Rather it is being digitized here and now.
I have been slow to catch on. Six months ago I didn’t know a tweet from a twit. Then I learned a bit about Twitter and thought tweeters are twits. Now I tweet every day. To go from writing 1200-word editorials to 140-character tweets has been a paradigm change. That’s OK, we’re all in for a paradigm change.
For a long time I thought Facebook was a teenage wasteland. Now I send Facebook news updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I believed LinkedIn was for self-promoters. Of course it is. So what? Now I’m caught up in the numbers game — how many contacts can I add to my network?
It’s a brave new world, these social “nets.” Especially if you’re over 45 years old. According to “Twitter Usage in America: 2010,” the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Study, 35 percent of 45-54-year-olds currently have a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social networking web site. That compares to 77 percent of 18-24-year-olds, 65 percent of those between 25-34 years old, and 51 percent of the 35-44 crowd.
For safety and health professionals, so many of them baby boomers in the 45+ demographic, to use social nets is to venture where few of their peers have gone before. Most safety and health pros, cautious and conservative by nature (hallmarks of being safety conscious, after all), have not exactly jumped at the chance to “join the conversation,” as social nets love to advertise.
Free to choose
On our website is an open invitation to “join the conversation” and provide feedback, comments, opinions to my blogging and the news of the day. Consider this response:
“Oh gawd Dave... you've imbibed the millennial Kool-Aid. I have been fighting the rope pulling me into Facebook and so far have maintained my freedom. Social networking can be a ‘cancer’ in that it spreads rapidly and there is no real cure other than amputating the PC/laptop from the clutches of the fingertips.
“Don't let the new age rule your life. As Chloe said in the final seconds of "24," ‘SHUT IT DOWN.’
“Smell the coffee, hug the kids and wife and go walk the dog and breathe the polluted Philly air. THAT is what really matters.”
Now that is excellent blog material. Too bad he’s “fighting the rope.”
I also received this response:
“I keep getting requests to join associates’ groups etc., have done that, but have found few who actually utilize the network to any extent. Most say something like, ‘everyone else is in so I got in!’ I too must get better acquainted with the tools available. Thanks for giving us all (or at least those who are uninitiated to date) a little push.”
Consider this column a nudge.
“Inherit the future”
At least keep an open mind. Philosopher and one-time longshoreman Eric Hoffer: "In times of great change, it is the learners who inherit the future."
And to quote another philosopher, Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin’.” Newspapers across the nation are folding faster than beach umbrellas before a storm. Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Rolling Stone are pathetically thin. Evening newscasts are hanging on to the AARP crowd. Every other commercial is for a prescription med.
Dylan again: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
Mr. Jones, with “his pencil in his hand” is a reporter. How prophetic. Many so-called “Mainstream Media” journalists stubbornly scorn social nets. The Babel of bloggers and blowhards.
Yet… in 2009, social net usage spiked to 57.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet population to 127 million users, according to projections from eMarketer. By 2014, social nets will reel in 65.6 percent of all Internet users, 164 million people.
Something is happening when Deepwater Horizon Response has 28,323 fans on Facebook. The official site of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command has embraced social nets like a teenager, not a bunch of bureaucrats: Breaking news is sent via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, StumbleUpon, email and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.
“There’s something happening here…”
Something is happening when, just on LinkedIn alone:
● The American Industrial Hygiene Association networking group has 1,491 members;
● EHSQ Elite has 12,108 members;
● The American Society of Safety Engineers has 3,787 members;
● The Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics has 2,640 members;
● The Environment Health & Safety Professionals group has 9,127 members;
● The Safety Training group has 1,016 members;
● The Green group has 84,090 members.
Something is happening when the Green group discussion on “Is global warming finally being exposed for what it is?” elicits 3,949 comments.
To be sure, the overwhelming majority of discussion group members consist of a vast tribe called the “lurkers.” Lurkers passively follow and read the updates of others without contributing updates or comments of their own. This is no different than the audience at any professional conference. In a room of say, 500 people, how many walk to a mic stand to ask a question or offer a comment during the Q&A? We are a silent majority of lurkers. The social nets merely reflect human nature.
Come out of your silo
Maybe you have nothing to contribute to the conversation. But don’t miss out on the conversations occuring on the social nets. It is here that you learn what’s on the minds of your peers. What the issues of the day are. You’ll relate to some of the gripes and complaints. You’ll find some comments self-aborbed, specious, ridiculous.
That’s no excuse for dismissing the revolution in communication. This isn’t a fad. There’s no turning back. According to the Arbitron study: Eighty-four percent of the U.S. population has Internet access. Six in seven homes with Internet access have broadband connections. Dial-up is so 20th century. More than six in ten homes with Internet access have a wireless (Wi-Fi) network set up. In 2008, 24 percent of the populations had a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, et al. In 2010, 48 percent have some type of profile page.
There’s a novelty effect here, no doubt. But folks by the millions are not going to wake up one morning bored with social nets, re-up their newspaper and magazine subscriptions and throw a life preserver to Katie Couric. It’s about the day-to-day pace. The times they are a-movin’ fast. We want to know what’s going on, right now, on demand, not tomorrow morning or next week.
So as you check in with ISHN’s daily Twitter updates, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, and daily e-news posts and blog accounts on our website, look at it this way: We’re not trying to ‘rope you in;’ we’re reflecting the revolution. And overturning paradigms is not for lurkers. Engage. Write a comment. Far too many blog posts show goose eggs in the comment column. The story is not just the facts of who, what, where, when and why. It includes how people react to the news. How they form communities. Hello Tea Party. Combustible Dust Policy Institute Group. Travel Media Pros. Writing Mafia. Find your niche. Be part of the story.
Who wants to be Mr. Jones?
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Rock of Ages
The best way to make your getaway from the assorted vulgarities of Vegas is to head east on Interstate 15. The posted speed limit is 75 MPH, which means you draft behind SUVs barreling along at 90+ MPH. And you do it for about a hundred miles. The first stoplight is 133 miles away in Hurricane, Utah, if you’re heading to true escape in the glories of Zion Canyon. God has a vacation home in Zion, the saying goes. Who’s to question His infinite wisdom?
Following a few days of work meetings in Vegas, my family graciously extended to me a five-day yard pass, allowing me dangerous free rein to roam southern Utah. My base would be the Zion Mountain Ranch, a collection of log cabins on 3,000 acres three miles east of Zion. The ranch doubles as a buffalo reserve, home to a herd of about 40 free-grazing buffalo. There’s no cell phone reception on the ranch, no phones in the cabins, no wake up calls, no clocks in the cabins. My family was comfortable with me going off the grid. In 2004 we spent Christmas at the ranch with a scrawny runt of a Christmas tree, no ornaments. Back then my kids tired easily of my all too frequent stops to snap photographs of canyon walls and hoodoos. Today they have absolutely no interest in returning to the rocks. So go ahead dad, disappear for a couple of days.
This is my fourth trip to Zion. Every time its massive red, white and charcoal cliffs have put me in my place. First time was 20 years ago, with two friends from work. Second time was in ‘93 with the family. We stayed at the old Parry Lodge in Kanab, where movie stars drank the idle nights away during the heyday of westerns in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Third time was Christmas, 1994. The kids agreed with reluctance to return with the promise of a few nights in Vegas.
It was April when I rolled into the ranch this time. I came in with an ugly low-pressure front from California, bringing freezing temperatures and a mix of snow and rain showers. “My girlfriend in Bakersfield says it’s raining cats and dogs there, so we’re in for a couple of nasty days,” said the owner of a unique bookstore/outfitter gear /CD/souvenir shop in Kanab. Kanab calls itself “Little Hollywood” and “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It is the county seat of Kane County, with a population of 3,564. Motels outnumber attorneys 20 to 3. The owner of one of Kanab’s two supermarkets, Glazier’s Foodtown, is a well-known local photographer. The eatery Houston’s Trail End has been family-run for 35 years.
Kanab lives off nostalgia for a west that no longer exists. What happens when the baby boomers raised on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and F Troop can no longer make the trek out here? Above the front doors of the small rooms at the Parry Lodge are the names of the stars who once stayed there: Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Arlene Dahl, Joel McCrea, Fred McMuarry, Maureen O’Hara, Ty Power, and on and on. When we stayed here over the Fourth of July in 2003 these names meant nothing to my kids. My wife was spooked by the prospects of ghosts.
So there’s something to be said for soloing to savor the rock of ages. A dusting of snow covered my rental Mitsubishi Galant the morning I grabbed two large Styrofoam cups of java from the ranch’s grill and headed east to Monument Valley. Another pleasure going it alone: you play whatever damn music you want.
The Impalas are a now-defunct surf-rock band out of Memphis, recommended to me by a know-it-all clerk at Shangri-La Records, not far from Sun Studios in mid-town Memphis. Healthy morning guitar twang and reverb to get you going.
Between Kanab and Page, Arizona, 70 miles southeast on 89 South, lies nothing save for an abandoned movie set used for “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood in 1976. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, 1.7 million acres of vermilion cliffs, sandstone sculptures, canyons, mesas and plateaus, runs along to your left. On your right, a vast expanse of flat tumbleweed desert. Utah Off Road Tours asserts it is here you can stop and “feel your place in the universe.” Also “meditate with lizards” — I thought they dart around too much to stop and chill — and “come to know yourself through knowing a landscape.”
Mystical PR. It will take longer than my five-day yard permits to gain fresh insights into the nature of the universe. I’m on a whirlwind tour, listening to loud music, blowing down empty 89 South at speeds my wife would waffle me for. I control the volume, the speedometer, and the choice of liquor. It’s a few shots of Old Grand Dad and some Zion Canyon Virgin Stout beer (“brewed with love and kindness between the walls of the great Zion Canyon”) in the evenings back at the cabin. No TV, newspapers, voice mails or emails. That Virgin Stout refers to the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, by the way. The buxom lass on the label is too politically incorrect for my wife and daughter. Another benefit of leaving the family at home.
89 East runs from Page to Kayenta, Arizona, another empty stretch of sandy, rocky nothing. You have a long and unpredictable wait if you run out of gas out here.
The Impalas’ CD runs through an impressive 30 songs. I continue the surf theme with a new CD by Surf Blood, less classic surf and more a melodic attack of pop guitars. Well-known lone travelers run through my mind as I think of nothing in particular: William Least Hurt Moon, Thoreau, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, the bearded bard of the West, described on his web site as a desert anarchist “mocking the mindless bureaucrats hell-bent on destroying it.
The wide-open, wild west (despite Abbey’s old school protests, desolation is a few miles down an “unimproved” gravel road) has the effect on stress the same as an Ansel Adams photograph. One night at the Zion Ranch grill I hear the chef tell a dining couple about all the touristos who drive out from Vegas for a “cleansing.”
The road and remoteness is also tonic for your inner outlaw. “Resist much, obey little” advised Walt Whitman. It’s a tradition in the U.S. created by revolutionaries, mythologized by Zane Gray and Hollywood. But as the west was been tamed — Eisenhower’s national interstate infrastructure, Indians shunted off to the rez in America’s version of apartheid, cars now banned from Zion National Park April through October— who really resists anymore? Especially in 2010 after being beaten down by the recession for a couple of years.
What fight is left is channeled through Willie Nelson. Or Ronny Elliott. He’s next up on my CD player. A hillbilly rock and roll guitar twanger-banger out of a Tampa garage originally. In fact played with bands called the “Outsiders” and the “Outlaws.” Now plays with a bunch of self-described misfits called “The Nationals.”
I enter the Navajo nation near Kayenta in northwest Arizona. How “mindless bureaucrats” corralled and forced the Navajo into an estranged nation of misfits (from mainstream America and with numerous exceptions to be sure) is simply a bullshit embarrassment.
Consider these facts: 165,673 Navajo live on the rez in northern Arizona and southern Utah; median age is 24. Sixty percent live without telephones. Median family income is $22,392. Forty percent of families live below the poverty level. About one-third of the housing is without complete plumbing.
Ronny Elliott’s reedy bluesy vocals, long gone and aching, with harp, mandolin and a stinging steel guitar, are appropriate for the rez.
About 30 miles from Kayenta on 163 North is Monument Valley. I arrive on a postcard-perfect afternoon to bounce along the 17-miles gravel loop through what the Navajo call the “Valley of the Rocks.” About 570 million years ago the valley formed the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The waters subsided as the Pacific and North American plates shifted, and about 65 million years back the mud from the ocean floor became sandstone, giving rise to Monument Valley’s Elephant Butte, Three Sisters, The Hub, The Thumb, Mitchell Mesa, Thunderbird Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Sentinel Mesa, Gray Whiskers and Camel Butte.
The valley is bathed in red from iron oxide; some canyons and buttes are a darker blue-gray from manganese oxide. The towering rock monuments are icons of American rugged individualism. Maybe that’s what attracts curious tourists from around the globe — the chance to get a sense of America’s still adolescent spirit. I hear as many foreign accents and languages at the Monument Valley visitor center as I do English speakers. Sure, it’s April and American family vacations are months away. But I get the weird sense Europeans and Asians are more interested in our history than we are. Same feeling came to me a few summers back walking the rolling hills of Custer’s Last Stand in eastern Montana, where foreign tourists seemed predominant.
