willie or Waylon. Two fiddle players provided the soundtrack for the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, after all. Route 14 in Washington twists and turns through tunnels, S curves and up and around hills, past the old white-painted steel truss Bridge of the Gods. The span has a total cantilever length of 1,131 feet. It’s a startling man-made contrast to the natural magnificence surrounding it. Route 14 nearly brushes the front porch of the Cook House Cafe general store and diner in Stevenson, with local business cards pinned to the bulletin board, and then beyond the Gorge, takes a straight flat line west, back to Portland.
The next morning I bid farewell to the hearing conservationists and head south to Corvallis. A classic Greyhound Bus sign stands on the main drag. Low, boxy buildings are anchored by a square with an impressive white, red tile roofed county courthouse and clock tower. Oregon State U is a few blocks to the west, through a tree-lined residential neighborhood. There’s a rugby match going on, not much else. The sun is dancing in and out. OSU’s shimmering stainless steel and glass football stadium dominates the quiet campus. I lunch at small deli with a surf theme, The North Shore, downing a turkey “Pipeliner.”
Head west to Newport on the Pacific, with whale bones set out on a beach park and a Vietnam Memorial Stone right off the sand, with perhaps 25 names engraved. It’s fully overcast now, windy, with the strong smell of salt water. Then it’s south on the swerving Pacific Coast Highway as night falls to Florence, with a stop off at Seal Rock Beach. I’m on the cell with my wife when I tell her, “I’ve got to pull over and see this beach before the sun sets.” The bluffs 30 or 40 feet above the beach and tidepools are thick with old growth fir, spruce, oak and maple, rising steeply across the PCH. There is something primal about those black, jagged rock outcroppings, the whitecaps crashing in. A dad can’t get his young five or six-year-old boy off the gray beach. There’s something primal, too, about young boys loving to toss stones, and the beach is thick with handy , smooth stones. The Seal Rock monolith, moss-covered, rounded with age and perhaps 70 feet high, is close enough to touch at low tide. A lone red cedar log perhaps 25 feet long stretches out diagonally on the sand. At some point I pull over on PCH, roll the windows down, turn off the engine, and listen to the black ocean’s dull roar. About 6:30 pm the last light disappears over the cloud-laden horizon. What makes for that constant rushing roar? Then I get what I’d call an Oregon moment of freedom and it strikes me, don’t analyze. Just take it in.
Dinner in Florence, a sea town that jumps in the summer, is at the cozy Firehouse, lined with fire department caps and tee shirts from around the country. The co-owner, a man of about 60, sits at the next table with friends. They talk of the new casino up the road, changing times, fishing, the no smoking in restaurants ban, past vacations in Mexico, vacations to come. “Casino killed my bar business,” says the co-owner. “Had one guy who’d spend $50 a day. Gone. To the casino. I think it’s time for me just to go fish.” There’s talk I can’t decipher. Then: “You fear for your grandkids, don’t you?” Another snippet: “We ran out of common sense a long time ago.” He grabs hold of his manager. “See that woman slip by the bathroom. She all right?” “Yeah, I picked her up. Said she still liked her dinner.”
Drive in a drizzle east in the dark to Eugene on Route 126, listening to Carley and Lurrie Bell play the blues. Takes some patience on these twisting two-lane tree-lined roads when you’re behind laggards, especially at night in the rain. I notice a pattern though: Just about when you’ve run out of patience the sign appears, “Passing lane one mile.” Roll into the Best Western in Eugene and the drizzle has turned to steady, cold rain.
Rain or drizzle all the next day in Eugene. Eugene is a tale of two towns. One is the official downtown, with civic center, office buildings, parking garages and a pedestrian/consumer open mall. The other is the U of Oregon campus a mile or two south, with a typical college main street (E. 13th Avenue) of shabby coffee shops, Mexican take-outs, outdoor wear apparel, the U bookstore on a corner, pizza shops, a head shop with showcase bongs, and a hip American Apparel store my college junior daughter would love. Streets all have designated lanes for cyclists. This is the Eugene for me, ramshackle off-campus houses and all. A small church has been converted into a movie house. Tonight the Oscar Awards are being shown for free, starting at 5 pm. The House of Records, with a commendably large collection of surf and rockabilly CDs, is crammed into an old bungalow. I go for a local band, “The Sugar Beets,” woodsy mandolin, violin, guitars and harmonies, I picked up on in a Eugene weekly “scene” paper. Also a northwest band, “Floater,” that the paper mentioned, a thick-sounding metal trio. And “Surfme’n’tal” by the Brazilian self-described metal-surf-punk instrumental band, “Estrume’n’tal.” Fodder for my archaic CD collection that confounds my iPod-loving kids. Download Brazilian surf-punk-metal, go ahead. Actually, I’m sure you can.
Eugene is like Boulder, Colorado, with its official chic downtown pedestrian mall with chain restaurants and upscale boutiques, and then the shaggy U of Colorado campus main street up a hill. Same kind of post-‘60s easy-going vibe. Same feeling that the outdoors is essential. Similar mix of extreme sports stores, new-age bookstores, gray-haired ponytailed hippies, lean jocks in training, and plenty of java to go.
Both towns are running, climbing, hiking, cycling meccas. At nine on a Sunday morning in Eugene runners are out in the thin fog and rain, in wool caps or not, in shorts or tights, in pairs or alone, running the sidewalks. It’s raw, about 40 degrees. In the 82-year-old U of O gym, McArthur or Mac Court, there’s a three-on-three half-court roundball tourney going, Black-Eyed Peas hip hop echoes off the ancient rafters on the PA during warm-ups. The Mac has three decks, like the old Boston Garden. Wood seats crammed together. A single wooden door opens with a single door knob to the restroom. After another two seasons or so, it will be replaced by a $200-million gym, the largest college basketball arena in the country.
Down an alley from the Mac I catch a glimpse of a lacrosse game. I end up on the sideline next to Paul A. Bilder, M.D., from Cottage Grove, south of Eugene. He’s an old goalie from upstate New York, forced between the pipes by a bum ankle, played lacrosse in Utah while in pre-med, started the first high school lacrosse program outside of Portland down in Roseburg some years ago. Another Oregon pioneer. Paul’s seldom at a loss for words, as he’ll tell you, and he educates me on lacrosse’s western expansion. Cheery, smiling beneath his ball cap, Paul looks to be in his early 60. Says he’s cut back on his work, only 50 hours a week instead of 100. He’s also the U of O ice hockey club’s unofficial doc. One of the players calls his cell, complaining of a sore throat. Come on over to the game, says Paul. The kid wanders over, Paul steps away, they talk, I hear Paul on his cell calling in an antibiotic prescription. Then another call, from a diabetic with a low sugar count. Meanwhile, U of O’s club team is clobbering Washington State; the score ends up 30-0. “Won’t get worse than this,” one of the WSU guys says taking off his uniform after the game.
Next door is Hayward Field, the historic old track with roofed grandstands on opposite sides of the field where Steve Prefontaine, Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike with track coach Bill Bowerman, and the Men of Oregon won many titles. The field’s fenced in and locked up, under re-construction for this summer’s U.S. track and field Olympic trials.
In the rain, just at dusk, I get lost and then find Autzen Stadium, home of the U of O Ducks football team. It’s on the opposite side of the Willamette River from downtown and the campus, a bowl built into the ground with a huge green O lighted outside one end zone. Super boxes, sky boxes, club lounges have been recently added on, and the stadium is locked down with surveillance cameras and sensors like Fort Knox. Across a walkway are the glassy modern athletic offices, a huge barn-like indoor turf field and training center, a souvenir shop, groomed outdoor practice fields surrounded by shrubs and locked fence, and a plaza with a flaming torch. This multi-million-dollar compound has risen to impress old alums with deep pockets, dawn-to-dusk game day tailgaters, and teenage recruits with size and speed. Peering up at the flame through the rain splatter, it hits me: Eisenhower in the ‘50s warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex; today, we don’t do industry in America, now we’re overwhelmed by the 24/7 sports-entertainment complex.
On 91.9 KRVM a disc jockey named Rome conducts a humorous, fawning interview with a faux humble Yale grad who left law behind in Thailand to start sing pop jazz. She’s flattered when he compares her to Joni Mitchell. “Really? No one’s ever told me that before.” Everyone’s in show biz, no mater where you are. Over on 88.1 KWVA the U of O station plays African tribal tunes from 6-8 pm. I try to find my way back to the Best Western in the rain, the dark, beating the steering wheel to the tribal drums.
Out of Eugene early, 7 am, the next morning after grabbing a large coffee at one of the many drive-thru java huts and a stop-off at a grocery store for a water bottle and turkey roll up for lunch. Then it’s I-5 south to Route 58 east. Try a short cut off 58 to get to Crater Lake’s north rim, head round a bend of dry road and make a quick turn to the right only to plow through a low snow bank that catches me by surprise. The Rav4 rolls slowly to a stop on a snow-packed road in the woods that hasn’t been plowed. Move the Rav4 up the road about 20 yards in low gear, then shift into reverse to blast through the snow bank and get out before Georgia-Pacific security guards come to my rescue. So now it’s the long roundabout way to Crater Lake: 58 to Route 97 south to Route 138 east to Route 230 south to Route 62 east up to the lake. Snow is piled high on the ridges. Groves of thin aspens coated in white form walls of dense frozen columns. The north rim is closed during winter, so I’ve circled the lake to come in the only other way, from the south. The national park’s tremendous snowfall is a result of its position at the crest of the Cascade Mountain Range.