During the evening drive back to the ranch from Monument Valley, damn if I don’t nearly run out of gas. Out of nowhere I see the needle resting on E. A road sign indicates 30 miles to Kanab. This will be close.
The CD plays some more outlaws: Simon Stokes, a biker Willie Nelson with a long white beard, ponytail, tattoos up and down both arms. On the CD cover he’s sitting at a bar with another biker, both dressed in black. What else?
Miles Davis, up next, was an outlaw to his soul. Didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought. Played what he wanted, fans, critics be damned. Growled at the audience in something of an old man’s raspy hiss on the concert CD I’m playing. Proved Duke Ellington right — made music beyond category. Miles’ late period space jazz is well-suited for empty desert travel. Music to contemplate your place in the universe? Don’t get that heavy on Miles.
Too bad towns like Tesgi and Kaibeto on the road to Kanab don’t have gas stations. I don’t even see the towns, just the signs.
Outside of Kanab I put $53 dollars of gas in the Galant at a Phillips 66 station. The red canyon cliffs surrounding Kanab are radiant red in the setting sun, and I follow one brilliant sliver of glowing red rock to a place called Tom’s Canyon. From 1880 to 2000 this was Tom Robinson and sons’ ranch, where they raised crops and graze cattle. The Hollywood people loved to film here because it’s so close to town and the Parry Lodge. But now the canyon is paved with curvy boulevards named Donner Circle, Rainmaker Road, Cutter Trail. Empty lots are tagged with markers: Lot # 115 and so on. You can purchase a Tuscan style abode with 2,135 square feet of living space, or The Knolls, done in the southwestern style with 2,563 square feet. “Live everyday where you love to vacation!” says the billboard on Mohawk Drive.
So we’re not at the ends of the earth. Heroic rock outcroppings become development backdrops.
I decide to traverse up to Capitol Reef National Park the next day to say I was there. This evolves into a nine-hour jaunt through bizarre weather (hail, snow, snow showers, windswept rain, sometimes drenching) and fantastic scenery (crystallized white woods of the Dixie Forest, low-lying snow clouds, expansive white and yellow canyons, tight S curves through Rocky Mountain-like high forests, and the white domes of the park that do indeed resemble capitol architecture). Capitol Reef is in what’s called south-central Utah. Coming from Kanab there is but one road in and out, via 89 North to 12 East to 24 East, past Boulder, Escalante, Torrey, Tropic, and appropriately, Box Death Hollow Wilderness.
Damn if a tricked-up black Jeep suddenly flashes dashboard lights in my rear view mirror. I’m ticketed $165 by Officer Dunton for speeding 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone through the tiny burg of Escalante.
The road to Capitol Reef is not for the vertigo-challenged. S curves time and again scale up and down canyon walls. Past Boulder a summit marker reads 9,600 feet. Outside it feels like February. What travelers, hikers I see wear parkas and gloves. It’s about 40 degrees. Snow clouds render the land white or gray. There is no other color. A sign points to Hell’s Backbone. Indeed.
On my way back I calculate I’ve got to make it to Angels Landing in Zion today. Tomorrow I have a few hours in the morning, then the drive back to Vegas and a 2:40 pm flight home to Philadelphia.
Watermelon Slim is on the CD player. Name about says all you need to know. Then a dude dubbed “The Hillbilly Cat” from 1955. The clouds have cleared, the sun is out bright over Moss Cave, about three to five miles from Bryce Canyon, elevation 7,777 feet (positive encouragement to press on). I get out of the car (you cannot see the west from a damn automobile, said Edward Abbey) to hike across the Tang orange soft gravel hills and a nest of red rock hoodoos. No self-absorbed reflection. Better to follow Thoreau’s dictate: Why am I in the woods if my head is some where else?
By the time I reach Angels Landing it’s what filmmakers call “the magic hour.” That short window of time, less than 60 minutes in the evening, when the low sun produces a fantastic shadow and light show off the rock of ages. I’m running late so I say screw the car ban, ignore the flashing road sign “Red Permits Only Beyond This Point” and park in an empty lot near the Old Grotto. Will the eco-police tow my rental away? Give me a ticket? A warning? What will be my defense: The shuttle goes too slow?
For whatever benevolent reasons, the Galant sits where I left it when I return from Angels Landing, still the only car in the lot. Back home in Philadelphia, no doubt, that car would’ve been long gone and I’d have a long walk to the park police.
There is no obesity epidemic on Angels Landing. What hikers I see are wiry and fit. The trail is what the park service defines as a “strenuous.” A five-mile, supposedly five-hour hike. An incline gain of 1,488 feet to reach the flat, white rocky summit at 5,785 feet. Two middle-aged women in shorts share the summit with me; one breaks out a kite to fly. “Isn’t she crazy?” says her friend. “No. You sure have enough wind up here,” I say. “Well, that makes you both crazy.”
I don’t’ know about crazy. An aging adolescent, as Abbey called himself, yes, that I’ll concede. Call me a guerilla resistor. For three full days, not counting the transit days from Vegas and back, I don’t think about much and it feels good. Appropriately, 1970s British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood are the last band on the CD player, after Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers. Again, their name says enough
The canyon floor of Zion on the Saturday morning I leave for Vegas is a riot of vibrant green coming alive on aspens, cottonwoods, Ponderosa Pines, and oak trees along the Virgin River. The azure sky is cloudless. The sun is brilliant. My yard pass is set to expire. I exit, turning in whatever road warrior credentials I have, to blend back into the suburbs.
Following a few days of work meetings in Vegas, my family graciously extended to me a five-day yard pass, allowing me dangerous free rein to roam southern Utah. My base would be the Zion Mountain Ranch, a collection of log cabins on 3,000 acres three miles east of Zion. The ranch doubles as a buffalo reserve, home to a herd of about 40 free-grazing buffalo. There’s no cell phone reception on the ranch, no phones in the cabins, no wake up calls, no clocks in the cabins. My family was comfortable with me going off the grid. In 2004 we spent Christmas at the ranch with a scrawny runt of a Christmas tree, no ornaments. Back then my kids tired easily of my all too frequent stops to snap photographs of canyon walls and hoodoos. Today they have absolutely no interest in returning to the rocks. So go ahead dad, disappear for a couple of days.
This is my fourth trip to Zion. Every time its massive red, white and charcoal cliffs have put me in my place. First time was 20 years ago, with two friends from work. Second time was in ‘93 with the family. We stayed at the old Parry Lodge in Kanab, where movie stars drank the idle nights away during the heyday of westerns in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Third time was Christmas, 1994. The kids agreed with reluctance to return with the promise of a few nights in Vegas.
It was April when I rolled into the ranch this time. I came in with an ugly low-pressure front from California, bringing freezing temperatures and a mix of snow and rain showers. “My girlfriend in Bakersfield says it’s raining cats and dogs there, so we’re in for a couple of nasty days,” said the owner of a unique bookstore/outfitter gear /CD/souvenir shop in Kanab. Kanab calls itself “Little Hollywood” and “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It is the county seat of Kane County, with a population of 3,564. Motels outnumber attorneys 20 to 3. The owner of one of Kanab’s two supermarkets, Glazier’s Foodtown, is a well-known local photographer. The eatery Houston’s Trail End has been family-run for 35 years.
Kanab lives off nostalgia for a west that no longer exists. What happens when the baby boomers raised on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and F Troop can no longer make the trek out here? Above the front doors of the small rooms at the Parry Lodge are the names of the stars who once stayed there: Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Arlene Dahl, Joel McCrea, Fred McMuarry, Maureen O’Hara, Ty Power, and on and on. When we stayed here over the Fourth of July in 2003 these names meant nothing to my kids. My wife was spooked by the prospects of ghosts.
So there’s something to be said for soloing to savor the rock of ages. A dusting of snow covered my rental Mitsubishi Galant the morning I grabbed two large Styrofoam cups of java from the ranch’s grill and headed east to Monument Valley. Another pleasure going it alone: you play whatever damn music you want.
The Impalas are a now-defunct surf-rock band out of Memphis, recommended to me by a know-it-all clerk at Shangri-La Records, not far from Sun Studios in mid-town Memphis. Healthy morning guitar twang and reverb to get you going.
Between Kanab and Page, Arizona, 70 miles southeast on 89 South, lies nothing save for an abandoned movie set used for “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood in 1976. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, 1.7 million acres of vermilion cliffs, sandstone sculptures, canyons, mesas and plateaus, runs along to your left. On your right, a vast expanse of flat tumbleweed desert. Utah Off Road Tours asserts it is here you can stop and “feel your place in the universe.” Also “meditate with lizards” — I thought they dart around too much to stop and chill — and “come to know yourself through knowing a landscape.”
Mystical PR. It will take longer than my five-day yard permits to gain fresh insights into the nature of the universe. I’m on a whirlwind tour, listening to loud music, blowing down empty 89 South at speeds my wife would waffle me for. I control the volume, the speedometer, and the choice of liquor. It’s a few shots of Old Grand Dad and some Zion Canyon Virgin Stout beer (“brewed with love and kindness between the walls of the great Zion Canyon”) in the evenings back at the cabin. No TV, newspapers, voice mails or emails. That Virgin Stout refers to the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, by the way. The buxom lass on the label is too politically incorrect for my wife and daughter. Another benefit of leaving the family at home.
89 East runs from Page to Kayenta, Arizona, another empty stretch of sandy, rocky nothing. You have a long and unpredictable wait if you run out of gas out here.
The Impalas’ CD runs through an impressive 30 songs. I continue the surf theme with a new CD by Surf Blood, less classic surf and more a melodic attack of pop guitars. Well-known lone travelers run through my mind as I think of nothing in particular: William Least Hurt Moon, Thoreau, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, the bearded bard of the West, described on his web site as a desert anarchist “mocking the mindless bureaucrats hell-bent on destroying it.
The wide-open, wild west (despite Abbey’s old school protests, desolation is a few miles down an “unimproved” gravel road) has the effect on stress the same as an Ansel Adams photograph. One night at the Zion Ranch grill I hear the chef tell a dining couple about all the touristos who drive out from Vegas for a “cleansing.”
The road and remoteness is also tonic for your inner outlaw. “Resist much, obey little” advised Walt Whitman. It’s a tradition in the U.S. created by revolutionaries, mythologized by Zane Gray and Hollywood. But as the west was been tamed — Eisenhower’s national interstate infrastructure, Indians shunted off to the rez in America’s version of apartheid, cars now banned from Zion National Park April through October— who really resists anymore? Especially in 2010 after being beaten down by the recession for a couple of years.
What fight is left is channeled through Willie Nelson. Or Ronny Elliott. He’s next up on my CD player. A hillbilly rock and roll guitar twanger-banger out of a Tampa garage originally. In fact played with bands called the “Outsiders” and the “Outlaws.” Now plays with a bunch of self-described misfits called “The Nationals.”
I enter the Navajo nation near Kayenta in northwest Arizona. How “mindless bureaucrats” corralled and forced the Navajo into an estranged nation of misfits (from mainstream America and with numerous exceptions to be sure) is simply a bullshit embarrassment.
Consider these facts: 165,673 Navajo live on the rez in northern Arizona and southern Utah; median age is 24. Sixty percent live without telephones. Median family income is $22,392. Forty percent of families live below the poverty level. About one-third of the housing is without complete plumbing.
Ronny Elliott’s reedy bluesy vocals, long gone and aching, with harp, mandolin and a stinging steel guitar, are appropriate for the rez.
About 30 miles from Kayenta on 163 North is Monument Valley. I arrive on a postcard-perfect afternoon to bounce along the 17-miles gravel loop through what the Navajo call the “Valley of the Rocks.” About 570 million years ago the valley formed the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The waters subsided as the Pacific and North American plates shifted, and about 65 million years back the mud from the ocean floor became sandstone, giving rise to Monument Valley’s Elephant Butte, Three Sisters, The Hub, The Thumb, Mitchell Mesa, Thunderbird Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Sentinel Mesa, Gray Whiskers and Camel Butte.
The valley is bathed in red from iron oxide; some canyons and buttes are a darker blue-gray from manganese oxide. The towering rock monuments are icons of American rugged individualism. Maybe that’s what attracts curious tourists from around the globe — the chance to get a sense of America’s still adolescent spirit. I hear as many foreign accents and languages at the Monument Valley visitor center as I do English speakers. Sure, it’s April and American family vacations are months away. But I get the weird sense Europeans and Asians are more interested in our history than we are. Same feeling came to me a few summers back walking the rolling hills of Custer’s Last Stand in eastern Montana, where foreign tourists seemed predominant.
During the evening drive back to the ranch from Monument Valley, damn if I don’t nearly run out of gas. Out of nowhere I see the needle resting on E. A road sign indicates 30 miles to Kanab. This will be close.
The CD plays some more outlaws: Simon Stokes, a biker Willie Nelson with a long white beard, ponytail, tattoos up and down both arms. On the CD cover he’s sitting at a bar with another biker, both dressed in black. What else?
Miles Davis, up next, was an outlaw to his soul. Didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought. Played what he wanted, fans, critics be damned. Growled at the audience in something of an old man’s raspy hiss on the concert CD I’m playing. Proved Duke Ellington right — made music beyond category. Miles’ late period space jazz is well-suited for empty desert travel. Music to contemplate your place in the universe? Don’t get that heavy on Miles.