Some people cry when they climb to the top of the rim and look across the lake’s placid expanse. That’s their second reaction. First comes: “Holy shit, that’s a 900-foot drop straight down to the lake!” The opposite rim of the crater is almost six miles away. The lake is more than 1,900 feet deep, the deepest in the U.S. I clomp up a snow bank in sneaks to get my look. To my immediate right is the rustic Crater Lake Lodge, dating back to 1914, closed in winter, with long jagged icicles hanging along roof ledges. A 33-mile road encircles the crystal clear, deep blue lake along the rim, but it too is closed in winter. I didn’t have room to pack the boots needed to hike; the snow is almost knee deep. It’s about 29 degrees at high noon but it doesn’t feel cold in the sun and fresh, clean air. I don’t want to move, just meditate. Tranquility Base with three inches of fresh powder from last night. Evergreens are crushed by the weight of heavy snow, many twisted and bent at odd angles. Bare outstretched tree limbs form white skeletons. Stands of pines and firs rising on the rim’s ridges seem dusted with a powdery blanket of crystal white.
Head back down from the lake with snow walls 8-10 feet high on either side of the narrow road, wet with melting snow. Like a bobsled run. The Rav4 is in neutral, coasting pretty much the whole way, except for the snow and slush curves when I shift to low gear. No cars anywhere. Get back on 62 east across flatlands. Funny, an hour ago up on the rim I felt like the only person on earth; now I’m on my cell listening to my daughter Kate, from her apartment at the University of Delaware, describe in detail the plot of movie she saw last night. “You’re not going to see this, right? OK…”
62 meets up with 97, where I turn and drive north for a long stretch to Bend, hitting the gas and passing as many trucks and cars as I can when those passing lanes open up. Most of the way The Staples Singers are clapping and crooning ‘60s and ‘70s civil rights soul music. Civil rights seem somehow out of place where nature so dominates, but I enjoy the contrast between song and scenery. Stop for gas at a Chevron station in tiny Chemult with the needle just about on E. No self-serve in Oregon. An overweight young woman in a white tee walks out to pump the gas while I get out to put on my wet sneaks. “Oh, you drive like me,” she says. “Socks are more comfortable.” Another woman inside says, “Great day for a drive.” She would know. Bright days with ample sun and 50 degree temperatures in central Oregon are seldom seen in winter. All the more to illumine the barren, dusty plains dotted with sagebrush, windswept wheat-colored grasslands, sandy ravines and small canyons. Barbed wired and wooden fence posts run along the road. Horses, deer, sheep, cattle and rusted barns and farm equipment are a few hundred yards off 97; one or two farms have rotting yellow school buses planted in weeds. Signs highlight summer rodeos. These barren central plains seem the epitome of Oregon’s “do your thing” independence — whether it’s skateboarders, windsurfers, artists, Mount Hood climbers, ranchers, farmers, long distance runners or small businessmen. “You know them up in Salem,” I remember one of the guys at the next table at the Florence Firehouse saying while they discussed the no smoking ban in restaurants, referring to the state capital. Oregon wasn’t made for them bureaucrats.
My cells rings and it’s my wife. “I wasn’t going to call you, but I thought I might have missed your call.” All’s quiet on the home front. “It’s beautiful out here today.” “Too bad you can’t stay out there longer.” Right.
Before the trip I reserved a room in Bend, but found the Shiloh Inn was across from a mall. Forget that. So I cruise on past La Pine, then Bend, to Route 20, taking a left to head west into the sun. I had read in the Portland Sunday Oregonian about a town, Sisters, that sounds like a more natural place to spend the night. Sisters sits at the base of The Three Sisters Mountains in the Cascade Range. Population 1,706. I wind up at the FivePine Lodge and Conference Center, only a year old, all red cedar logs and stone, a business and weekend summer getaway retreat for well-off Portlanders. I get room number one. Right off the arched lobby with the grand fireplace and granite floor.
Smallest room they have, the young desk clerk says, comes with a king-size bed that could sleep a family of four, about a dozen pillows, a 42-inch plasma flat screen TV hidden above the electric fireplace, which can be viewed through open doors from the soaking tub. The Italian tile shower could easily fit a basketball team. Wood plank floor with Oriental rugs, hand-crafted Amish wood desk and nightstands, black leather easy chairs and foot rests by the fire, recessed lighting, tiffany lamps. “Health. Balance. Adventure,” is the FivePoint motto. The owner’s wife is a massage therapist, and you can stroll over to the Shibui Spa to get one. So much for being in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s about three hours southeast of Portland. And perhaps is there no nowhere anywhere anymore. I’ve read where a string of luxury golf courses has opened in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail.
They best milk this eco-tourism while they can. Oregon’s beaches are eroding, maybe because of warm air from Japan sent over the Pacific has stirred up some monster storms. And up on Crater Lake they get almost 200 inches less of snow now each winter than in the 1940s.
The Sunday paper also mentioned Bronco Billy’s restaurant in Sisters, so it’s ribs and a much too-large dish of ice cream and shortcake dessert at Billy’s. Posters of Clint Eastwood westerns hang from the wood-paneled walls. Next morning starts with 26 miles going back eastward on Route 126 to Redmond. Turn left onto 97 again and head north through high desert country. No snow across these plains. It’s like northern Wyoming, brown jagged hills, ranches, sand and gravel; a nice coat of road grit covers the car’s windows. To the left off 30 miles or so are The Three Sisters, each snow-capped at about 10,000 feet, and Mount Jefferson, which I first mistook for Mount Hood, standing at 10,497 feet.
At Madras a left turn puts me on Route 26, through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. A typically desolate western rez. Route 26 aims straight as an arrow at Mount Hood, rising 11,239 feet to a near-perfect snow cone peak. That’s when it’s visible. I’ve got another rare sunny February day and Hood can be seen from more than an hour’s drive away.
I leave 26 to take the Timberline Road turnoff, going up the mountain’s southern flank about six miles to the Timberline Lodge. Climbers launch their assaults on the peak from here, but today it’s all skiers and snowboarders. From a snowy parking lot I follow footsteps in the powder snow along a ridge, ducking into a few surprisingly roomy ice caves, I suppose dug out for training demonstrations. They are only a quarter-mile or less from the lodge.
As lonely and still as Crater Lake was yesterday, the parking lot is packed at Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge. The place buzzes with lunching skiers. It’s as though a freak “sun day” holiday was called in Portland and families, grade schoolers and college kids, middle-aged businessmen and women all drove out to the slopes. I’m very likely the only fool on the Hood wearing sneakers. And yes, I’ve never skied a day in my life.
After two hours or so clomping around extremely whiteness, sunglasses being de rigueur, I throw two soaked sneaks on the back seat, put on a fresh pair of dry socks, and the Rav4 rolls back down the lodge turnoff and west on 26, past Government Camp and Zigzag and farms in the Huckleberry Wilderness Area. One has a rickety wooden wheel barrel with cut evergreen branches in the front yard. Another showcases a piece of true rural roadside sculpture: a red rusted-out Harley Davidson, with skeleton wheels and frame and a rusted skeleton rider fashioned from metal parts, one fist raised above his helmeted skull, American flag flapping in the rear. But civilization looms. Portland’s suburbs stretch out to the town of Sandy, and the last hour of the drive is familiar stop-and-go early rush hour slowdowns past shopping centers and fast food chains.
There’s time for a last trip into town to Powell’s City of Books. I want to go back to the rack of “zines” and pick up some of these personalized blogs in bound print that certainly aren’t stocked at Border’s — “Reality Ranch,” “Survivalism (by a soldier in Iraq),” a series of “Four Hundred Words” of autobiographies, and “Sufism,” with the cover line: “The present time is history in its truest form.” How can you resist such a promise? It also hits me I’ve taken ten rolls of film with nary a shot of a human being. So I lean against a column at one of Powell’s entrances and shoot cars and couples and streetwalkers as the sun sets on office windows across the intersection. Nature’s not private, there’s no invasion taking natural shots. People, though, see the camera and duck. And my shots will turn out pedestrian, figuratively and literally. Then it’s back to the airport, to a Country Inn & Suites, to drop off the rental and to learn the second leg of my flight back tomorrow, from Chicago, has been cancelled. “Hello, can I get a four o’clock wake up call?” The United flight to L.A. leaves before dawn, and then it is the long haul back.
Hazards obviously aren’t what they were in 1846, but still, signs warn you: “Search and rescue or recovery costs will be paid by you or your heirs.” “Ocean bacteria levels have been measured high.” “Don’t pass snow removal trucks on right.” “Sharp turns ahead.” “Steep drop off.” On the back of a parking meter in Portland: “Hate is Hazardous.”
Oregon feels more remote and barren, more dangerous for a visiting Easterner, in February. No tourists beyond the snow enthusiasts. No one hundred-plus windsurfers out on the Columbia River by Hood River. February is not the postcard month for sun and color. What you will find: 111 inches of snow on the ground at Crater Lake. Roiling seas and storms off the Pacific pounding away at rocky beaches. Roads closed. Away from interstate commerce there’s a stillness that comes with deep snow. Plenty of hotel/motel vacancy signs. Along with rain, fog, and low-hanging cloud cover.
I lucked out. The road to Crater Lake is closed about 50 percent of the days in winter, according the lonely gift shop cashier the day I visited. That day the sky was such a peacock blue it was startling, with all shades of blue mirrored across the smooth as glass lake. I had the lake to myself, standing atop a 30-foot high snowy hill. No wind. Pure serenity, if not for the constant churn of an orange snow removal truck.
Next day on Mount Hood it was 62 degrees, zero wind, blinding sun, and ski instructors wearing tee shirts.
Very easily I could’ve flown the 2,860 miles from Philadelphia and seen neither the lake nor the mountain, if the winter clouds and fog and mist rolled in as usual. When the sun disappears the only colors in the gloom are black rocks and rivers, brown trees, dirt, various shades of gray — and most fortunately the green of the fir and pine woods. Deep dark forest green radiates a richness when the sun shines. The skies, rivers and lakes take on a brilliant blue, snow glistens and shadows dance. If you’re not so lucky with the weather, bring along only black and white film and do your Ansel Adams best.
No matter the time of year, Oregon offers up its craggy Pacific coastline, sand dunes and sea lion dens, the Cascade Range, the Columbia River Gorge, fossil beds, lava beds, buttes, caves, canyons, forests as far as the eyes can see, high desert country, grasslands and waterfalls. Most of all is space, the openness, and quiet solitude. It is a delightful peacefulness to roam an empty two-lane blacktop, with 30-40 mile vistas off in any direction, under an immense sky, on a day with ample sun.
It’s more than enough to lure a romantic and gridlocked Easterner like me almost 3,000 miles. So too the wind surfers, mountain climbers, hikers, runners, cyclists, skiers, hunters, fishermen, snowmobilers, sea captains, snow boarders, clam diggers, naturalists, spiritualists, individualists, nomads, ranchers, farmers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, artists, craftspeople, bead stringers, all “gone crazy.” Each bring their own reasons for coming here..
Lewis and Clark’s expedition came through the Cascade Mountains in canoes down the Columbia River past what’s now Portland in December 1805. For my mode of transport I choose a Toyota Rav4, a compact SUV with four-wheel drive, light gold before covered with road grit, from Dollar Car Rental at the Portland airport.
My solo expedition begins with a few days in Portland, taking care of business, since my magazine covered the airfare. The assignment: report on the annual gathering of the National Hearing Conservation Association, about 300 noise, sound and audiology techies, all seemingly on a first-name basis with each other. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant calls Portland “its own universe. Still a frontier town.” Several of his free-form films (“Elephant,” “The Last Days,” “Paranoid Park”) have been shot around Portland. The city of 568,380 or so doesn’t appear an outpost, with its sleek, glassy modern skyline. But at street level there is a certain “free form” to it. Folks meandering streets and parks and riding the transit make Portland seem to be America’s largest college town. Casual, hang loose, hip, funky, nerdy. There’s many a book reader holed up here. One bookstore in Eugene offers free buttons: “Readin’ in the rain 2008. Read more!” Portland also has a strong skateboard culture, featured in Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park.” And girls in vintage long sweaters, short skirts, black tights, scarves and sandals or boots. Guys in mirrored shades. Guys in black chic. Goth girls. Of course if you hang at Powell’s City of Books, the department store-sized bookstore at NW 10th and Burnside, you’ll see this laid-back fashion parade day and night. In wintertime, though, Portland takes on The North Face conformity. It pours rain days on end, just like the winter of 1805-06, when Lewis and Clark camped further west in what’s now Astoria.
Friday afternoon I escape my cushy downtown riverfront Marriott, take rail transit to Powell’s, then return, hop in my rental, and cruise out through the Gorge in the cloudy afternoon fading light to Hood River, about a 100-mile roundtrip. Cross the Columbia to into Washington and almost immediately get called out by a relaxed police officer in shades, sitting in his black and white patrol car. He observes that I’m standing on railroad tracks snapping photos, right beyond a “Warning: No Trespassing” sign. “Two or three photographers have been killed here,” he says. Then with a slight smile: “We try to keep people alive.”
I’ve brought my old manual Nikon fm 10, with two lenses: a 35-70mm standard lens and a 60-300mm zoom. Since I’m not digital, I’ve got film canisters with ISO speeds from 100 to 800, depending on the light. I don’t carry much else. About 20 CDs, a backpack with two books I won’t open, and a large Under Armour gym bag with gloves, thick socks, heat packets, wool cap, jeans, couple of shirts and tees, hygiene essentials, and a cardboard box to keep the conference business attire somewhat professional.
I bring along a few basic rules as well: don’t check bags at an airport, exit the interstates soon as possible, stay away from malldom, no global positioning system and its pushbutton predestination — let’s improvise — and try not to retrace your steps. Eighty to 90-percent of this trip of about 700-800 miles total will be on two-lane state roads. I don’t step near a mall, take a few wrong turns without the GPS, and rarely go down the same road twice. Mission accomplished.
The Gorge, even on a solid gray day, is flat-out grand. Sharp-rising cliffs and forests with moss-covered white ash, pines and varieties of fir. You smell the pines and feel the dampness. Falls rush over rocks, plunging hundreds of feet, flowing down through stone-strewn creeks. The view from the Washington side is preferable to me, though you’re further from the falls. This is mandolin pickin’ and grinnin’ country, or Merle Haggard or Willie or Waylon. Two fiddle players provided the soundtrack for the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, after all. Route 14 in Washington twists and turns through tunnels, S curves and up and around hills, past the old white-painted steel truss Bridge of the Gods. The span has a total cantilever length of 1,131 feet. It’s a startling man-made contrast to the natural magnificence surrounding it. Route 14 nearly brushes the front porch of the Cook House Cafe general store and diner in Stevenson, with local business cards pinned to the bulletin board, and then beyond the Gorge, takes a straight flat line west, back to Portland.
The next morning I bid farewell to the hearing conservationists and head south to Corvallis. A classic Greyhound Bus sign stands on the main drag. Low, boxy buildings are anchored by a square with an impressive white, red tile roofed county courthouse and clock tower. Oregon State U is a few blocks to the west, through a tree-lined residential neighborhood. There’s a rugby match going on, not much else. The sun is dancing in and out. OSU’s shimmering stainless steel and glass football stadium dominates the quiet campus. I lunch at small deli with a surf theme, The North Shore, downing a turkey “Pipeliner.”
Head west to Newport on the Pacific, with whale bones set out on a beach park and a Vietnam Memorial Stone right off the sand, with perhaps 25 names engraved. It’s fully overcast now, windy, with the strong smell of salt water. Then it’s south on the swerving Pacific Coast Highway as night falls to Florence, with a stop off at Seal Rock Beach. I’m on the cell with my wife when I tell her, “I’ve got to pull over and see this beach before the sun sets.” The bluffs 30 or 40 feet above the beach and tidepools are thick with old growth fir, spruce, oak and maple, rising steeply across the PCH. There is something primal about those black, jagged rock outcroppings, the whitecaps crashing in. A dad can’t get his young five or six-year-old boy off the gray beach. There’s something primal, too, about young boys loving to toss stones, and the beach is thick with handy , smooth stones. The Seal Rock monolith, moss-covered, rounded with age and perhaps 70 feet high, is close enough to touch at low tide. A lone red cedar log perhaps 25 feet long stretches out diagonally on the sand. At some point I pull over on PCH, roll the windows down, turn off the engine, and listen to the black ocean’s dull roar. About 6:30 pm the last light disappears over the cloud-laden horizon. What makes for that constant rushing roar? Then I get what I’d call an Oregon moment of freedom and it strikes me, don’t analyze. Just take it in.
Dinner in Florence, a sea town that jumps in the summer, is at the cozy Firehouse, lined with fire department caps and tee shirts from around the country. The co-owner, a man of about 60, sits at the next table with friends. They talk of the new casino up the road, changing times, fishing, the no smoking in restaurants ban, past vacations in Mexico, vacations to come. “Casino killed my bar business,” says the co-owner. “Had one guy who’d spend $50 a day. Gone. To the casino. I think it’s time for me just to go fish.” There’s talk I can’t decipher. Then: “You fear for your grandkids, don’t you?” Another snippet: “We ran out of common sense a long time ago.” He grabs hold of his manager. “See that woman slip by the bathroom. She all right?” “Yeah, I picked her up. Said she still liked her dinner.”
Drive in a drizzle east in the dark to Eugene on Route 126, listening to Carley and Lurrie Bell play the blues. Takes some patience on these twisting two-lane tree-lined roads when you’re behind laggards, especially at night in the rain. I notice a pattern though: Just about when you’ve run out of patience the sign appears, “Passing lane one mile.” Roll into the Best Western in Eugene and the drizzle has turned to steady, cold rain.
Rain or drizzle all the next day in Eugene. Eugene is a tale of two towns. One is the official downtown, with civic center, office buildings, parking garages and a pedestrian/consumer open mall. The other is the U of Oregon campus a mile or two south, with a typical college main street (E. 13th Avenue) of shabby coffee shops, Mexican take-outs, outdoor wear apparel, the U bookstore on a corner, pizza shops, a head shop with showcase bongs, and a hip American Apparel store my college junior daughter would love. Streets all have designated lanes for cyclists. This is the Eugene for me, ramshackle off-campus houses and all. A small church has been converted into a movie house. Tonight the Oscar Awards are being shown for free, starting at 5 pm. The House of Records, with a commendably large collection of surf and rockabilly CDs, is crammed into an old bungalow. I go for a local band, “The Sugar Beets,” woodsy mandolin, violin, guitars and harmonies, I picked up on in a Eugene weekly “scene” paper. Also a northwest band, “Floater,” that the paper mentioned, a thick-sounding metal trio. And “Surfme’n’tal” by the Brazilian self-described metal-surf-punk instrumental band, “Estrume’n’tal.” Fodder for my archaic CD collection that confounds my iPod-loving kids. Download Brazilian surf-punk-metal, go ahead. Actually, I’m sure you can.