Too bad towns like Tesgi and Kaibeto on the road to Kanab don’t have gas stations. I don’t even see the towns, just the signs.
Outside of Kanab I put $53 dollars of gas in the Galant at a Phillips 66 station. The red canyon cliffs surrounding Kanab are radiant red in the setting sun, and I follow one brilliant sliver of glowing red rock to a place called Tom’s Canyon. From 1880 to 2000 this was Tom Robinson and sons’ ranch, where they raised crops and graze cattle. The Hollywood people loved to film here because it’s so close to town and the Parry Lodge. But now the canyon is paved with curvy boulevards named Donner Circle, Rainmaker Road, Cutter Trail. Empty lots are tagged with markers: Lot # 115 and so on. You can purchase a Tuscan style abode with 2,135 square feet of living space, or The Knolls, done in the southwestern style with 2,563 square feet. “Live everyday where you love to vacation!” says the billboard on Mohawk Drive.
So we’re not at the ends of the earth. Heroic rock outcroppings become development backdrops.
I decide to traverse up to Capitol Reef National Park the next day to say I was there. This evolves into a nine-hour jaunt through bizarre weather (hail, snow, snow showers, windswept rain, sometimes drenching) and fantastic scenery (crystallized white woods of the Dixie Forest, low-lying snow clouds, expansive white and yellow canyons, tight S curves through Rocky Mountain-like high forests, and the white domes of the park that do indeed resemble capitol architecture). Capitol Reef is in what’s called south-central Utah. Coming from Kanab there is but one road in and out, via 89 North to 12 East to 24 East, past Boulder, Escalante, Torrey, Tropic, and appropriately, Box Death Hollow Wilderness.
Damn if a tricked-up black Jeep suddenly flashes dashboard lights in my rear view mirror. I’m ticketed $165 by Officer Dunton for speeding 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone through the tiny burg of Escalante.
The road to Capitol Reef is not for the vertigo-challenged. S curves time and again scale up and down canyon walls. Past Boulder a summit marker reads 9,600 feet. Outside it feels like February. What travelers, hikers I see wear parkas and gloves. It’s about 40 degrees. Snow clouds render the land white or gray. There is no other color. A sign points to Hell’s Backbone. Indeed.
On my way back I calculate I’ve got to make it to Angels Landing in Zion today. Tomorrow I have a few hours in the morning, then the drive back to Vegas and a 2:40 pm flight home to Philadelphia.
Watermelon Slim is on the CD player. Name about says all you need to know. Then a dude dubbed “The Hillbilly Cat” from 1955. The clouds have cleared, the sun is out bright over Moss Cave, about three to five miles from Bryce Canyon, elevation 7,777 feet (positive encouragement to press on). I get out of the car (you cannot see the west from a damn automobile, said Edward Abbey) to hike across the Tang orange soft gravel hills and a nest of red rock hoodoos. No self-absorbed reflection. Better to follow Thoreau’s dictate: Why am I in the woods if my head is some where else?
By the time I reach Angels Landing it’s what filmmakers call “the magic hour.” That short window of time, less than 60 minutes in the evening, when the low sun produces a fantastic shadow and light show off the rock of ages. I’m running late so I say screw the car ban, ignore the flashing road sign “Red Permits Only Beyond This Point” and park in an empty lot near the Old Grotto. Will the eco-police tow my rental away? Give me a ticket? A warning? What will be my defense: The shuttle goes too slow?
For whatever benevolent reasons, the Galant sits where I left it when I return from Angels Landing, still the only car in the lot. Back home in Philadelphia, no doubt, that car would’ve been long gone and I’d have a long walk to the park police.
There is no obesity epidemic on Angels Landing. What hikers I see are wiry and fit. The trail is what the park service defines as a “strenuous.” A five-mile, supposedly five-hour hike. An incline gain of 1,488 feet to reach the flat, white rocky summit at 5,785 feet. Two middle-aged women in shorts share the summit with me; one breaks out a kite to fly. “Isn’t she crazy?” says her friend. “No. You sure have enough wind up here,” I say. “Well, that makes you both crazy.”
I don’t’ know about crazy. An aging adolescent, as Abbey called himself, yes, that I’ll concede. Call me a guerilla resistor. For three full days, not counting the transit days from Vegas and back, I don’t think about much and it feels good. Appropriately, 1970s British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood are the last band on the CD player, after Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers. Again, their name says enough
The canyon floor of Zion on the Saturday morning I leave for Vegas is a riot of vibrant green coming alive on aspens, cottonwoods, Ponderosa Pines, and oak trees along the Virgin River. The azure sky is cloudless. The sun is brilliant. My yard pass is set to expire. I exit, turning in whatever road warrior credentials I have, to blend back into the suburbs.
Friday, February 19, 2010
A record snowfall puts us in our place
The all-time Philly snowfall record was busted Wednesday, February 10. We’re now just shy of six feet of snow for the winter — 70.5 inches and counting.
I spent the day writing blogs for my magazine with the blinds on all four of my home office windows raised so I could watch storm rage on…
My neighbor is shoveling his drive. He’s a somewhat vague, bundled and determined figure with the snow coming down thick and wind-whipped. Often when we get snow around here big flakes float lazily to the ground, like one of those small shake ‘em up snow globes. The air is usually wet and the accumulation civilized.
This is not one of those storms. The snowfall is dense and unrelenting. It began last night and will eventually end a little more than 24 hours later. There’s already about two feet of snow on the ground from a storm last weekend. I see that my neighbor is up on his roof, shoveling off snow. Back on the ground, he then shovels away what he dumped on his front stoop and sidewalk.
Early in the afternoon my kids and I venture out to see what, if anything, is moving — people, snowmobiles, snowplows. We hear strange, muffled explosions. It’s thunder and lightning above the dense cloud cover. Visibility is 100-200 yards. We walk into a driving wind with heads down, trudging as though defying gravity. “Now I know what it’s like to be a Muslim woman,” says my daughter. She’s covered with layers of sweatshirts and scarves, boots, gloves, a wrap-around hood and wool cap. Only her eyes are uncovered. She wishes she had ski goggles, preferably yellow-tinted. With the exception of the howling wind, which reaches 30 to 40 MPH, and the intermittent thunder, it’s quiet. And smells very fresh, clean. A supermarket is open, and a convenience store. The linoleum tiles in both are slick with melted snow and slush. Everybody in line at the convenience store seems to be a snowplow operator holding a large coffee.
As always in these emergency-like circumstances — sirens periodically go off in the distance — some unprepared fools in compact cars too small and light blunder off the road or billow exhaust spinning their wheels on a hill. “What the hell is anybody doing out in this?” demands my daughter. “Where do they think they’re going?”
It’s scary amazing. Here in the mid-Atlantic states, crowded with office towers and strip malls, concrete and asphalt, we rarely see Mother Nature when she really gets it going. Volcanic eruptions, tornados, avalanches, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, monsoons, earthquakes — the power when she unloads is random, merciless and miraculous.
Back in my office I see my neighbor is shoveling his drive again. Taking a broom to his cars again. I watch him as through veils of white gauze. The snow falls almost horizontally. “Falling” is too benign a description. The snow is being driven into the ground. There’s nothing gentle about it. Thin, small trees crack apart under the snow’s weight. Large evergreens sag like the weight of the world is on their branches. I see my neighbor dusting off the bushes he trims so fastidiously every summer.
Around 4:30 in the afternoon the electricity quits on us. I’m thinking it could be out for days. We just don’t have storms like this; Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, must be overwhelmed. The township snowplows can’t keep up as darkness sets in. My son and I walk our dog, a Husky who frolics in this stuff. Our neighborhood streets haven’t seen a plow in hours. Some of the drifts are shoulder high. Power lines sag so low you can touch them. Don’t do that, I warn my son. A few men are out manning snow blowers. When nature turns nasty like this, it makes us humans nicer. Strangers mumble “hello” to each other. Hold on, this guy fishtailing up the hill needs a push. A neighbor with a wood burning stove calls and invites us over if it gets too cold in our house. My neighbor across the street is digging out a space by the street for the recyclable bin that his wife is holding.
By eight or nine at night, in the blackness, my kids are bored out of their minds. I see my neighbor out shoveling his drive one last time. Even the laptop with wireless Internet connectivity has lost its Facebook allure after three or four hours. The kids blankly text friends on their cells. My daughter reads by flashlight. My son drags our two dogs in bed with him and calls it a day. My wife bunks down in my office, warmer than our freezer-like bedroom. I’m lying on the living room sofa, in a hoodie and long johns and thick thermal socks, a mummy with a large vanilla candle balanced on my stomach. I’m trying to read The New York Times. It’s hell turning the pages without the candle sliding off and starting a house fire. I look out our bay window and see daggers of icicles, up to two feet, hang from the gutter. I think I hear my neighbor across the street scraping ice from his sidewalk.
Around midnight I wake up to the lights and widescreen TV on, the stove clock beeping and the furnace whirring and chugging to life. Homes across the street show signs of life. It has stopped snowing. That shadowy figure is my neighbor salting his drive; he’s the first one out of the neighborhood every morning. The wind rattles branches high in the trees and roars around the corners of our house. Otherwise, the storm has exhausted itself. But is has definitely served notice, putting us in our place.
I spent the day writing blogs for my magazine with the blinds on all four of my home office windows raised so I could watch storm rage on…
My neighbor is shoveling his drive. He’s a somewhat vague, bundled and determined figure with the snow coming down thick and wind-whipped. Often when we get snow around here big flakes float lazily to the ground, like one of those small shake ‘em up snow globes. The air is usually wet and the accumulation civilized.
This is not one of those storms. The snowfall is dense and unrelenting. It began last night and will eventually end a little more than 24 hours later. There’s already about two feet of snow on the ground from a storm last weekend. I see that my neighbor is up on his roof, shoveling off snow. Back on the ground, he then shovels away what he dumped on his front stoop and sidewalk.
Early in the afternoon my kids and I venture out to see what, if anything, is moving — people, snowmobiles, snowplows. We hear strange, muffled explosions. It’s thunder and lightning above the dense cloud cover. Visibility is 100-200 yards. We walk into a driving wind with heads down, trudging as though defying gravity. “Now I know what it’s like to be a Muslim woman,” says my daughter. She’s covered with layers of sweatshirts and scarves, boots, gloves, a wrap-around hood and wool cap. Only her eyes are uncovered. She wishes she had ski goggles, preferably yellow-tinted. With the exception of the howling wind, which reaches 30 to 40 MPH, and the intermittent thunder, it’s quiet. And smells very fresh, clean. A supermarket is open, and a convenience store. The linoleum tiles in both are slick with melted snow and slush. Everybody in line at the convenience store seems to be a snowplow operator holding a large coffee.
As always in these emergency-like circumstances — sirens periodically go off in the distance — some unprepared fools in compact cars too small and light blunder off the road or billow exhaust spinning their wheels on a hill. “What the hell is anybody doing out in this?” demands my daughter. “Where do they think they’re going?”
It’s scary amazing. Here in the mid-Atlantic states, crowded with office towers and strip malls, concrete and asphalt, we rarely see Mother Nature when she really gets it going. Volcanic eruptions, tornados, avalanches, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, monsoons, earthquakes — the power when she unloads is random, merciless and miraculous.
Back in my office I see my neighbor is shoveling his drive again. Taking a broom to his cars again. I watch him as through veils of white gauze. The snow falls almost horizontally. “Falling” is too benign a description. The snow is being driven into the ground. There’s nothing gentle about it. Thin, small trees crack apart under the snow’s weight. Large evergreens sag like the weight of the world is on their branches. I see my neighbor dusting off the bushes he trims so fastidiously every summer.
Around 4:30 in the afternoon the electricity quits on us. I’m thinking it could be out for days. We just don’t have storms like this; Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, must be overwhelmed. The township snowplows can’t keep up as darkness sets in. My son and I walk our dog, a Husky who frolics in this stuff. Our neighborhood streets haven’t seen a plow in hours. Some of the drifts are shoulder high. Power lines sag so low you can touch them. Don’t do that, I warn my son. A few men are out manning snow blowers. When nature turns nasty like this, it makes us humans nicer. Strangers mumble “hello” to each other. Hold on, this guy fishtailing up the hill needs a push. A neighbor with a wood burning stove calls and invites us over if it gets too cold in our house. My neighbor across the street is digging out a space by the street for the recyclable bin that his wife is holding.
By eight or nine at night, in the blackness, my kids are bored out of their minds. I see my neighbor out shoveling his drive one last time. Even the laptop with wireless Internet connectivity has lost its Facebook allure after three or four hours. The kids blankly text friends on their cells. My daughter reads by flashlight. My son drags our two dogs in bed with him and calls it a day. My wife bunks down in my office, warmer than our freezer-like bedroom. I’m lying on the living room sofa, in a hoodie and long johns and thick thermal socks, a mummy with a large vanilla candle balanced on my stomach. I’m trying to read The New York Times. It’s hell turning the pages without the candle sliding off and starting a house fire. I look out our bay window and see daggers of icicles, up to two feet, hang from the gutter. I think I hear my neighbor across the street scraping ice from his sidewalk.
Around midnight I wake up to the lights and widescreen TV on, the stove clock beeping and the furnace whirring and chugging to life. Homes across the street show signs of life. It has stopped snowing. That shadowy figure is my neighbor salting his drive; he’s the first one out of the neighborhood every morning. The wind rattles branches high in the trees and roars around the corners of our house. Otherwise, the storm has exhausted itself. But is has definitely served notice, putting us in our place.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Dissing the gods
We’re actually all in the house at the same time. Kate, back in the nest after graduating from Delaware, works ‘til seven every night at a KinderCare. Steve, restless high school senior, frequently slips out to the Y, Barnes & Noble, over to a friend’s.
This night, for a few minutes anyway, not only are we all home, but in the same general vicinity. Kate’s watching “E! News,” kicked back in the recliner, doing her nails, the two dogs curled on the couch.
“So,” I ask, “what’s your recommendation for Steve? What college do you think he should go to?”
“Well, I just learned Drexel is $51,000 a year.”
“Next.”
The conversation draws Steve into the living room.
“Wait!” yells Suze. “What time is it? Turn on channel 12.”
“What?”
“Just turn on channel 12. It’s eight o’clock.”
Steve, after years of diligent practice handling the remote like an extension of his arm, flicks to channel 12.
There on the flat screen are John, Paul, George and Ringo, in soft-focus black and white, flickering as though transmitted from a distant planet. They’ve got their matching mop-tops, dark suits with white shirts and thin dark ties. “She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah,” they sing, with a smiling earnestness seeming to be aimed at earning Establishment Ed’s approval.
“It’s the Ed Sullivan show,” says Suze. “It’s the first time the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Who’s Ed?” asks Steve.
Steve and Kate start giggling, then laughing. Their parents are taken aback, especially Suze, who one time actually saw the Beatles live in concert. “What’s so funny?”
“They look so corny,” says Kate. “Yeah,” seconds Steve. “Did they really wear their hair like that?” asks Kate.
The kids are disrespecting the gods. Funny thing is, both of them like Beatles’ music off of CDs. But visually you better be styling nowadays: Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, The Gap, Banana Republic, New York Connection, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, American Apparel, American Eagle, the brands that Kate (“I am, therefore I shop”) can recite in her sleep. Steve was a late bloomer but is coming on strong — J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Nike. Awkward Ed’s show of course never scored any style points. Steve and Kate might as well be watching the Marx Brothers as the Beatles. But the Marx Brothers would be equally baffling and prehistoric. “Who are the Marx Brothers? You mean Karl Marx? Were they a band?”
Anyway, Ed comes out, shakes hands with the Beatles, and the documentary moves to a clip of the Beatles’ archrivals, the Beach Boys, also singing on the Sullivan show. The five boys in the band, barely out of their teens, are scrubbed fresh and wear matching striped shirts and white pants. A couple of hot rods have been rolled on stage for props. They’re sing “I Get Around” by Ed’s rules, like the Beatles, standing in place, smiling and clean. Nothing to unnerve the adults.
“Oh… my… god!” sputters Kate. “They’re even cornier. They’re nerds.”
“What do you think, Steve? Steve?”
Black and white TV was never his world. He’s retreated to his bedroom and his X Box 360 and NCAA Football 2010, with animated players more realistic than 45-year-old clips of the Beatles.
Next up, from 1969, Tommy James and the Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover,” with the Sullivan show now in color, and the camera going psychedelic with tripped out mirror images and dizzying, flashing shots zooming in and out. Scenes from Woodstock follow and Kate groans.
“You gotta be on drugs, then this music would sound OK,” says Kate, staring in befuddlement. “You guys did a lot of drugs back then, right? I mean the hippies. If that’s what drugs make things looks like, I’d completely freak out.”
“Times change,” says Suze.
“I should say,” says Kate, inferring a total understatement. “Can I change the channel?”
This night, for a few minutes anyway, not only are we all home, but in the same general vicinity. Kate’s watching “E! News,” kicked back in the recliner, doing her nails, the two dogs curled on the couch.
“So,” I ask, “what’s your recommendation for Steve? What college do you think he should go to?”
“Well, I just learned Drexel is $51,000 a year.”
“Next.”
The conversation draws Steve into the living room.
“Wait!” yells Suze. “What time is it? Turn on channel 12.”
“What?”
“Just turn on channel 12. It’s eight o’clock.”
Steve, after years of diligent practice handling the remote like an extension of his arm, flicks to channel 12.
There on the flat screen are John, Paul, George and Ringo, in soft-focus black and white, flickering as though transmitted from a distant planet. They’ve got their matching mop-tops, dark suits with white shirts and thin dark ties. “She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah,” they sing, with a smiling earnestness seeming to be aimed at earning Establishment Ed’s approval.
“It’s the Ed Sullivan show,” says Suze. “It’s the first time the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Who’s Ed?” asks Steve.
Steve and Kate start giggling, then laughing. Their parents are taken aback, especially Suze, who one time actually saw the Beatles live in concert. “What’s so funny?”
“They look so corny,” says Kate. “Yeah,” seconds Steve. “Did they really wear their hair like that?” asks Kate.
The kids are disrespecting the gods. Funny thing is, both of them like Beatles’ music off of CDs. But visually you better be styling nowadays: Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, The Gap, Banana Republic, New York Connection, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, American Apparel, American Eagle, the brands that Kate (“I am, therefore I shop”) can recite in her sleep. Steve was a late bloomer but is coming on strong — J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Nike. Awkward Ed’s show of course never scored any style points. Steve and Kate might as well be watching the Marx Brothers as the Beatles. But the Marx Brothers would be equally baffling and prehistoric. “Who are the Marx Brothers? You mean Karl Marx? Were they a band?”
Anyway, Ed comes out, shakes hands with the Beatles, and the documentary moves to a clip of the Beatles’ archrivals, the Beach Boys, also singing on the Sullivan show. The five boys in the band, barely out of their teens, are scrubbed fresh and wear matching striped shirts and white pants. A couple of hot rods have been rolled on stage for props. They’re sing “I Get Around” by Ed’s rules, like the Beatles, standing in place, smiling and clean. Nothing to unnerve the adults.
“Oh… my… god!” sputters Kate. “They’re even cornier. They’re nerds.”
“What do you think, Steve? Steve?”
Black and white TV was never his world. He’s retreated to his bedroom and his X Box 360 and NCAA Football 2010, with animated players more realistic than 45-year-old clips of the Beatles.
Next up, from 1969, Tommy James and the Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover,” with the Sullivan show now in color, and the camera going psychedelic with tripped out mirror images and dizzying, flashing shots zooming in and out. Scenes from Woodstock follow and Kate groans.
“You gotta be on drugs, then this music would sound OK,” says Kate, staring in befuddlement. “You guys did a lot of drugs back then, right? I mean the hippies. If that’s what drugs make things looks like, I’d completely freak out.”
“Times change,” says Suze.
“I should say,” says Kate, inferring a total understatement. “Can I change the channel?”
Monday, January 11, 2010
Only in Ojai
Very freakish, Philadelphia getting bombed with almost two feet of snow less than a week before Christmas. So the first order of business Sunday morning, before I could go anywhere, was grabbing a broom and sweeping snow off our three cars, defrosting the cars, and then shoveling out. Figuring to find mayhem at the airport, I left about four hours before my flight to LA.
Sure enough, flights were canceled all over the departures board. Stranded holiday travelers were sprawled out or slumped over, bleary-eyed zombies at most every gate. My flight got pushed back from 2 to 5 p.m. in a case of a missing pilot. Then his plane landed but could not reach a gate for all the snow plowed into small mountains. Next came the dreaded tarmac delay. We were on board, buckled in and going nowhere. The pilot, with a soothing British accent, explained only one runway was operating, alternating take-offs with landings. Finally we were airborne about 6 p.m. for the 6-hour flight cross country. The plane’s cabin of course was crammed to the max, not an empty seat. Across the entire nation a little dog yapped, yapped and yelped, trapped in a cage stowed in the overhead luggage rack.
The most disorienting and dangerous part of a trip I find is getting a start in an unfamiliar city after the dark, when you’re in a rental car you’ve never driven before, making seat adjustments, mirror adjustments, deciphering the dashboard, trying to follow typed directions handed over by an automaton behind the counter at Avis Rental. I’m leaving LAX, scanning for street and interstate signs, discovering the directions are flat-out ass backwards wrong, and dealing with a zooming flow of traffic to the right and left. I do believe the highest risk for some kind of rental car road collision is always within the first 10-15 minutes when you’re trying to figure out both the car and where the hell you’re heading.
That critical juncture for me came at Sunday night about 9:30 in LA. Of course the freeways are flooded with streams of red and white lights across 12 lanes like rush hour in most towns. I take I-405 to North 101 and try to center myself if you will listening to a CD of raw gut-bucket Clarksdale, Mississippi bottomland blues by Terry “Big T” Williams and Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson. This deep-down thumping blues, totally at odds with the fast LA tempo, is what I need.
An hour and half later around Ventura traffic has thinned way out and I make a right to head up Route 33, which narrows to a twisting two-lane mountain road. It’s nearing 2 a.m. east coast time and a world away from shoveling snow in the driveway this morning. The key to my hotel room is in an envelope taped to the office door at the Blue Iguana Inn. Described by a tourist magazine as “hip and stylish,” the inn is designed in a Mexican motif by a local architect and decorated by his wife, who owns the place. All that matters to me after a day shoveling snow, waiting out a 4-hour delay, then the 6-hour flight and that damn barking mutt, and the 2-hour drive up to Ojai is that a beautiful bed takes up almost my entire room, with giant fluffy pillows and a cushy, soft mattress to die for.
Come 7 in the morning the alarm is beep, beep, beeping away. I set it early to leave sufficient time to chug vast quantities of java, clear my head, and think about what it is that I want to see happen at my 9 a.m. meeting. Also need some extra time to find the meeting place.
It’s an overcast Monday morning driving along Ojai Avenue past a running/bike trail, the town’s Spanish-style arcade, a bell tower supposedly reminiscent of one in Havana, the pergola, which is a walkway beneath a series of connecting arches, a skateboard park, small parks and plazas, small art shops, craft stores, restaurants and bars. Everything in Ojai is on a small scale. The town, two hours north of LA, has only 8,000 residents, most living in tidy cottages and ranchers in leafy blocks off the main drag. There is a lengthy list of Hollywood celebs who’ve retreated here to slum in disguise and hide out — Tim Burton, Julie Christie, Johnny Depp, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, Diane Ladd, Malcolm McDowell, Bill Paxton, Ted Danson. Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter had a place up in the hills in nearby Casitas Springs, where every Christmas John would put speakers on his deck and blast the valley with Christmas tunes, until a neighbor finally got him to shut it down. That’s John, sentimental, romantic and a pain in the ass at the same time.
The CEO and the Board Chairman were chatting, waiting for me when I arrived pretty much on the button at 9. The ice was broken by my being completely over-dressed for the occasion; wearing jacket, tie and pullover sweater. The chairman was in sneaks, jeans and a corduroy shirt. The CEO, a Brit, wore business casual shirt and slacks. He had been in Oslo, Norway last Thursday, stopped over in London on Saturday, and was here in the plush and comfy chairman’s office Monday morning. The chairman, an older man, was yawning, complaining he still couldn’t shake off the jet lag after a three-week trip to Taiwan, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Management consultants like these two make their living on the road, flying off to clients, conferences, training seminars and speaking gigs around the globe.
Our meeting was scheduled for Christmas week for the simple fact it’s one of the few times during the year both of these globe-trotters can be found in the same room at the same time. They’ve scheduled me for two hours and we take it down to the last minute. The casual conversation and open-ended brain-storming is laid back. The one exception to this relaxed atmosphere is the statute of a large, threatening gargoyle that dominates the chairman’s broad, clean desk. “Where’d you get that?” “My wife gave it to me to ward off evil people.” “Does it work?” “Why yes, I believe it does.” Not interested in learning the details, I bring our talk back on track.
We decide on two projects I’ll go forward on, shake hands, and part ways with smiles all around and Merry Christmas send-offs. I lunch for two hours with the communications manager, who fills me in some more about the projects I’ll be working on and the culture of the organization.
By 2 pm I’m a free man, feeling good about making a decent impression after Sunday’s long day and night. I head to Ojai’s public library to use one of its free Internet-connected computers to check emails. My magazine, the editing of which is my occupation aside from independent contracting, is winding down production on the January 2010 issue and there are usually last minute glitches and changes and questions.
The temperature is in the high 50s, the sun finally breaks through, and I get an idea of how the valley, running east-west about ten miles long and three miles wide, traps light all day long, inspiring Ojai’s colony of artists. Nordhoff Ridge, towering over the north side of town at more than 5,000 feet, is now clearly visible and stunning.
Stuart Rupp runs a shop where he makes prints of his wife’s delicate Oriental brush art — depending on the strength and balance of line — coupled with calligraphy and Zen seals ‘Laugher,” “Unique,” “Cherish the Moment” and “No method.” He explains to me how Ojai’s mountains and looming trees humble locals, an odd diversity of Hollywood intelligentsia, redneck farm laborers, retired millionaire industrialists, and new-age spiritualists. The sun’s day-long radiance, the famous pink glowing sunset, the absence of shadows, the mountainous confines and stands of forests put residents in what Stuart describes as a state of “Quiet Excellence.”