Eugene is like Boulder, Colorado, with its official chic downtown pedestrian mall with chain restaurants and upscale boutiques, and then the shaggy U of Colorado campus main street up a hill. Same kind of post-‘60s easy-going vibe. Same feeling that the outdoors is essential. Similar mix of extreme sports stores, new-age bookstores, gray-haired ponytailed hippies, lean jocks in training, and plenty of java to go.
Both towns are running, climbing, hiking, cycling meccas. At nine on a Sunday morning in Eugene runners are out in the thin fog and rain, in wool caps or not, in shorts or tights, in pairs or alone, running the sidewalks. It’s raw, about 40 degrees. In the 82-year-old U of O gym, McArthur or Mac Court, there’s a three-on-three half-court roundball tourney going, Black-Eyed Peas hip hop echoes off the ancient rafters on the PA during warm-ups. The Mac has three decks, like the old Boston Garden. Wood seats crammed together. A single wooden door opens with a single door knob to the restroom. After another two seasons or so, it will be replaced by a $200-million gym, the largest college basketball arena in the country.
Down an alley from the Mac I catch a glimpse of a lacrosse game. I end up on the sideline next to Paul A. Bilder, M.D., from Cottage Grove, south of Eugene. He’s an old goalie from upstate New York, forced between the pipes by a bum ankle, played lacrosse in Utah while in pre-med, started the first high school lacrosse program outside of Portland down in Roseburg some years ago. Another Oregon pioneer. Paul’s seldom at a loss for words, as he’ll tell you, and he educates me on lacrosse’s western expansion. Cheery, smiling beneath his ball cap, Paul looks to be in his early 60. Says he’s cut back on his work, only 50 hours a week instead of 100. He’s also the U of O ice hockey club’s unofficial doc. One of the players calls his cell, complaining of a sore throat. Come on over to the game, says Paul. The kid wanders over, Paul steps away, they talk, I hear Paul on his cell calling in an antibiotic prescription. Then another call, from a diabetic with a low sugar count. Meanwhile, U of O’s club team is clobbering Washington State; the score ends up 30-0. “Won’t get worse than this,” one of the WSU guys says taking off his uniform after the game.
Next door is Hayward Field, the historic old track with roofed grandstands on opposite sides of the field where Steve Prefontaine, Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike with track coach Bill Bowerman, and the Men of Oregon won many titles. The field’s fenced in and locked up, under re-construction for this summer’s U.S. track and field Olympic trials.
In the rain, just at dusk, I get lost and then find Autzen Stadium, home of the U of O Ducks football team. It’s on the opposite side of the Willamette River from downtown and the campus, a bowl built into the ground with a huge green O lighted outside one end zone. Super boxes, sky boxes, club lounges have been recently added on, and the stadium is locked down with surveillance cameras and sensors like Fort Knox. Across a walkway are the glassy modern athletic offices, a huge barn-like indoor turf field and training center, a souvenir shop, groomed outdoor practice fields surrounded by shrubs and locked fence, and a plaza with a flaming torch. This multi-million-dollar compound has risen to impress old alums with deep pockets, dawn-to-dusk game day tailgaters, and teenage recruits with size and speed. Peering up at the flame through the rain splatter, it hits me: Eisenhower in the ‘50s warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex; today, we don’t do industry in America, now we’re overwhelmed by the 24/7 sports-entertainment complex.
On 91.9 KRVM a disc jockey named Rome conducts a humorous, fawning interview with a faux humble Yale grad who left law behind in Thailand to start sing pop jazz. She’s flattered when he compares her to Joni Mitchell. “Really? No one’s ever told me that before.” Everyone’s in show biz, no mater where you are. Over on 88.1 KWVA the U of O station plays African tribal tunes from 6-8 pm. I try to find my way back to the Best Western in the rain, the dark, beating the steering wheel to the tribal drums.
Out of Eugene early, 7 am, the next morning after grabbing a large coffee at one of the many drive-thru java huts and a stop-off at a grocery store for a water bottle and turkey roll up for lunch. Then it’s I-5 south to Route 58 east. Try a short cut off 58 to get to Crater Lake’s north rim, head round a bend of dry road and make a quick turn to the right only to plow through a low snow bank that catches me by surprise. The Rav4 rolls slowly to a stop on a snow-packed road in the woods that hasn’t been plowed. Move the Rav4 up the road about 20 yards in low gear, then shift into reverse to blast through the snow bank and get out before Georgia-Pacific security guards come to my rescue. So now it’s the long roundabout way to Crater Lake: 58 to Route 97 south to Route 138 east to Route 230 south to Route 62 east up to the lake. Snow is piled high on the ridges. Groves of thin aspens coated in white form walls of dense frozen columns. The north rim is closed during winter, so I’ve circled the lake to come in the only other way, from the south. The national park’s tremendous snowfall is a result of its position at the crest of the Cascade Mountain Range.
Some people cry when they climb to the top of the rim and look across the lake’s placid expanse. That’s their second reaction. First comes: “Holy shit, that’s a 900-foot drop straight down to the lake!” The opposite rim of the crater is almost six miles away. The lake is more than 1,900 feet deep, the deepest in the U.S. I clomp up a snow bank in sneaks to get my look. To my immediate right is the rustic Crater Lake Lodge, dating back to 1914, closed in winter, with long jagged icicles hanging along roof ledges. A 33-mile road encircles the crystal clear, deep blue lake along the rim, but it too is closed in winter. I didn’t have room to pack the boots needed to hike; the snow is almost knee deep. It’s about 29 degrees at high noon but it doesn’t feel cold in the sun and fresh, clean air. I don’t want to move, just meditate. Tranquility Base with three inches of fresh powder from last night. Evergreens are crushed by the weight of heavy snow, many twisted and bent at odd angles. Bare outstretched tree limbs form white skeletons. Stands of pines and firs rising on the rim’s ridges seem dusted with a powdery blanket of crystal white.
Head back down from the lake with snow walls 8-10 feet high on either side of the narrow road, wet with melting snow. Like a bobsled run. The Rav4 is in neutral, coasting pretty much the whole way, except for the snow and slush curves when I shift to low gear. No cars anywhere. Get back on 62 east across flatlands. Funny, an hour ago up on the rim I felt like the only person on earth; now I’m on my cell listening to my daughter Kate, from her apartment at the University of Delaware, describe in detail the plot of movie she saw last night. “You’re not going to see this, right? OK…”
62 meets up with 97, where I turn and drive north for a long stretch to Bend, hitting the gas and passing as many trucks and cars as I can when those passing lanes open up. Most of the way The Staples Singers are clapping and crooning ‘60s and ‘70s civil rights soul music. Civil rights seem somehow out of place where nature so dominates, but I enjoy the contrast between song and scenery. Stop for gas at a Chevron station in tiny Chemult with the needle just about on E. No self-serve in Oregon. An overweight young woman in a white tee walks out to pump the gas while I get out to put on my wet sneaks. “Oh, you drive like me,” she says. “Socks are more comfortable.” Another woman inside says, “Great day for a drive.” She would know. Bright days with ample sun and 50 degree temperatures in central Oregon are seldom seen in winter. All the more to illumine the barren, dusty plains dotted with sagebrush, windswept wheat-colored grasslands, sandy ravines and small canyons. Barbed wired and wooden fence posts run along the road. Horses, deer, sheep, cattle and rusted barns and farm equipment are a few hundred yards off 97; one or two farms have rotting yellow school buses planted in weeds. Signs highlight summer rodeos. These barren central plains seem the epitome of Oregon’s “do your thing” independence — whether it’s skateboarders, windsurfers, artists, Mount Hood climbers, ranchers, farmers, long distance runners or small businessmen. “You know them up in Salem,” I remember one of the guys at the next table at the Florence Firehouse saying while they discussed the no smoking ban in restaurants, referring to the state capital. Oregon wasn’t made for them bureaucrats.
My cells rings and it’s my wife. “I wasn’t going to call you, but I thought I might have missed your call.” All’s quiet on the home front. “It’s beautiful out here today.” “Too bad you can’t stay out there longer.” Right.
Before the trip I reserved a room in Bend, but found the Shiloh Inn was across from a mall. Forget that. So I cruise on past La Pine, then Bend, to Route 20, taking a left to head west into the sun. I had read in the Portland Sunday Oregonian about a town, Sisters, that sounds like a more natural place to spend the night. Sisters sits at the base of The Three Sisters Mountains in the Cascade Range. Population 1,706. I wind up at the FivePine Lodge and Conference Center, only a year old, all red cedar logs and stone, a business and weekend summer getaway retreat for well-off Portlanders. I get room number one. Right off the arched lobby with the grand fireplace and granite floor.
Smallest room they have, the young desk clerk says, comes with a king-size bed that could sleep a family of four, about a dozen pillows, a 42-inch plasma flat screen TV hidden above the electric fireplace, which can be viewed through open doors from the soaking tub. The Italian tile shower could easily fit a basketball team. Wood plank floor with Oriental rugs, hand-crafted Amish wood desk and nightstands, black leather easy chairs and foot rests by the fire, recessed lighting, tiffany lamps. “Health. Balance. Adventure,” is the FivePoint motto. The owner’s wife is a massage therapist, and you can stroll over to the Shibui Spa to get one. So much for being in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s about three hours southeast of Portland. And perhaps is there no nowhere anywhere anymore. I’ve read where a string of luxury golf courses has opened in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail.