My conversation with Stuart, a short, gregarious man with shaggy gray hair who’s got a rep in town as something of a maverick, runs past an hour. He recounts how his wife Nancy’s life was cut all too short at age 57 in 2001 when she was struck in the leg by a car on Ojai’s Main Street, not 50 yards away from the shop. She died when a blood clot broke free in her leg 11 days later. Stuart keeps her spirit alive in the small shop, crammed with prints of Nancy’s art: the Buddha’s 12 barnyard animals printed on cardboard packaging boxes, tee-shirts, sweat shirts, night shirts and “Sanity Bites” framed reprints of mixed Chinese calligraphy and brushpainting. Stuart, who retired as a physicist and oceanographer at 45 to let Nancy do her thing, and I carry on about transcendent physicist Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Obama, the New England Patriots, “global weirding,” health care reform, the computer software and hardware industries, junior chamber of commerce carpetbaggers, the country’s energy oligarchy, the demise of conversation, Johns Hopkins lacrosse, the 57 churches Stuart counted on his paper route as a boy growing up in Ojai, his father the doc who made house calls until he was 80, the orange groves to the north that benefit from the full day of sunlight to deliver product a month after the rest of the state’s groves are harvested. “Embrace life,” Stuart smiles at one point. “It’s all we have. We’re all in this together, after all.” I forget what we were talking about.
I run into a peppy young blonde woman with rosy cheeks sitting behind the counter at the Trowbridge Gallery who says people call her Sunshine because she’s always had a bubbling, giggling energy. She’s from the far northeast of Philadelphia and we talk about places in South Jersey. She looks like a native but has been out here just less than a year. It was time to “gain her footing,” she explains, vague about where her traction will lead. “You’ve got to learn California,” Sunshine says. “It takes a while. You know, it’s the west out here. People think different. More open. In the east people think more in boxes.” As I walk out the door she greets two friends and I hear her talk about “the good energy” to be found in something or somewhere. She’s right: back east you hear little about embracing the good energy.
Another dose of positive energy came my way at dinner Monday night at Azu Mediterranean Restaurant and Bar on East Ojai Avenue. Eric the bartender had set me up with a couple of generous shots of Woodford Reserve bourbon and a draught of something called Wildfire beer. I had retreated from the bar to a couch to talk on the cell to Kate, my daughter who was spending the night at her boyfriend’s in Delaware. No one had picked up when I called home, and son Steve and Kate hadn’t picked up cell calls to them. After 30 years of travel I still get nervous when no one answers the call at home.
“Everything OK?” a fellow asks me when I sign off with Kate. “Sorry, I talked too loud.” “No, not a problem, glad to share a couch with you,” he smiles. Ron is his name. He introduces a cute young blonde woman, Desiree, his best friend, he says. Desiree reminds me of other SoCal girls or women, attractive, fit, and seemingly somewhat bored and weary of it all. Turns out Desiree is 32, doesn’t look it, was born in Ojai, hates LA, there’s no culture there, loves New York but couldn’t live there, might end up in South Carolina, likes the pace, like country music.
Ron says all the money in the world couldn’t buy a friend like Desiree. Ron’s blind in his right eye, going blind in the other one. He’s 62, doesn’t look it, is tanned with his hair parted down the middle and a diamond in his left ear. Ron smiles constantly. He asks Desiree are they OK with time, can he have another 5 minutes? He was born in Manhattan and runs 4 massages parlors in Ventura he bought after getting sick off looking in his mirror each morning hating his work as an account manager for high-end men’s fashion accessories, belt buckles he mentions in particular. It was his father’s business he got into after 7 years working for CBS behind the camera in production, where he tired of kissing ass to get anywhere. “I was making $300,000 a year, now I’m making $35,000. I had a lot of money, I spent a lot of money. My life’s complicated like you wouldn’t want to know. But I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror.” As he leaves he shouts across to Eric the bartender, “We’ll be back. This is Desiree. We love this place.”
I’m back at the Blue Iguana by around 10. Read newspapers in bed to decompress and then wake up around 4 a.m., earlier than I wanted and before the alarm goes off. Grab some heavy duty Costa Rican java at a shop, Full of Beans and Fuel, and it’s off to LAX at 6 in the morning darkness to beat the dreaded LA rush hour. To bypass some of it, I take the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Oxnard and watch the sun rise over the Santa Monica Mountains at about 7:15. Make a point to drive to Zuma Beach and wade into the Pacific. A couple of men in sweatshirts walk large dogs. It’s cold and wind, and the sea is churning and roiling.
The security line at LAX three days before Christmas is out the door at 8 a.m. But it moves along. My flight gets delayed an hour — a case of a missing aircraft. Then we’re stuck on the tarmac again when the pilot announces we’ve either got a fuel leak in one of the wings or it’s goo leftover from a de-icing. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he says. He advises passengers who will miss connections to stay on board and hope for the best because there’s not an empty seat on any flight out of LA until Friday.
Holiday time is amateur hour for infrequent flyers. They bombard gate agents with anxious, edgy questions: Is the plane here? The pilot here? I’m going to miss my connection. When will we board? How long is this flight? A cell phone chorus makes the rounds: “We’re delayed, delayed, delayed.” Finally, when we get into Philadelphia at about 8:40 p.m., two hours late, one of the attendants grabs the PA: “Any passengers to Tel Aviv or Madrid, you’ve got to run to your gate. Please make way. The rest of you poor bastards who missed your connections, see the agent at the podium.”
I’m not moving, stuck in the last row by the window, seat 33A. The woman next to me sounds exasperated: “Dad, dad, I just landed. Dad, didn’t you check online to find my terminal. C’mon dad, you can do it.” From another row: “Brendan, did you find what you needed? Is that our bag? Where’s our other bag?” From behind me: “Hi, mom, we’re on the ground. Just getting off the plane. Huh? Huh? Can’t hear you. See you soon.” A small girl wanders off dragging a pink blanket, holding a purple stuffed dragon.
Walking through Terminal B, I see small tight clusters of lost travelers surround besieged gate agents, hands out waiting for hotel vouchers for an unwanted stay-over at the Marriott. Flights to Boston, Tampa, Charlotte, State College, are taking off at 10 and 11 tonight, unusually late for Philadelphia. Passengers, tired and blue, will roll into beds not as comfy as the Blue Iguana’s at 2 or 3 a.m. Adding to the irritation, the muzak in Terminal B’s is playing possibly the most ridiculous holiday songs, “ding-dong, ding-dong, Christmas bells are ringing.” Stressed-out travelers have already been dinged and donged. How about, “God rest ye merry flyers, let no delay dismay, air traffic is our saviour, our only ticket home, just save us all from winter’s power, when plans have gone astray, O tidings of comfort and joy, that’s what we seek, may departure boards bring comfort and joy, on-time flights, may departure boards bring comfort and joy.”
Sure enough, flights were canceled all over the departures board. Stranded holiday travelers were sprawled out or slumped over, bleary-eyed zombies at most every gate. My flight got pushed back from 2 to 5 p.m. in a case of a missing pilot. Then his plane landed but could not reach a gate for all the snow plowed into small mountains. Next came the dreaded tarmac delay. We were on board, buckled in and going nowhere. The pilot, with a soothing British accent, explained only one runway was operating, alternating take-offs with landings. Finally we were airborne about 6 p.m. for the 6-hour flight cross country. The plane’s cabin of course was crammed to the max, not an empty seat. Across the entire nation a little dog yapped, yapped and yelped, trapped in a cage stowed in the overhead luggage rack.
The most disorienting and dangerous part of a trip I find is getting a start in an unfamiliar city after the dark, when you’re in a rental car you’ve never driven before, making seat adjustments, mirror adjustments, deciphering the dashboard, trying to follow typed directions handed over by an automaton behind the counter at Avis Rental. I’m leaving LAX, scanning for street and interstate signs, discovering the directions are flat-out ass backwards wrong, and dealing with a zooming flow of traffic to the right and left. I do believe the highest risk for some kind of rental car road collision is always within the first 10-15 minutes when you’re trying to figure out both the car and where the hell you’re heading.
That critical juncture for me came at Sunday night about 9:30 in LA. Of course the freeways are flooded with streams of red and white lights across 12 lanes like rush hour in most towns. I take I-405 to North 101 and try to center myself if you will listening to a CD of raw gut-bucket Clarksdale, Mississippi bottomland blues by Terry “Big T” Williams and Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson. This deep-down thumping blues, totally at odds with the fast LA tempo, is what I need.
An hour and half later around Ventura traffic has thinned way out and I make a right to head up Route 33, which narrows to a twisting two-lane mountain road. It’s nearing 2 a.m. east coast time and a world away from shoveling snow in the driveway this morning. The key to my hotel room is in an envelope taped to the office door at the Blue Iguana Inn. Described by a tourist magazine as “hip and stylish,” the inn is designed in a Mexican motif by a local architect and decorated by his wife, who owns the place. All that matters to me after a day shoveling snow, waiting out a 4-hour delay, then the 6-hour flight and that damn barking mutt, and the 2-hour drive up to Ojai is that a beautiful bed takes up almost my entire room, with giant fluffy pillows and a cushy, soft mattress to die for.
Come 7 in the morning the alarm is beep, beep, beeping away. I set it early to leave sufficient time to chug vast quantities of java, clear my head, and think about what it is that I want to see happen at my 9 a.m. meeting. Also need some extra time to find the meeting place.
It’s an overcast Monday morning driving along Ojai Avenue past a running/bike trail, the town’s Spanish-style arcade, a bell tower supposedly reminiscent of one in Havana, the pergola, which is a walkway beneath a series of connecting arches, a skateboard park, small parks and plazas, small art shops, craft stores, restaurants and bars. Everything in Ojai is on a small scale. The town, two hours north of LA, has only 8,000 residents, most living in tidy cottages and ranchers in leafy blocks off the main drag. There is a lengthy list of Hollywood celebs who’ve retreated here to slum in disguise and hide out — Tim Burton, Julie Christie, Johnny Depp, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, Diane Ladd, Malcolm McDowell, Bill Paxton, Ted Danson. Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter had a place up in the hills in nearby Casitas Springs, where every Christmas John would put speakers on his deck and blast the valley with Christmas tunes, until a neighbor finally got him to shut it down. That’s John, sentimental, romantic and a pain in the ass at the same time.
The CEO and the Board Chairman were chatting, waiting for me when I arrived pretty much on the button at 9. The ice was broken by my being completely over-dressed for the occasion; wearing jacket, tie and pullover sweater. The chairman was in sneaks, jeans and a corduroy shirt. The CEO, a Brit, wore business casual shirt and slacks. He had been in Oslo, Norway last Thursday, stopped over in London on Saturday, and was here in the plush and comfy chairman’s office Monday morning. The chairman, an older man, was yawning, complaining he still couldn’t shake off the jet lag after a three-week trip to Taiwan, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Management consultants like these two make their living on the road, flying off to clients, conferences, training seminars and speaking gigs around the globe.
Our meeting was scheduled for Christmas week for the simple fact it’s one of the few times during the year both of these globe-trotters can be found in the same room at the same time. They’ve scheduled me for two hours and we take it down to the last minute. The casual conversation and open-ended brain-storming is laid back. The one exception to this relaxed atmosphere is the statute of a large, threatening gargoyle that dominates the chairman’s broad, clean desk. “Where’d you get that?” “My wife gave it to me to ward off evil people.” “Does it work?” “Why yes, I believe it does.” Not interested in learning the details, I bring our talk back on track.
We decide on two projects I’ll go forward on, shake hands, and part ways with smiles all around and Merry Christmas send-offs. I lunch for two hours with the communications manager, who fills me in some more about the projects I’ll be working on and the culture of the organization.
By 2 pm I’m a free man, feeling good about making a decent impression after Sunday’s long day and night. I head to Ojai’s public library to use one of its free Internet-connected computers to check emails. My magazine, the editing of which is my occupation aside from independent contracting, is winding down production on the January 2010 issue and there are usually last minute glitches and changes and questions.
The temperature is in the high 50s, the sun finally breaks through, and I get an idea of how the valley, running east-west about ten miles long and three miles wide, traps light all day long, inspiring Ojai’s colony of artists. Nordhoff Ridge, towering over the north side of town at more than 5,000 feet, is now clearly visible and stunning.
Stuart Rupp runs a shop where he makes prints of his wife’s delicate Oriental brush art — depending on the strength and balance of line — coupled with calligraphy and Zen seals ‘Laugher,” “Unique,” “Cherish the Moment” and “No method.” He explains to me how Ojai’s mountains and looming trees humble locals, an odd diversity of Hollywood intelligentsia, redneck farm laborers, retired millionaire industrialists, and new-age spiritualists. The sun’s day-long radiance, the famous pink glowing sunset, the absence of shadows, the mountainous confines and stands of forests put residents in what Stuart describes as a state of “Quiet Excellence.”
My conversation with Stuart, a short, gregarious man with shaggy gray hair who’s got a rep in town as something of a maverick, runs past an hour. He recounts how his wife Nancy’s life was cut all too short at age 57 in 2001 when she was struck in the leg by a car on Ojai’s Main Street, not 50 yards away from the shop. She died when a blood clot broke free in her leg 11 days later. Stuart keeps her spirit alive in the small shop, crammed with prints of Nancy’s art: the Buddha’s 12 barnyard animals printed on cardboard packaging boxes, tee-shirts, sweat shirts, night shirts and “Sanity Bites” framed reprints of mixed Chinese calligraphy and brushpainting. Stuart, who retired as a physicist and oceanographer at 45 to let Nancy do her thing, and I carry on about transcendent physicist Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Obama, the New England Patriots, “global weirding,” health care reform, the computer software and hardware industries, junior chamber of commerce carpetbaggers, the country’s energy oligarchy, the demise of conversation, Johns Hopkins lacrosse, the 57 churches Stuart counted on his paper route as a boy growing up in Ojai, his father the doc who made house calls until he was 80, the orange groves to the north that benefit from the full day of sunlight to deliver product a month after the rest of the state’s groves are harvested. “Embrace life,” Stuart smiles at one point. “It’s all we have. We’re all in this together, after all.” I forget what we were talking about.
I run into a peppy young blonde woman with rosy cheeks sitting behind the counter at the Trowbridge Gallery who says people call her Sunshine because she’s always had a bubbling, giggling energy. She’s from the far northeast of Philadelphia and we talk about places in South Jersey. She looks like a native but has been out here just less than a year. It was time to “gain her footing,” she explains, vague about where her traction will lead. “You’ve got to learn California,” Sunshine says. “It takes a while. You know, it’s the west out here. People think different. More open. In the east people think more in boxes.” As I walk out the door she greets two friends and I hear her talk about “the good energy” to be found in something or somewhere. She’s right: back east you hear little about embracing the good energy.
Another dose of positive energy came my way at dinner Monday night at Azu Mediterranean Restaurant and Bar on East Ojai Avenue. Eric the bartender had set me up with a couple of generous shots of Woodford Reserve bourbon and a draught of something called Wildfire beer. I had retreated from the bar to a couch to talk on the cell to Kate, my daughter who was spending the night at her boyfriend’s in Delaware. No one had picked up when I called home, and son Steve and Kate hadn’t picked up cell calls to them. After 30 years of travel I still get nervous when no one answers the call at home.
“Everything OK?” a fellow asks me when I sign off with Kate. “Sorry, I talked too loud.” “No, not a problem, glad to share a couch with you,” he smiles. Ron is his name. He introduces a cute young blonde woman, Desiree, his best friend, he says. Desiree reminds me of other SoCal girls or women, attractive, fit, and seemingly somewhat bored and weary of it all. Turns out Desiree is 32, doesn’t look it, was born in Ojai, hates LA, there’s no culture there, loves New York but couldn’t live there, might end up in South Carolina, likes the pace, like country music.
Ron says all the money in the world couldn’t buy a friend like Desiree. Ron’s blind in his right eye, going blind in the other one. He’s 62, doesn’t look it, is tanned with his hair parted down the middle and a diamond in his left ear. Ron smiles constantly. He asks Desiree are they OK with time, can he have another 5 minutes? He was born in Manhattan and runs 4 massages parlors in Ventura he bought after getting sick off looking in his mirror each morning hating his work as an account manager for high-end men’s fashion accessories, belt buckles he mentions in particular. It was his father’s business he got into after 7 years working for CBS behind the camera in production, where he tired of kissing ass to get anywhere. “I was making $300,000 a year, now I’m making $35,000. I had a lot of money, I spent a lot of money. My life’s complicated like you wouldn’t want to know. But I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror.” As he leaves he shouts across to Eric the bartender, “We’ll be back. This is Desiree. We love this place.”
I’m back at the Blue Iguana by around 10. Read newspapers in bed to decompress and then wake up around 4 a.m., earlier than I wanted and before the alarm goes off. Grab some heavy duty Costa Rican java at a shop, Full of Beans and Fuel, and it’s off to LAX at 6 in the morning darkness to beat the dreaded LA rush hour. To bypass some of it, I take the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Oxnard and watch the sun rise over the Santa Monica Mountains at about 7:15. Make a point to drive to Zuma Beach and wade into the Pacific. A couple of men in sweatshirts walk large dogs. It’s cold and wind, and the sea is churning and roiling.
The security line at LAX three days before Christmas is out the door at 8 a.m. But it moves along. My flight gets delayed an hour — a case of a missing aircraft. Then we’re stuck on the tarmac again when the pilot announces we’ve either got a fuel leak in one of the wings or it’s goo leftover from a de-icing. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he says. He advises passengers who will miss connections to stay on board and hope for the best because there’s not an empty seat on any flight out of LA until Friday.
Holiday time is amateur hour for infrequent flyers. They bombard gate agents with anxious, edgy questions: Is the plane here? The pilot here? I’m going to miss my connection. When will we board? How long is this flight? A cell phone chorus makes the rounds: “We’re delayed, delayed, delayed.” Finally, when we get into Philadelphia at about 8:40 p.m., two hours late, one of the attendants grabs the PA: “Any passengers to Tel Aviv or Madrid, you’ve got to run to your gate. Please make way. The rest of you poor bastards who missed your connections, see the agent at the podium.”
I’m not moving, stuck in the last row by the window, seat 33A. The woman next to me sounds exasperated: “Dad, dad, I just landed. Dad, didn’t you check online to find my terminal. C’mon dad, you can do it.” From another row: “Brendan, did you find what you needed? Is that our bag? Where’s our other bag?” From behind me: “Hi, mom, we’re on the ground. Just getting off the plane. Huh? Huh? Can’t hear you. See you soon.” A small girl wanders off dragging a pink blanket, holding a purple stuffed dragon.
Walking through Terminal B, I see small tight clusters of lost travelers surround besieged gate agents, hands out waiting for hotel vouchers for an unwanted stay-over at the Marriott. Flights to Boston, Tampa, Charlotte, State College, are taking off at 10 and 11 tonight, unusually late for Philadelphia. Passengers, tired and blue, will roll into beds not as comfy as the Blue Iguana’s at 2 or 3 a.m. Adding to the irritation, the muzak in Terminal B’s is playing possibly the most ridiculous holiday songs, “ding-dong, ding-dong, Christmas bells are ringing.” Stressed-out travelers have already been dinged and donged. How about, “God rest ye merry flyers, let no delay dismay, air traffic is our saviour, our only ticket home, just save us all from winter’s power, when plans have gone astray, O tidings of comfort and joy, that’s what we seek, may departure boards bring comfort and joy, on-time flights, may departure boards bring comfort and joy.”
Dusseldorf divas and Bonnie’s delta dudes
I imagine rounding up the noontime patrons at Bonnie’s Café for a group photo on the front porch. It’d be a challenge to break up the half-dozen or so conversations buzzing inside Bonnie’s. To pull these boys, 12 to 15 I reckon, away from their heaping hot supper plates of chicken and gravy and dumplings. Fact is, I seriously doubt some of these boys are ready to take directions from a Yankee photographer. “Squeeze in on the left over there, just a little bit more, little more. Now everybody say, ‘gravy’.”
It’d be hard to fit all the fellows in one frame. Bonnie’s regulars are big boys. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Mostly heavyset dudes. They clomp into Bonnie’s looking like they’ve wrestled in mud trenches all morning. Before they grab a seat they head straight back to the kitchen to wash up over the sinks. It’s a gray raw November day out and the boys wear layers of clothing, plaid shirts, overalls, Carhartt outer jackets, work boots or knee high rubber boots. Every one of them wears some kind of ball cap, skull cap or wool knit cap. They pull up chairs that scrape across Bonnie’s plain wooden floor and huddle around square pedestal tables by two’s and four’s; a long table by the front window seats a half dozen. They’re all chowing down.
There is nothing fancy in the least about Bonnie’s Café. Function trumps form. Work crews don’t lounge about, they’re fed and out in 25 minutes. The cafe butts up against an abandoned general store with a sagging red rusted roof and has two plump and torn old sofas on its porch. Train tracks run in front of Bonnie’s, on the other side of a gravel-strewn street where the boys park hulking, mud-splattered Ford and Chevy, red and black, pickups. You won’t find a minivan, an SUV, or any foreign made car parked anywhere near Bonnie’s. Not down in these parts. A white water tower standing on three steel legs and rising above bare trees has “Watson” spelled out in black letters. Watson sits on Arkansas Route 1 about 8 miles west of the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Memphis.
The town is but a speck on the map, taking up 0.2 square miles and home to 288 residents, according to the 2000 census. Bonnie’s is where the action is at lunch hour during the week. The waitresses work fast and talk like they know every customer, which they do. Everyone gets a large round jar, no handles, of iced tea. Some of the boys bullshit, joke and laugh, talk about the weather or the morning’s work, or equipment problems or what they’ll be doing this afternoon. Others sit and shovel down the chicken and dumplings. Three teenage Mexicans sit by themselves wearing hoodies. One fellow sits down, he’s lost every one of his fingers and his two thumbs jut out from club-like hands. A young boy hardly out of his teens if he is at all drags his limp right leg from table to table, shooting barbs, and taking some himself. A couple of large men wear big bushy beards, other have sideburns from another century. All have weathered, creased and lined dirty faces. Definitely lived in. “Those fried taters are good with catsup, let me tell you.” “What d’ya have coveralls on for, it ain’t winter yet?”
A couple of Bonnie’s boys yell goodbye to the women working the grills and the other fellows, and shove open the creaking screen door. A few minutes later they’re sitting in the cabs of huge green and yellow combines, metallic monsters as wide as the street that roar past Bonnie’s and slowly lumber up and over the train tracks.
Watson, Arkansas is 4,644 miles from Dusseldorf, Germany. After a day making sales calls in Memphis, I passed through Watson on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spiritual home of American blues music, by way of Marvell, Arkansas (population 1,395 and birthplace of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer), heading down to Vicksburg, Mississippi across miles and miles of bottom land cotton fields. Exactly two weeks earlier, Wednesday, November 4, I was sitting in Frank Gehry’s restaurant and bar downing a couple of shots of Noah’s Mill bourbon in what’s called Dusseldorf’s Media Harbour, by the Rhine River.
Absolutely the one and only common thread connecting Dusseldorf with Watson, Arkansas half a world away is beer. In Dusseldorf it is Altbier, an “old beer” amber lager poured into tall thin glasses with three-inch foam heads. And the waiters keep pouring, refilling, until you say, “no mas.” Down in the delta the beer flows easy, too. Liquor stores, shacks or huts still stand in the smallest, poorest of towns. A Miller Lite “Welcome Hunters” orange banner hangs on fence next to the F&L Liquor Store outside Watson. At Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company in Vicksburg I downed dark bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan and Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer Spiced Ale, brewed in Kiln, Mississippi. That happens to be where future NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre played quarterback for his dad, Irvin, who coached Kiln’s Hancock High.
In all other ways of life, culture and values, Watson and Dusseldorf trace extremely different orbits. Watson is rusted-out, dirt farmer poor. Dusseldorf, as Ibrahim, my Senegalese cabbie pointed out driving me in from the airport, is the most expensive city in Germany, the country’s center for advertising and fashion. Ibrahim confided in me his vision. After somehow enduring 28 years in Dusseldorf, where people of color are invisible, Ibrahim was finally plotting his return to Senegal, to build a home from scratch and bake all day. “If you are black, you get nowhere in Dusseldorf. No jobs, no opportunities, nothing,” he said.
In the delta you get stories, lots of stories. Just ask a question or two. I spent two hours jawing with a businessman named John at the bar in Vicksburg after the sun went down. According to John, who’s the only man in the bar wearing a jacket and tie — “It’s been a long day; I’m kinda tired — three times he sat down with old Irvin Favre for beers. “He was tough on the outside but a softie, really.”
Neil the bartender served up shots of Old Charter and kept the chatter going about Southeast Conference football, predictions, opinions and his supposedly inside information. Mark in a tie-dyed tee shirt and flowing locks walked past offering chocolate pecans. “Pass ‘em around. They don’t get getter than this. You OK, bud? Keepin’ the chill out?”
These conversations with John, Neil and Mark ran longer and deeper, far longer and deeper, than any conversation I had in Dusseldorf in the four days I was there, save for a dinner with the trade fair sponsor who paid my way over to write up the show. And that was the kind of shallow business lite talk you could have in your sleep. Dusseldorf is all business, no small talk. Germans I’m convinced don’t do small talk. Especially with foreigners. Especially in Dusseldorf, ranked by the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey of cities as possessing the sixth highest quality of living in the world and first in Germany. In Dusseldorf it’s about making money and spending money. Office lights are on until 7 or 8 at night at banking institutions, publishing houses, telecommunications giants, insurers, ad agencies and internet companies.
As I sat at world renown architect Frank Gehry’s stylishly hip, amber-lit woodsy bar rest assured no one came up and asked if I was OK or passed around chocolate pecans. The after-work crowd started filtering in around 8 and all went straight to dinner tables. No raucous laughs and ribbing like you got with Bonnie’s boys; no barstool philosophizing like at the biscuit company in Vicksburg — “It’s laid back here. It’s beautiful on these bluffs overlooking the river. People here, like the owner over there, they put up with me; they’ve shoveled me out of here more than once, I can tell you,” said John.