They best milk this eco-tourism while they can. Oregon’s beaches are eroding, maybe because of warm air from Japan sent over the Pacific has stirred up some monster storms. And up on Crater Lake they get almost 200 inches less of snow now each winter than in the 1940s.
The Sunday paper also mentioned Bronco Billy’s restaurant in Sisters, so it’s ribs and a much too-large dish of ice cream and shortcake dessert at Billy’s. Posters of Clint Eastwood westerns hang from the wood-paneled walls. Next morning starts with 26 miles going back eastward on Route 126 to Redmond. Turn left onto 97 again and head north through high desert country. No snow across these plains. It’s like northern Wyoming, brown jagged hills, ranches, sand and gravel; a nice coat of road grit covers the car’s windows. To the left off 30 miles or so are The Three Sisters, each snow-capped at about 10,000 feet, and Mount Jefferson, which I first mistook for Mount Hood, standing at 10,497 feet.
At Madras a left turn puts me on Route 26, through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. A typically desolate western rez. Route 26 aims straight as an arrow at Mount Hood, rising 11,239 feet to a near-perfect snow cone peak. That’s when it’s visible. I’ve got another rare sunny February day and Hood can be seen from more than an hour’s drive away.
I leave 26 to take the Timberline Road turnoff, going up the mountain’s southern flank about six miles to the Timberline Lodge. Climbers launch their assaults on the peak from here, but today it’s all skiers and snowboarders. From a snowy parking lot I follow footsteps in the powder snow along a ridge, ducking into a few surprisingly roomy ice caves, I suppose dug out for training demonstrations. They are only a quarter-mile or less from the lodge.
As lonely and still as Crater Lake was yesterday, the parking lot is packed at Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge. The place buzzes with lunching skiers. It’s as though a freak “sun day” holiday was called in Portland and families, grade schoolers and college kids, middle-aged businessmen and women all drove out to the slopes. I’m very likely the only fool on the Hood wearing sneakers. And yes, I’ve never skied a day in my life.
After two hours or so clomping around extremely whiteness, sunglasses being de rigueur, I throw two soaked sneaks on the back seat, put on a fresh pair of dry socks, and the Rav4 rolls back down the lodge turnoff and west on 26, past Government Camp and Zigzag and farms in the Huckleberry Wilderness Area. One has a rickety wooden wheel barrel with cut evergreen branches in the front yard. Another showcases a piece of true rural roadside sculpture: a red rusted-out Harley Davidson, with skeleton wheels and frame and a rusted skeleton rider fashioned from metal parts, one fist raised above his helmeted skull, American flag flapping in the rear. But civilization looms. Portland’s suburbs stretch out to the town of Sandy, and the last hour of the drive is familiar stop-and-go early rush hour slowdowns past shopping centers and fast food chains.
There’s time for a last trip into town to Powell’s City of Books. I want to go back to the rack of “zines” and pick up some of these personalized blogs in bound print that certainly aren’t stocked at Border’s — “Reality Ranch,” “Survivalism (by a soldier in Iraq),” a series of “Four Hundred Words” of autobiographies, and “Sufism,” with the cover line: “The present time is history in its truest form.” How can you resist such a promise? It also hits me I’ve taken ten rolls of film with nary a shot of a human being. So I lean against a column at one of Powell’s entrances and shoot cars and couples and streetwalkers as the sun sets on office windows across the intersection. Nature’s not private, there’s no invasion taking natural shots. People, though, see the camera and duck. And my shots will turn out pedestrian, figuratively and literally. Then it’s back to the airport, to a Country Inn & Suites, to drop off the rental and to learn the second leg of my flight back tomorrow, from Chicago, has been cancelled. “Hello, can I get a four o’clock wake up call?” The United flight to L.A. leaves before dawn, and then it is the long haul back.
Ghosts on a 5/8 Mile Oval
“You got no business bein’ up there. I’m callin’ the sheriff.”
With that, the young large woman in white shorts trundles back into her trailer.
Is he going to show? How many minutes have we to escape? Won’t be hard to find us in this little town. I look down at her trailer, and parked in front of it our flaming red Hertz Ford Mustang we rented from the “Fun Collection” for the hell of it. No, it won’t be hard to spot that Mustang.
Steve, my 16-year-old son, and I look at each other. “We better make our getaway,” I say. We’re maybe 30, 40 feet up, atop the ruins of the North Wilkesboro Speedway. The view is outstanding, and I keep clicking pictures. We’re standing on the splintering black wood planks of the spotter’s perch above the press box. It’s about 97 degrees, mid July, in the Northern High Country of North Carolina. Some call it the soul of NASCAR nation.
For a huge nation, it’s got a small soul, and it’s not easy to find. North Wilkesboro’s population is about 4,100. “Out there,” is how the locals describe the Northern High Country, where Carolina’s coastal expanse rises into rolling hills and then, further west, the Blue Ridge Mountains. No major highways lead into the high country. Not much in the way of fast food, motels and malls. Just red roof barns, pastures, apple orchards, churches and more churches. Old cabins, lonesome homes, rivers, ravines, hollows, valleys dipping and rising, hills, hard red clay, and thick forests of pines, birch, ash, oaks and maples. Everything, trees, telephone poles and lines, billboards, abandoned cars, drapped in kudzu, like an ever-growing blanket of thick leafy vines.
Perfect for hiding the old creek-side moonshine stills that made surrounding Wilkes County the self-described white lightning capital of America in the 1930s,‘40s and ‘50s. A number of the bootleggers hauling more than 100 gallons of ‘shine out of the foothills, outgunning treasury agents in supercharged, turbocharged Fords, Dodges and Chryslers that roared across Route 421 up to 115 miles per hour, became NASCAR’s earliest racers.
I imagine the trailer woman on the phone. “The kid looks like a surfer, sheriff, lanky with a mop of blond hair. The father’s smaller ‘n he’s wearin’ a pink tee shirt with palm trees on it.”
We clamber down the press box’s stairs, search for the quickest way out. “I want to take one more look,” says Steve. I snapped a couple last shots. We climb over a chain link locked gate. No barbed wire luckily. Jump in the Mustang and leave the trailer and the track in the dust.
Fifteen minutes later we’re safely eating lunch in the Mustang in a Food Lion parking lot — bananas and bottled water, typical grab-and-go road trip grub. We look at all the pickups. Not a mini-van in sight. So what are a couple of Yankees from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, doing parked in a Food Lion shopping center keeping an eye out for the sheriff?
It’s a secret pilgrimage.
Why the secrecy? NASCAR’s fan and revenue growth have exploded wildly in the past 15 years. Attendance at races averaged 127,000 in 2006, according to Forbes magazine. (The NFL averaged 67,000 that year). Sponsors shelled out $650 million in ’06 to have their logos painted on NASCAR’s top 35 cars. Races deserted the likes of the homey confines of North Wilkesboro Speedway in the mid-‘90s for modern tracks across the country, from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. Still, stock car racing carries a stigma, no more so than in the East Coast megalopolis.
A sportswriter in Philadelphia prints a NASCAR quote of the week, in which he finds a driver saying something about fried bologna sandwiches being his favorite, to make the point one more time that the sport (which he fails to dignify as a sport) is overblown, unfathomable hype full of sixth-grade dropouts, tire changers, and Bud-swilling, pot-bellied rednecks.
So to be a NASCAR loyalist in a suburban East Coast enclave calls for going underground. Otherwise you’re an alien from Alabama or someplace else covered in kudzu. If Steve is watching a race on a Sunday afternoon and his friends come knocking, he hops up, goes to door, and talks with ‘em outside. Sometimes he just tapes a race and watches it that night. When his buds troop through the house, the F1 Racing, Racer, Speed Sport News, and MotorSport magazines are stashed away. Nothing much he can do about the 12-inch wide, 27-inch diameter bald Goodyear Eagle tire sitting at the foot of his bed. He got it at the Las Vegas Speedway once and rolled it through the Vegas and Philly airports. I’ve had my own scrapes with the stereotype. Not long ago my wife made me strip off from our familymobile’s windows about a half-dozen NASCAR team numbers (every driver’s car has the same number plastered on both sides all season). “I’m not driving that car,” she protested. “People think we’re hillbillies.” This is a smart, liberal, reasonable woman, mind you.
Growing up, none of my friends were aware of my interest in hillbilly racing. In the late ‘60s, a few years after my father died and I was a few years younger than Steve, one of the things I did to pass time was glue together plastic model stockers, paint ‘em, and stick on the numbers and sponsor decals. I watched NASCAR races on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with the legendary Chris Economaki barking his reports from the pits. He wrote his first racing column when he was 14, in 1934. At 87 he still writes his column in Speed Sport News.
So what’s the fascination with watching 43 very fast, wildly painted cars make left turns for four hours? Could be any number of things. Speed pure and simple. Noise, the roar from the track. What’s called “tradin’ paint” or running “door to door.” A driver trying to wrest control of his car fish-tailing at a 100 miles an hour ‘round a tight turn. Watching a mad racer tear through the field, passing cars high and low. Cars racing “three wide.” Spin outs, cartwheels, T-bone collisions. Blown tires, engines and tempers. Ten-second tire changes, refuels and body adjustments. Bumper-to-bumper drafting. Sometimes two cars coming down the stretch for a nose-to-nose finish.