Image is paramount, image is everywhere in an ad agency and media capital like Dusseldorf. Nature is buried beneath late 20th century architecture, save for several parks. History is difficult to find, too. The RAF firebombed the city repeatedly in 1942, destroying 80 percent of it. More than 700 British bombers would crowd the night skies over Dusseldorf, igniting hundreds of fires, killing thousands, and making 140,000 homeless. “A pity,” said a middle-aged well-to-do investor, shaking his head, as I walked through the faux old town cobblestone streets taking photos. One was of a bright, shining red metallic front door of an office the man had rehabbed and was now looking to lease. He had rushed out to greet me like I was a potential leaser, scouting locations with my camera. It’s all about business in Dusseldorf.
And it’s about the fruits of a workaholic life. Black and silver BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Opels are tightly parked on “Queen Street,” the KÖ shopping district. Not a single minivan, SUV or pickup will you find. No U.S. or Japanese cars. And strangely, there is little sign of family life. No college stickers on rear windows. No “Proud parent of an all-star honor student” bumper stickers. “All this, too expensive, very expensive, for you and me,” smiled Ibrahim on the way to my hotel in the cab. Women in tight black skirts, with black stockings or black stretch leggings, maneuver atop black leather boots with spiked heels, balancing shopping bags from Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Boss, Sacha, Espirit, Tiffany and Company, Goex, Feel Good, Elena, Franzen, Kult, Villa Happ, Bvlgari, Louis Vitton. Men wear black, black ties, black scarves, black overcoats, and particularly hip black-framed thick, rectangular glasses that make them look like professors or scientists.
“Dusseldorf denizens thumb their noses at the rest of Germany,” I recall Ibrahim warning me. “But the German character is strong. No dancing about. You get straight talk. Yes is yes and no is no. That’s OK. But Germans, they are not warm and open like the Dutch. The time is come. I must live my vision. Make my home in Senegal.”
Down in the delta, folks of course are too damn poor to thumb their noses at anyone. Red Roof Inns don’t have portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O, like were hanging in the lobby at my Dusseldorf Hotel Carat. Red Roof rooms are twice the size of my spartan Carat closet, too. It is the world of dirt farmers, combine drivers, ditch diggers, machinists, blue collars versus Dusseldorf’s world architects, psychiatrists, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and gallery owners.
At Gehry’s on the Rhine no one asked if I was OK to get home. John at the bar in Vicksburg leaned over at one point and strongly suggested in friendly manner, “You don’t wanna drive back up to Clarksdale tonight. That’s three hours. You don’t wanna do that. Tell you what, you go down the street to Harrah’s and get yourself a room for $31. Then come back and stay with us for a few more pops. Then you can just walk back to your room.”
I walked along the Rhine back to my hotel from Gehry’s. It was chilly and spitting rain. Couples walked arm in arm in wool caps, scarves, driver’s gloves, berets, those studious rectangular glasses, carrying umbrellas. Some jogged in running suits. Cars suddenly pulled out of side alleys, crossed walkways, wheeled and circled like in a Bourne movie. Silent cyclists occasionally zoomed up on you out of the dark, without warning, no bells or horns or “hallo,” seemingly intent on seeing how close they could come to clipping you.
A few times in Dusseldorf I chanced upon old white-haired Germans, stout, stone-faced husbands and wives, standing shoulder to shoulder, bundled up, like squat statutes waiting for a bus or the tram. I wonder if a wailing Little Walter harmonica solo would make them flinch, or wince.
It’d be hard to fit all the fellows in one frame. Bonnie’s regulars are big boys. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Mostly heavyset dudes. They clomp into Bonnie’s looking like they’ve wrestled in mud trenches all morning. Before they grab a seat they head straight back to the kitchen to wash up over the sinks. It’s a gray raw November day out and the boys wear layers of clothing, plaid shirts, overalls, Carhartt outer jackets, work boots or knee high rubber boots. Every one of them wears some kind of ball cap, skull cap or wool knit cap. They pull up chairs that scrape across Bonnie’s plain wooden floor and huddle around square pedestal tables by two’s and four’s; a long table by the front window seats a half dozen. They’re all chowing down.
There is nothing fancy in the least about Bonnie’s Café. Function trumps form. Work crews don’t lounge about, they’re fed and out in 25 minutes. The cafe butts up against an abandoned general store with a sagging red rusted roof and has two plump and torn old sofas on its porch. Train tracks run in front of Bonnie’s, on the other side of a gravel-strewn street where the boys park hulking, mud-splattered Ford and Chevy, red and black, pickups. You won’t find a minivan, an SUV, or any foreign made car parked anywhere near Bonnie’s. Not down in these parts. A white water tower standing on three steel legs and rising above bare trees has “Watson” spelled out in black letters. Watson sits on Arkansas Route 1 about 8 miles west of the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Memphis.
The town is but a speck on the map, taking up 0.2 square miles and home to 288 residents, according to the 2000 census. Bonnie’s is where the action is at lunch hour during the week. The waitresses work fast and talk like they know every customer, which they do. Everyone gets a large round jar, no handles, of iced tea. Some of the boys bullshit, joke and laugh, talk about the weather or the morning’s work, or equipment problems or what they’ll be doing this afternoon. Others sit and shovel down the chicken and dumplings. Three teenage Mexicans sit by themselves wearing hoodies. One fellow sits down, he’s lost every one of his fingers and his two thumbs jut out from club-like hands. A young boy hardly out of his teens if he is at all drags his limp right leg from table to table, shooting barbs, and taking some himself. A couple of large men wear big bushy beards, other have sideburns from another century. All have weathered, creased and lined dirty faces. Definitely lived in. “Those fried taters are good with catsup, let me tell you.” “What d’ya have coveralls on for, it ain’t winter yet?”
A couple of Bonnie’s boys yell goodbye to the women working the grills and the other fellows, and shove open the creaking screen door. A few minutes later they’re sitting in the cabs of huge green and yellow combines, metallic monsters as wide as the street that roar past Bonnie’s and slowly lumber up and over the train tracks.
Watson, Arkansas is 4,644 miles from Dusseldorf, Germany. After a day making sales calls in Memphis, I passed through Watson on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spiritual home of American blues music, by way of Marvell, Arkansas (population 1,395 and birthplace of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer), heading down to Vicksburg, Mississippi across miles and miles of bottom land cotton fields. Exactly two weeks earlier, Wednesday, November 4, I was sitting in Frank Gehry’s restaurant and bar downing a couple of shots of Noah’s Mill bourbon in what’s called Dusseldorf’s Media Harbour, by the Rhine River.
Absolutely the one and only common thread connecting Dusseldorf with Watson, Arkansas half a world away is beer. In Dusseldorf it is Altbier, an “old beer” amber lager poured into tall thin glasses with three-inch foam heads. And the waiters keep pouring, refilling, until you say, “no mas.” Down in the delta the beer flows easy, too. Liquor stores, shacks or huts still stand in the smallest, poorest of towns. A Miller Lite “Welcome Hunters” orange banner hangs on fence next to the F&L Liquor Store outside Watson. At Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company in Vicksburg I downed dark bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan and Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer Spiced Ale, brewed in Kiln, Mississippi. That happens to be where future NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre played quarterback for his dad, Irvin, who coached Kiln’s Hancock High.
In all other ways of life, culture and values, Watson and Dusseldorf trace extremely different orbits. Watson is rusted-out, dirt farmer poor. Dusseldorf, as Ibrahim, my Senegalese cabbie pointed out driving me in from the airport, is the most expensive city in Germany, the country’s center for advertising and fashion. Ibrahim confided in me his vision. After somehow enduring 28 years in Dusseldorf, where people of color are invisible, Ibrahim was finally plotting his return to Senegal, to build a home from scratch and bake all day. “If you are black, you get nowhere in Dusseldorf. No jobs, no opportunities, nothing,” he said.
In the delta you get stories, lots of stories. Just ask a question or two. I spent two hours jawing with a businessman named John at the bar in Vicksburg after the sun went down. According to John, who’s the only man in the bar wearing a jacket and tie — “It’s been a long day; I’m kinda tired — three times he sat down with old Irvin Favre for beers. “He was tough on the outside but a softie, really.”
Neil the bartender served up shots of Old Charter and kept the chatter going about Southeast Conference football, predictions, opinions and his supposedly inside information. Mark in a tie-dyed tee shirt and flowing locks walked past offering chocolate pecans. “Pass ‘em around. They don’t get getter than this. You OK, bud? Keepin’ the chill out?”
These conversations with John, Neil and Mark ran longer and deeper, far longer and deeper, than any conversation I had in Dusseldorf in the four days I was there, save for a dinner with the trade fair sponsor who paid my way over to write up the show. And that was the kind of shallow business lite talk you could have in your sleep. Dusseldorf is all business, no small talk. Germans I’m convinced don’t do small talk. Especially with foreigners. Especially in Dusseldorf, ranked by the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey of cities as possessing the sixth highest quality of living in the world and first in Germany. In Dusseldorf it’s about making money and spending money. Office lights are on until 7 or 8 at night at banking institutions, publishing houses, telecommunications giants, insurers, ad agencies and internet companies.
As I sat at world renown architect Frank Gehry’s stylishly hip, amber-lit woodsy bar rest assured no one came up and asked if I was OK or passed around chocolate pecans. The after-work crowd started filtering in around 8 and all went straight to dinner tables. No raucous laughs and ribbing like you got with Bonnie’s boys; no barstool philosophizing like at the biscuit company in Vicksburg — “It’s laid back here. It’s beautiful on these bluffs overlooking the river. People here, like the owner over there, they put up with me; they’ve shoveled me out of here more than once, I can tell you,” said John.
Image is paramount, image is everywhere in an ad agency and media capital like Dusseldorf. Nature is buried beneath late 20th century architecture, save for several parks. History is difficult to find, too. The RAF firebombed the city repeatedly in 1942, destroying 80 percent of it. More than 700 British bombers would crowd the night skies over Dusseldorf, igniting hundreds of fires, killing thousands, and making 140,000 homeless. “A pity,” said a middle-aged well-to-do investor, shaking his head, as I walked through the faux old town cobblestone streets taking photos. One was of a bright, shining red metallic front door of an office the man had rehabbed and was now looking to lease. He had rushed out to greet me like I was a potential leaser, scouting locations with my camera. It’s all about business in Dusseldorf.
And it’s about the fruits of a workaholic life. Black and silver BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Opels are tightly parked on “Queen Street,” the KÖ shopping district. Not a single minivan, SUV or pickup will you find. No U.S. or Japanese cars. And strangely, there is little sign of family life. No college stickers on rear windows. No “Proud parent of an all-star honor student” bumper stickers. “All this, too expensive, very expensive, for you and me,” smiled Ibrahim on the way to my hotel in the cab. Women in tight black skirts, with black stockings or black stretch leggings, maneuver atop black leather boots with spiked heels, balancing shopping bags from Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Boss, Sacha, Espirit, Tiffany and Company, Goex, Feel Good, Elena, Franzen, Kult, Villa Happ, Bvlgari, Louis Vitton. Men wear black, black ties, black scarves, black overcoats, and particularly hip black-framed thick, rectangular glasses that make them look like professors or scientists.
“Dusseldorf denizens thumb their noses at the rest of Germany,” I recall Ibrahim warning me. “But the German character is strong. No dancing about. You get straight talk. Yes is yes and no is no. That’s OK. But Germans, they are not warm and open like the Dutch. The time is come. I must live my vision. Make my home in Senegal.”
Down in the delta, folks of course are too damn poor to thumb their noses at anyone. Red Roof Inns don’t have portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O, like were hanging in the lobby at my Dusseldorf Hotel Carat. Red Roof rooms are twice the size of my spartan Carat closet, too. It is the world of dirt farmers, combine drivers, ditch diggers, machinists, blue collars versus Dusseldorf’s world architects, psychiatrists, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and gallery owners.
At Gehry’s on the Rhine no one asked if I was OK to get home. John at the bar in Vicksburg leaned over at one point and strongly suggested in friendly manner, “You don’t wanna drive back up to Clarksdale tonight. That’s three hours. You don’t wanna do that. Tell you what, you go down the street to Harrah’s and get yourself a room for $31. Then come back and stay with us for a few more pops. Then you can just walk back to your room.”
I walked along the Rhine back to my hotel from Gehry’s. It was chilly and spitting rain. Couples walked arm in arm in wool caps, scarves, driver’s gloves, berets, those studious rectangular glasses, carrying umbrellas. Some jogged in running suits. Cars suddenly pulled out of side alleys, crossed walkways, wheeled and circled like in a Bourne movie. Silent cyclists occasionally zoomed up on you out of the dark, without warning, no bells or horns or “hallo,” seemingly intent on seeing how close they could come to clipping you.
A few times in Dusseldorf I chanced upon old white-haired Germans, stout, stone-faced husbands and wives, standing shoulder to shoulder, bundled up, like squat statutes waiting for a bus or the tram. I wonder if a wailing Little Walter harmonica solo would make them flinch, or wince.
Bourbon, break-ins and flashing blue lights
on the road to father and bonding
Otto stared down at the phone he had just hung up. He paused. “Well, that’s a revolting development.”
I had hired Otto, a portly attorney and friend of my wife’s father, to find me another attorney who would handle my case in Virginia — site of the “revolting development.” He found Ms. Stacy Slatterhouse, with an office across from the Halifax County Courthouse, and we had just debriefed her on the details of my case.
“I can’t promise anything,” said Ms. Slatterhouse.