Maybe it’s the culture. You get it or you don’t. Us versus them. Makes you feel like you own something that’s just yours.
Or it could go beyond the oval. Maybe it’s the names of racers down through the years. Junior Johnson, a North Wilkesboro native who spent 11 months in a federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio after his arrest at his daddy’s still. Fireball Roberts. Cale Yarborough. Richard “The King” Petty. Dale “The Intimidator” Earnhardt. Earnhardt Junior. Benny “BP” Parsons. Maybe it’s the rivalries. The duels between King Richard and David Pearson. The infield fist fight between Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers, Donnie and Bobby.
Or how racing gets in a family’s blood lines. Four generations of Pettys have raced: Lee, Richard, Kyle and Adam. Early on there were the four Flock siblings: Ethel, Tim, Bob and Fonty. Ned and Dale Jarrett, father and son. The Earnhardts. Darrell “DW” Waltrip and his brother Michael. Rusty and brother Kenny Wallace, and now Rusty’s son Steve.
Or perhaps it’s the romance of some of the hallowed tracks themselves. Rockingham, “The Rock,” now gone from NASCAR’s schedule. North Wilkesboro, shuttered in 1996 after 50 years. Darlington, “Too Tough to Tame,” in South Carolina. Bristol, “Thunder Valley,” in Tennessee. Martinsville, with its paper-clip shaped oval, in Virginia. Talledaga’s superspeedway in Alabama. For a sport second in TV ratings only to the NFL, can anyone find these places on a map? Then of course there’s Daytona in Florida, where they raced on the beach before building a speedway.
Pilgrimages are part of sport. Life-long baseball fans go to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium, to sense the grandeur of the sport’s past. The more timid might settle for Boston’s Fenway Park or the Cubs’ Wrigley Field. NFL fanatics find their way up to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. These shrines aren’t exactly Stonehenge. Yankee Stadium will be razed after this season. For ice hockey cultists, the old Maple Leaf Gardens, Montreal Forum and Boston Gardens are history.
So Steve and I slipped out of Philadelphia without a trace early one Sunday morning (needless to say, mom stayed home) to track down the roots of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing — NASCAR. Before prime time TV coverage, the Speed Channel, the Car of Tomorrow (the universal car design forced on every team to improve safety and lower costs). Before multimillionaire track owners purchased places like North Wilkesboro solely to shut them down and move their races to new frontiers like Kansas City or Chicagoland. Before smiling Earnhardt Junior’s Wrangler commercials. Before the sponsor millions poured in — Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, DuPont, 3M, M&Ms, the U.S. Army, Bass Pro Shops, Alltel, Best Buy, Cheerios, Caterpillar, Dewalt, Jack Daniels, and obviously, Budweiser.
We cruised up I-77 one morning from our base in Mooresville, North Carolina — about 25 miles north of Charlotte, sitting on the sprawling and glittering Lake Norman, and called “Race City USA” because of the 30-50 team corporate offices and garages in the area. What exactly we were going to find in backwoods North Wilkesboro was a mystery. We knew the speedway still existed, mothballed by its current owners, Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre, who refuse to sell out. (Smith needed an extra security detail when he left the speedway after the last race in 1996.)
I had been there twice before: dragging my wife through the town on our honeymoon to the Smokey Mountains 25 years ago, and passing the track at a distance on a very remote sales call about 18 years ago. “What kind of business did you call on out here?” wondered Steve, looking out the window at nothing but brush and farmland. “An old glove factory full of women at knitting machines. Called Golden Needles. Long gone.”
After barreling about an hour north on the interstate, we turned left on Route 421, and headed west 14 miles. Three miles from the track we stopped to read the recently planted roadside historical marker. “North Wilkesboro Speedway. Pioneer NASCAR dirt track built in 1946; paved in 1958. Hosted sanctioned events, 1949-96. 5/8 mile oval. 3 mi. W.”
The adrenaline kicked in. And then minutes later, damn, there’s the track, still standing. Many pilgrims in the past dozen years have made this trip and stood where we were now. Some actually have camped out on the grounds. Most snap photos from the highway. But from a distance you could be looking at the remains of an oversized high school football stadium. A tattered “NASCAR Winston Cup Series” billboard invites us up the half-paved, half gravel entrance road. We take it slow and the Mustang bounces along.
“We gotta get in,” I said, surveying for an opening. Steve stared at me. “Aren’t we trespassing?” For a second I considered my role model obligations. But it was easy to rationalize: The boy is 16. Hell, when Junior Johnson was 16 he left plowing a mule and planting corn to start running ‘shine for his dad. “We came this far,” I said, “and it’s still here standing. What, are we just going to get back in the car?” Seeing nothing but rusted locks at every gate, I eventually found a cinder block wall with the toehold and heaved myself up and over. Steve shrugged and scampered over.
We had the speedway to ourselves. Sixty thousand empty seats. Single tier concrete stands with gray metal fold-back chair seats anchored in long rows still ring the track. The “North Wilkesboro Speedway” sign stretches beneath the dark and empty press box, its red background and white lettering framed in black. The infield, with large swaths of dirt patches, is overgrown with wild grass. The electronic black scoring tower still rises atop a pole, as does the familiar “76” orange and blue circular gas sign next to the one remaining infield garage. The pit lane is divided by low concrete walls, with white paint cracked and peeling. The red and white Winston Cup Series lettering, red and white Coca-Cola letters, and the black and white North Wilkesboro Speedway signs on the outer pit wall are gouged and faded by the relentless Carolina summers.
The paved oval track, with its 14-degree banked turns and the front straightaway that dips slightly and the back straightaway that slopes up, still has white lane makers and a wide white finish line. But the region’s sudden, drenching storms over the years have opened up cracks everywhere. Rows of grass run up and down either side of the finish line and zig-zag along the track in long stretches.
Truman “Fonty” Flock, a Georgia bootlegger, won the first race here when it was a dirt track on May 5, 1947. Brother Bob Flock won the first NASCAR-sanctioned race in 1949, taking home a purse of $3,800. One year Dale Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace drove side-by-side for around ten laps straight dueling for the lead. In ’72, Bobby Allison and Richard Petty traded the lead 13 times in the Wilkes 400. In ’88, Earnhardt and Ricky Rudd banged fenders for the final 41 laps. Both were black-flagged for rough driving and sent to the back of the field. A fight in the infield got out of hand once and track officials threw a yellow flag to slow the race so one of the pugilists could be tossed in a car, driven around the track and out of the speedway. King Petty won here 15 times, the record. One of those times he was attacked by a drunk in victory lane. In all, North Wilkesboro featured 73 NASCAR races in 50 years.
After we get the warning the sheriff is coming, we stand at the top of one of the faded blue concrete aisles to take a last look around. Weeds sprout up between the steps. There’s nothing much to say, like walking a graveyard or a battlefield.
An hour later, banana peels tossed in the back seat, lunch finished, we head out of the Food Lion lot aiming to head south to Taylorsville. Steve’s not much of a map reader, something of a lost art with the GPS generation. I think I know our way, but not for long. The narrow two-laner we’re on starts twisting and turning up and down the Brushy Mountain ridges, an isolated spur of the Blue Ridges. Soon we’re absolutely lost in the Wilkes County apple country. I’ve driven the Pacific Coast Highway twisting through Big Sur. Down a steep gravel road on the side of a southern Utah canyon with the family horrified. Nothing compares to this unknown, unnumbered county road in the North Carolina Piedmont for S curves, one after another after another, for a half hour or so at least.
No wonder Junior Johnson was once quoted saying stock car racing was a comedown compared to running moonshine. I couldn’t imagine racing these curves in the night without searchlights. Junior would take them sideways, clipping mailboxes and newspaper boxes — with the headlights off. He was famous, as Tom Wolfe described in “The Last American Hero,” for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” where, coming up to a “revenuer” roadblock, he’d throw the car into second gear, twist the wheel, hit the accelerator, and make the car’s rear end skid around in a complete arc, then tear back up the same road he came down.
“It’s official, Steve.” “What?” “I have no idea where we are.” “You sure?” “Sooner or later we’ll hit a road with a number. Right now we’re off the map.” The maps shows nearby towns like Thankful, Love Valley, Hunting Creek, Boomer. We’ve driven more than an hour without coming to a stop light or stop sign. The only people we’ve seen are road crews. Every so often we get a fleeting glimpse through the pines of the Blue Ridges, maybe 10-15 miles to the west, then we lean into another tight curve. Somewhere nearby is Brushy Mountain Township, population 524, where the most common job is driving a truck and the median age is 43. The “Brushies” as the natives call these hills usually rise from 300 to 800 feet. Hickory Knob. Walnut Knob. Fox Mountain. Asbury Mountain. It’s isolated. Slow. Very green.
Or as an Internet blogger posted when I was researching the trip, “First and foremost, Wilkes County is BACKWOODS country. You have backwoods people who live miles from anyone and may or may not have luxuries such as electricity. There is absolutely positively nothing to do in all of Wilkes County.”
The family calls Steve the mystery man because he’s the quiet type, laid back like a surfer dude. Maybe he’ll respond with a Marlon Brando mumble sometimes. He is 16. But he doesn’t brood. He’s a pleasant traveling companion. Unless we’re stuck in traffic (“Isn’t there another way?), on a long road trip (“Couldn’t we have flown?”), or there’s static on the radio (“Mind if I turn that off?”). iPods have no static.
I don’t own an iPod, despite the urgings of Steve and his sister Kate. “You got to get one. You got to get one. We’ll get one for you.” No thanks. I’m a tactile person. I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs. I like pulling them out, pulling out the liner notes and reading about the musicians and where the music was made. I like to look at my collection, like a library of books.
Once Steve accepted that we were off the map and his dad had no idea where we were going, he settled back and we listened to music to soothe our frustrations. Old-timey mountain music would have been the most appropriate soundtrack, but show me a 16-year suburban boy who’ll listen to fiddles, mandolins, banjos, maybe wooden spoons, a washtub and an autoharp. So it was The Clash’s “London Calling.” Clash alums Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and Mick Jones and Carbon/Silicon. The Band. The Roots. Bob Marley. The Strokes. The Libertines. With music as with racing, the kid appreciates his history. He’s got more than 1,000 iTune songs on his Mac, half of them must be from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That would have been like me at 16 listening to Benny Goodman, Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters. Last thing I wanted to hear was my parents’ music. Maybe there is something to this classic rock hype.
“Why do you think Sgt. Pepper’s was the Beatles’ best album?” asks Steve at one point. How do you answer something that profound? Particularly when you’re lost on unmarked roads. “I don’t think it is. I’d go for Revolver.” “A lot of people say Sgt. Pepper.” “It was the album cover. Had all these famous people on it. Tarzan. Bob Dylan. W.C. Fields. Laurel and Hardy.” “Who?” “A doll wearing a ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones’ sweater.” “On an album cover?” “Believe it, Steve. Album covers used to mean something.”
We finally emerge from the wilds of the Brushies totally by chance not design, and hang a right onto the Wilkesboro Highway, which takes us in short order to I-80, east to Statesville, and back down I-77 south. It’s all familiar again. Interstates are interstates. We’re back in the land of the homogenized. But for a while there we were chasing ghosts, moonshine ridge runners and oval daredevils. And about that threat of a call to the sheriff, mom never will know.
With that, the young large woman in white shorts trundles back into her trailer.
Is he going to show? How many minutes have we to escape? Won’t be hard to find us in this little town. I look down at her trailer, and parked in front of it our flaming red Hertz Ford Mustang we rented from the “Fun Collection” for the hell of it. No, it won’t be hard to spot that Mustang.
Steve, my 16-year-old son, and I look at each other. “We better make our getaway,” I say. We’re maybe 30, 40 feet up, atop the ruins of the North Wilkesboro Speedway. The view is outstanding, and I keep clicking pictures. We’re standing on the splintering black wood planks of the spotter’s perch above the press box. It’s about 97 degrees, mid July, in the Northern High Country of North Carolina. Some call it the soul of NASCAR nation.
For a huge nation, it’s got a small soul, and it’s not easy to find. North Wilkesboro’s population is about 4,100. “Out there,” is how the locals describe the Northern High Country, where Carolina’s coastal expanse rises into rolling hills and then, further west, the Blue Ridge Mountains. No major highways lead into the high country. Not much in the way of fast food, motels and malls. Just red roof barns, pastures, apple orchards, churches and more churches. Old cabins, lonesome homes, rivers, ravines, hollows, valleys dipping and rising, hills, hard red clay, and thick forests of pines, birch, ash, oaks and maples. Everything, trees, telephone poles and lines, billboards, abandoned cars, drapped in kudzu, like an ever-growing blanket of thick leafy vines.
Perfect for hiding the old creek-side moonshine stills that made surrounding Wilkes County the self-described white lightning capital of America in the 1930s,‘40s and ‘50s. A number of the bootleggers hauling more than 100 gallons of ‘shine out of the foothills, outgunning treasury agents in supercharged, turbocharged Fords, Dodges and Chryslers that roared across Route 421 up to 115 miles per hour, became NASCAR’s earliest racers.
I imagine the trailer woman on the phone. “The kid looks like a surfer, sheriff, lanky with a mop of blond hair. The father’s smaller ‘n he’s wearin’ a pink tee shirt with palm trees on it.”
We clamber down the press box’s stairs, search for the quickest way out. “I want to take one more look,” says Steve. I snapped a couple last shots. We climb over a chain link locked gate. No barbed wire luckily. Jump in the Mustang and leave the trailer and the track in the dust.
Fifteen minutes later we’re safely eating lunch in the Mustang in a Food Lion parking lot — bananas and bottled water, typical grab-and-go road trip grub. We look at all the pickups. Not a mini-van in sight. So what are a couple of Yankees from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, doing parked in a Food Lion shopping center keeping an eye out for the sheriff?
It’s a secret pilgrimage.
Why the secrecy? NASCAR’s fan and revenue growth have exploded wildly in the past 15 years. Attendance at races averaged 127,000 in 2006, according to Forbes magazine. (The NFL averaged 67,000 that year). Sponsors shelled out $650 million in ’06 to have their logos painted on NASCAR’s top 35 cars. Races deserted the likes of the homey confines of North Wilkesboro Speedway in the mid-‘90s for modern tracks across the country, from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. Still, stock car racing carries a stigma, no more so than in the East Coast megalopolis.
A sportswriter in Philadelphia prints a NASCAR quote of the week, in which he finds a driver saying something about fried bologna sandwiches being his favorite, to make the point one more time that the sport (which he fails to dignify as a sport) is overblown, unfathomable hype full of sixth-grade dropouts, tire changers, and Bud-swilling, pot-bellied rednecks.
So to be a NASCAR loyalist in a suburban East Coast enclave calls for going underground. Otherwise you’re an alien from Alabama or someplace else covered in kudzu. If Steve is watching a race on a Sunday afternoon and his friends come knocking, he hops up, goes to door, and talks with ‘em outside. Sometimes he just tapes a race and watches it that night. When his buds troop through the house, the F1 Racing, Racer, Speed Sport News, and MotorSport magazines are stashed away. Nothing much he can do about the 12-inch wide, 27-inch diameter bald Goodyear Eagle tire sitting at the foot of his bed. He got it at the Las Vegas Speedway once and rolled it through the Vegas and Philly airports. I’ve had my own scrapes with the stereotype. Not long ago my wife made me strip off from our familymobile’s windows about a half-dozen NASCAR team numbers (every driver’s car has the same number plastered on both sides all season). “I’m not driving that car,” she protested. “People think we’re hillbillies.” This is a smart, liberal, reasonable woman, mind you.
Growing up, none of my friends were aware of my interest in hillbilly racing. In the late ‘60s, a few years after my father died and I was a few years younger than Steve, one of the things I did to pass time was glue together plastic model stockers, paint ‘em, and stick on the numbers and sponsor decals. I watched NASCAR races on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with the legendary Chris Economaki barking his reports from the pits. He wrote his first racing column when he was 14, in 1934. At 87 he still writes his column in Speed Sport News.
So what’s the fascination with watching 43 very fast, wildly painted cars make left turns for four hours? Could be any number of things. Speed pure and simple. Noise, the roar from the track. What’s called “tradin’ paint” or running “door to door.” A driver trying to wrest control of his car fish-tailing at a 100 miles an hour ‘round a tight turn. Watching a mad racer tear through the field, passing cars high and low. Cars racing “three wide.” Spin outs, cartwheels, T-bone collisions. Blown tires, engines and tempers. Ten-second tire changes, refuels and body adjustments. Bumper-to-bumper drafting. Sometimes two cars coming down the stretch for a nose-to-nose finish.
Maybe it’s the culture. You get it or you don’t. Us versus them. Makes you feel like you own something that’s just yours.
Or it could go beyond the oval. Maybe it’s the names of racers down through the years. Junior Johnson, a North Wilkesboro native who spent 11 months in a federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio after his arrest at his daddy’s still. Fireball Roberts. Cale Yarborough. Richard “The King” Petty. Dale “The Intimidator” Earnhardt. Earnhardt Junior. Benny “BP” Parsons. Maybe it’s the rivalries. The duels between King Richard and David Pearson. The infield fist fight between Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers, Donnie and Bobby.
Or how racing gets in a family’s blood lines. Four generations of Pettys have raced: Lee, Richard, Kyle and Adam. Early on there were the four Flock siblings: Ethel, Tim, Bob and Fonty. Ned and Dale Jarrett, father and son. The Earnhardts. Darrell “DW” Waltrip and his brother Michael. Rusty and brother Kenny Wallace, and now Rusty’s son Steve.
Or perhaps it’s the romance of some of the hallowed tracks themselves. Rockingham, “The Rock,” now gone from NASCAR’s schedule. North Wilkesboro, shuttered in 1996 after 50 years. Darlington, “Too Tough to Tame,” in South Carolina. Bristol, “Thunder Valley,” in Tennessee. Martinsville, with its paper-clip shaped oval, in Virginia. Talledaga’s superspeedway in Alabama. For a sport second in TV ratings only to the NFL, can anyone find these places on a map? Then of course there’s Daytona in Florida, where they raced on the beach before building a speedway.
Pilgrimages are part of sport. Life-long baseball fans go to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium, to sense the grandeur of the sport’s past. The more timid might settle for Boston’s Fenway Park or the Cubs’ Wrigley Field. NFL fanatics find their way up to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. These shrines aren’t exactly Stonehenge. Yankee Stadium will be razed after this season. For ice hockey cultists, the old Maple Leaf Gardens, Montreal Forum and Boston Gardens are history.
So Steve and I slipped out of Philadelphia without a trace early one Sunday morning (needless to say, mom stayed home) to track down the roots of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing — NASCAR. Before prime time TV coverage, the Speed Channel, the Car of Tomorrow (the universal car design forced on every team to improve safety and lower costs). Before multimillionaire track owners purchased places like North Wilkesboro solely to shut them down and move their races to new frontiers like Kansas City or Chicagoland. Before smiling Earnhardt Junior’s Wrangler commercials. Before the sponsor millions poured in — Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, DuPont, 3M, M&Ms, the U.S. Army, Bass Pro Shops, Alltel, Best Buy, Cheerios, Caterpillar, Dewalt, Jack Daniels, and obviously, Budweiser.
We cruised up I-77 one morning from our base in Mooresville, North Carolina — about 25 miles north of Charlotte, sitting on the sprawling and glittering Lake Norman, and called “Race City USA” because of the 30-50 team corporate offices and garages in the area. What exactly we were going to find in backwoods North Wilkesboro was a mystery. We knew the speedway still existed, mothballed by its current owners, Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre, who refuse to sell out. (Smith needed an extra security detail when he left the speedway after the last race in 1996.)
I had been there twice before: dragging my wife through the town on our honeymoon to the Smokey Mountains 25 years ago, and passing the track at a distance on a very remote sales call about 18 years ago. “What kind of business did you call on out here?” wondered Steve, looking out the window at nothing but brush and farmland. “An old glove factory full of women at knitting machines. Called Golden Needles. Long gone.”
After barreling about an hour north on the interstate, we turned left on Route 421, and headed west 14 miles. Three miles from the track we stopped to read the recently planted roadside historical marker. “North Wilkesboro Speedway. Pioneer NASCAR dirt track built in 1946; paved in 1958. Hosted sanctioned events, 1949-96. 5/8 mile oval. 3 mi. W.”
The adrenaline kicked in. And then minutes later, damn, there’s the track, still standing. Many pilgrims in the past dozen years have made this trip and stood where we were now. Some actually have camped out on the grounds. Most snap photos from the highway. But from a distance you could be looking at the remains of an oversized high school football stadium. A tattered “NASCAR Winston Cup Series” billboard invites us up the half-paved, half gravel entrance road. We take it slow and the Mustang bounces along.
“We gotta get in,” I said, surveying for an opening. Steve stared at me. “Aren’t we trespassing?” For a second I considered my role model obligations. But it was easy to rationalize: The boy is 16. Hell, when Junior Johnson was 16 he left plowing a mule and planting corn to start running ‘shine for his dad. “We came this far,” I said, “and it’s still here standing. What, are we just going to get back in the car?” Seeing nothing but rusted locks at every gate, I eventually found a cinder block wall with the toehold and heaved myself up and over. Steve shrugged and scampered over.
We had the speedway to ourselves. Sixty thousand empty seats. Single tier concrete stands with gray metal fold-back chair seats anchored in long rows still ring the track. The “North Wilkesboro Speedway” sign stretches beneath the dark and empty press box, its red background and white lettering framed in black. The infield, with large swaths of dirt patches, is overgrown with wild grass. The electronic black scoring tower still rises atop a pole, as does the familiar “76” orange and blue circular gas sign next to the one remaining infield garage. The pit lane is divided by low concrete walls, with white paint cracked and peeling. The red and white Winston Cup Series lettering, red and white Coca-Cola letters, and the black and white North Wilkesboro Speedway signs on the outer pit wall are gouged and faded by the relentless Carolina summers.
The paved oval track, with its 14-degree banked turns and the front straightaway that dips slightly and the back straightaway that slopes up, still has white lane makers and a wide white finish line. But the region’s sudden, drenching storms over the years have opened up cracks everywhere. Rows of grass run up and down either side of the finish line and zig-zag along the track in long stretches.
Truman “Fonty” Flock, a Georgia bootlegger, won the first race here when it was a dirt track on May 5, 1947. Brother Bob Flock won the first NASCAR-sanctioned race in 1949, taking home a purse of $3,800. One year Dale Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace drove side-by-side for around ten laps straight dueling for the lead. In ’72, Bobby Allison and Richard Petty traded the lead 13 times in the Wilkes 400. In ’88, Earnhardt and Ricky Rudd banged fenders for the final 41 laps. Both were black-flagged for rough driving and sent to the back of the field. A fight in the infield got out of hand once and track officials threw a yellow flag to slow the race so one of the pugilists could be tossed in a car, driven around the track and out of the speedway. King Petty won here 15 times, the record. One of those times he was attacked by a drunk in victory lane. In all, North Wilkesboro featured 73 NASCAR races in 50 years.
After we get the warning the sheriff is coming, we stand at the top of one of the faded blue concrete aisles to take a last look around. Weeds sprout up between the steps. There’s nothing much to say, like walking a graveyard or a battlefield.
An hour later, banana peels tossed in the back seat, lunch finished, we head out of the Food Lion lot aiming to head south to Taylorsville. Steve’s not much of a map reader, something of a lost art with the GPS generation. I think I know our way, but not for long. The narrow two-laner we’re on starts twisting and turning up and down the Brushy Mountain ridges, an isolated spur of the Blue Ridges. Soon we’re absolutely lost in the Wilkes County apple country. I’ve driven the Pacific Coast Highway twisting through Big Sur. Down a steep gravel road on the side of a southern Utah canyon with the family horrified. Nothing compares to this unknown, unnumbered county road in the North Carolina Piedmont for S curves, one after another after another, for a half hour or so at least.
No wonder Junior Johnson was once quoted saying stock car racing was a comedown compared to running moonshine. I couldn’t imagine racing these curves in the night without searchlights. Junior would take them sideways, clipping mailboxes and newspaper boxes — with the headlights off. He was famous, as Tom Wolfe described in “The Last American Hero,” for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” where, coming up to a “revenuer” roadblock, he’d throw the car into second gear, twist the wheel, hit the accelerator, and make the car’s rear end skid around in a complete arc, then tear back up the same road he came down.
“It’s official, Steve.” “What?” “I have no idea where we are.” “You sure?” “Sooner or later we’ll hit a road with a number. Right now we’re off the map.” The maps shows nearby towns like Thankful, Love Valley, Hunting Creek, Boomer. We’ve driven more than an hour without coming to a stop light or stop sign. The only people we’ve seen are road crews. Every so often we get a fleeting glimpse through the pines of the Blue Ridges, maybe 10-15 miles to the west, then we lean into another tight curve. Somewhere nearby is Brushy Mountain Township, population 524, where the most common job is driving a truck and the median age is 43. The “Brushies” as the natives call these hills usually rise from 300 to 800 feet. Hickory Knob. Walnut Knob. Fox Mountain. Asbury Mountain. It’s isolated. Slow. Very green.
Or as an Internet blogger posted when I was researching the trip, “First and foremost, Wilkes County is BACKWOODS country. You have backwoods people who live miles from anyone and may or may not have luxuries such as electricity. There is absolutely positively nothing to do in all of Wilkes County.”
The family calls Steve the mystery man because he’s the quiet type, laid back like a surfer dude. Maybe he’ll respond with a Marlon Brando mumble sometimes. He is 16. But he doesn’t brood. He’s a pleasant traveling companion. Unless we’re stuck in traffic (“Isn’t there another way?), on a long road trip (“Couldn’t we have flown?”), or there’s static on the radio (“Mind if I turn that off?”). iPods have no static.
I don’t own an iPod, despite the urgings of Steve and his sister Kate. “You got to get one. You got to get one. We’ll get one for you.” No thanks. I’m a tactile person. I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs. I like pulling them out, pulling out the liner notes and reading about the musicians and where the music was made. I like to look at my collection, like a library of books.
Once Steve accepted that we were off the map and his dad had no idea where we were going, he settled back and we listened to music to soothe our frustrations. Old-timey mountain music would have been the most appropriate soundtrack, but show me a 16-year suburban boy who’ll listen to fiddles, mandolins, banjos, maybe wooden spoons, a washtub and an autoharp. So it was The Clash’s “London Calling.” Clash alums Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and Mick Jones and Carbon/Silicon. The Band. The Roots. Bob Marley. The Strokes. The Libertines. With music as with racing, the kid appreciates his history. He’s got more than 1,000 iTune songs on his Mac, half of them must be from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That would have been like me at 16 listening to Benny Goodman, Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters. Last thing I wanted to hear was my parents’ music. Maybe there is something to this classic rock hype.
“Why do you think Sgt. Pepper’s was the Beatles’ best album?” asks Steve at one point. How do you answer something that profound? Particularly when you’re lost on unmarked roads. “I don’t think it is. I’d go for Revolver.” “A lot of people say Sgt. Pepper.” “It was the album cover. Had all these famous people on it. Tarzan. Bob Dylan. W.C. Fields. Laurel and Hardy.” “Who?” “A doll wearing a ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones’ sweater.” “On an album cover?” “Believe it, Steve. Album covers used to mean something.”
We finally emerge from the wilds of the Brushies totally by chance not design, and hang a right onto the Wilkesboro Highway, which takes us in short order to I-80, east to Statesville, and back down I-77 south. It’s all familiar again. Interstates are interstates. We’re back in the land of the homogenized. But for a while there we were chasing ghosts, moonshine ridge runners and oval daredevils. And about that threat of a call to the sheriff, mom never will know.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