Days before, Virginia state troopers snared me racing 94 MPH under clear skies and with little traffic on Route 58E along the Virginia-North Carolina border. I was in a 60 MPH zone. They swooped in and nailed me roughly halfway between Roanoke and Richmond, about 400 miles from home near Philadelphia.
94 MPH is double reckless driving, Ms. Slatterhouse informed us. The judge conceivably could reduce the charge to defective equipment. Then again, “94 is a high number, very aggressive driving,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. Ms. Slatterhouse also brought up the touchy business of my son, Steve, being with me when I sprung the trap. “The judge might take into account, how can I put it, some egregious parental role modeling,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. But Steve was sound asleep in the shotgun seat when the blue lights lined up behind us. “What? What’s going on?” he asked groggily, realizing we were boxed in by three brown and tan state patrol cars. His first question was the same one the trooper asked me as he leaned into front seat: “What on earth are you doing going this fast?”
“When you come down for your court date, and make no mistake, you must appear,” said Ms Slatterhouse, “bring along your toothbrush. Just a heads up. You just might spend some nights across the street from the court house in the county jail.”
“You know, I was up your way not long ago,” said one of the troopers after studying my driver’s license. I know. Everybody drives fast up there. It’s different down here. It’s a different world. Why don’t you let your son slide over and drive for a while? He’s driving age, isn’t he?”
Sure he is, we’re out here hunting for a college, after all. That’s what Steve and I had been doing for eight days. I told one of the troopers we were tired and just wanted to get home. A plea he has heard, oh, possibly thousands of times. My bad. I should have stuck with the “different world” rationale. Steve slid behind the wheel and locked in a steady 60 MPH. We said nothing. Hell, we were out of cell phone range and I couldn’t even phone home and freak out on my wife.
I wouldn’t say Steve and I committed to this trip with a high sense of purpose, like actually finding a school for Steve. No, we didn’t drill down too deep. My wife Suze suspected all along we had other plans, other goals for this summertime road trip. To be sure, we stayed away from anything organized, organized campus tours, orientations, interviews, print propaganda handouts. We breezed through campuses, sometimes not even getting out of the car, and went with first impressions and gut feelings:
Penn State — 41,700 students, almost all white. Sprawling vanilla campus without discernable personality. At least the massive football stadium is a walk away from the dorms. A steady rain while we were there left a bland impression.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania — Workable size, 14,310 students. IUP wasn’t on the initial itinerary, but like many decisions on this trip, we improvised on the move. Old projects-like dorms are being demolished for new two- and four-person suites with private baths. This is a trend all across campus America. Kids coddled at home want to bring as much comfort and privacy with them to college as they can. The campus lifestyle factor can be a significant determinant.
University of Pittsburgh — Probably too urban for Steve. Petersen Events Center, where the Pitt Panthers basketball team plays, is a NBA-worthy glass and steel palace. It also houses the student fitness center. Rec centers and student centers are other major “lifestyle” draws on college tours. A classroom is a classroom, a commodity when college shopping, but student centers with multiple flat screen monitors and food courts, and gyms with rock climbing walls, this is part and parcel of creating brand reputations and positioning schools competitively. After 18 years of training, our kids know what to look for when they shop.
University of West Virginia — Confusing campus layout. The school loses points as we lose patience trying to find the football stadium. We find it, it’s locked up, we climb over the gate and stroll the astroturf field. You’ve noted no doubt the emphasis we put on athletic facilities. Colleges pour millions into their athletic budgets every year; athletics is part of the lifestyle equation and brand building; so we feel obligated to check out their investments. Of course that’s horeshit. Steve and I are serious sports fans, have been all our lives, and we’ll take every opportunity (or risk) to walk the fields we see on TV. Beyond sportsdom, Morgantown has too much weedy, ramshackle off-campus housing winding up into the hills. I heard someone once say WVU is too “trailer park.” That’s a helluva image problem for the admissions people to deal with. They’ve got to free the state university from the baggage of the state.
The College of Wooster — Classy, leafy, brick-lined liberal arts campus. Immediately out of our price range. And as Steve asks, “What good does a liberal arts degree do for you?” “It’s your ticket to keep studying a few more years in a grad program,” I explain.
Ohio State University — OSU suffers from bad timing on this trip. Columbus is hot and crowded and we’re hot and tired. Still, we push on to locate the famed Horseshoe, Ohio Stadium, “one of the most recognizable landmarks in all of sports” according to the Buckeye web site. Colleges love to tout recognizable landmarks, and of course most of them are the towering football stadiums. After all, ESPN, CBS Sports, ABC Sports et al don’t come to campuses to photograph the library or the physics lab.
Ohio University — Steve would be a legacy kid here, with both his mom and I OU alumni. “It’s a party school isn’t it?” he asked. “Aren’t they all?” I answer. I think he’s looking to escape his legacy, and more important, that zoombifying eight-hour drive from Philadelphia. OU is in fact a perennial top five finisher in annaul national collegiate party power rankings. The admissions folks grit their teeth and prepare their spin every year the rankings come out. “Oh, that’s such an old story by now…”
Virginia Tech — Steve likes the slate stone architecture of the buildings circling the expansive grass drill field, the heart of the campus has a military feel like West Point. Va Tech is another school standing in the shadows of an enormous football stadium. As mentioned, Steve’s not one for long windshield time, and Va Tech, like OU, is a drive too far.
Actually Steve and I didn’t talk about specific colleges on this tour as much as we went back and forth on areas of study. Steve is taking a shotgun approach to what major to pursue, and I can’t keep up with the rounds of questions. “What do you do with a sports administration major? What if you combined it with journalism? Is journalism dead? What’s a sports information director do? ESPN did a show about them. Seems there is a lot of pressure to those jobs. How much do they get paid. What do you do with a general business degree? What’s business administration? What kind of job could I get in TV production? How do you a get a job with NFL Films or ESPN or The Speed Channel?”
“Wanna see Applachian Bible College?”
“What?”
“Just messin’ with you. You don’t have to figure out the entire arc of your career when you’re 17.”
“But if I don’t know what I want to do, maybe I shouldn’t go to college for a year. Maybe community college. It’s expensive. Give you and mom a break. I know we don’t have a lot of money now.”
As you can see, there are no secrets, financial or otherwise, in our small ranch house. But the boy is prone to thinking too much. Just like his mom, dad and sister. We all need to chill a little more. Of course the stakes of finding an affordable four-year college experience don’t lend themselves to chillin’.
Our road trip talk becomes much easier to handle when music is the topic, which happens at some point every day on this trip. In the back seat sits a cooler packed full of CDs. Steve’s a particular fan of what’s called “Brit Pop,” the wave of British rock and roll bands from the ‘90s. He started listening to The Clash and took it from there. Oasis. Blur. Pulp. Coldplay and Radiohead, the Libertines, Keane. Back to Led Zep, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who. Throw in a lot of Marley, a bit of Dylan and The Band. I don’t want to lay my musical prejudices on him. Pick out another CD, Steve. But what’s most annoying is the iPod generation’s itchy trigger finger that keeps pushing the damn forward button searching for another single track. They’re “single minded,” no different than the transitor radio craze in the ‘60s.
A more complicated topic that often comes up has to do with what I’d call “cultures,” for lack of anything more descriptive. Steve doesn’t use the word per se, but he’s something of an anthropologist. Now how do you make money out of that? For years he’s followed the NASCAR culture and the Formula One racing culture. College football cultures and traditions, especially the hardcore southern schools and midwest Big Ten schools in towns and states without professional teams. Texas and Ohio high school football cultures. Books like “Friday Night Lights,” and “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.”
Steve talks some on this trip about the rust belt culture we’ve been driving through.Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Akron. Canton. He finds something interesting in the decay and the people and the towns hanging on. He zeroes in on the tortured history of the Cleveland Browns. Something about the old school plain orange helmet he likes. And the Browns’ history of Hall of Famers, die-hard fans, the Dawg Pound, and never being in a Super Bowl.
Dipping into NASCAR culture was a main attraction of this road trip. We aimed to see the Bristol (Tennessee) and Martinsville (Virginia) tracks. The Martinsville track is the smallest NASCAR races on the circuit. Bristol, aka “Thunder Valley,” is a pilgrimmage shrine. If you took the grandstands at Daytona International Speedway, which stretch for miles, wrapped those stands around and around, coiled them tight as a drum, higher and higher around a half-mile oval, until you had a ten-story coliseum, that’s Bristol Motor Speeday. The “world’s fastest half-mile,” with 160,000 seats.
Twice a year NASCAR races at Bristol, on a spring Sunday and an August Saturday night. In mid-July, when we drove up to the track, it was after hours and the tours were done for the day. The museum was closed. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, with a few other straggler fans.
Damn if a gate to the track was open and some fans were wandering in. We walked down the rows of seat, slipped through an opening in the chain-link fence circling the tracks, and ran laughing up and down the steep raceway banks like concrete sand dunes. Suddenly a red pickup flies by us on the track. “Isn’t that the guys who were out here taking pictures?” asks Steve. Hmmm. Sure enough, track workers left open a drive-in gate down by turn one. Steve and I hurried back to our car.
“You drive,” I told Steve.
“Why?”
“You wanted to see Bristol. Well, nobody’s here and the track’s open. Take a few spins around.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yes. Who wouldn’t want to take their car out on Bristol and turn a couple laps. Damn straight.”
Steve guns our Mazda and its puny put-put engine around the high banks, once, twice, three, four times. That’s two miles. Then it’s my turn. Twice around for a mile. We laughed our asses off.
We weren’t laughing several days later when a patrolman caught us trespassing inside the Martinsville track. The thing is shaped like a paper clip, track walls are scarred and gouged by metal and rubber, with the stands sunk low in a valley, hard to see from the highway.
“Can’t you read? Read the signs?” an old, leathery guard asked me. “I could arrest you for being out here.” Of course two “No trespassing” signs hung on the fence right above where I had slid on my back to wriggle my way on to the track. “Come on, Steve,” I yelled. He was wandering the far end of the paper clip. “Sorry sir,” I said to the guard.
Before the old boy had more time to consider our fate, we were in the Mazda heading east on Highway 58. We were leaving behind the old south culture and heading toward home, to Philadelphia. “Racin’ the way it oughta be!” as the Bristol Motor Speedway motto says. Leaving behind strip malls and Hardees, Long John Silver, Arby’s, Subway, Wendy’s, Burger King, Sam’s Club, Daylight Doughnuts, Doggy Bakery, General Tire, Auto Zone, K Mart, CVS, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Food City, Walgreens. Cash Now. Cash 1. Bristol Cash. Gun’s ‘n Pawn.
Bristol is the “Birthplace of Country Music,” where the Carter Family came out of Poor Valley to first record here in ’27. Where hell-bent Saturday nights turn into solemn Sunday mornings. “Speak something worth hearing or be silent” commands one church message board. It’s not a long walk from the State Line Bar & Grille, Logan’s Roadhouse, Borderline Billiards to that Sunday morning coming down feeling at the Sacred Cross Church, Volunteer Baptist Church, the Faith Community Fellowship.
Bristol, the Carter Family, old time music, old time racing, they all were part of my romantic reflection until we were about two hours down the road on 58E and the blue lights came out of hiding.
It was a damn good ride while it lasted. Steve and I hit many of our targets. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a subterranean collection of musical misfits, outcasts and geniuses. The Pro Football Hall of Fame. A World War II sub. The Pittsburgh Vintage Car Grand Prix in rainy Schenley Park — MGs, Austin Healys, Jags, Rolls Royces, Lotuses. A 14-inning Pirates game after a torrential rain delay to see ace Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum, thin as a reed, hair like a surfer’s, last year’s Cy Young winner. An Indians game viewed from scorching left-field bleachers, with a clown in the top row pounding on a tom-tom drum that just made you sweat more.
We drove through mountains and hollows in West Virginia. Where the Ghent Fire Department features Mountain State wrestling. Where in White Sulphur Springs, Mud Bogs are organized on city property. Whoever can drive an ATV, 4x4 truck and/or SUVs the furthest distance in the mud pit in the shortest time wins.
One afternoon we drove 40 miles south on Ohio Route 3 from Wooster to Mount Vernon, a rich green stretch of farms, hay fields, pastures, soft hills and a hot haze out on the horizon. Classic Ohio Gothic. I counted 93 barns during that stretch of road. Small, large, aluminum, tin, wooden, brand new and rusted ruins.
We had buffet dinners at Iron Skillets and Golden Corrals. Load the plates high and come back for seconds and thirds. Our minor contribution in the nation’s obesity crisis.
There was that Blacksburg pub where a spunky waitress described what it was to be a Hokie, the Va Tech mascot. “Soon as you get here, the first day, you buy your Hokie tee shirt and from then on you’re a Hokie. It is a family. Especially after the killings.”
“Were you on campus?” I asked.
“Yes. You had to stay wherever you were. Sirens went off and the school sent everyone an email saying there had been a shooting and to stay where you are. We all spent the rest of the day texting and emailing our friends to make sure they were all right.”
“Did you know anyone who was shot?”
“Yeah, my friend Michael was killed, shot in the back.”
There was one night in Athens, Ohio, when Steve and I had dinner at The Oak Room, serenaded by one sorry out-of-tune townie singer-guitarist-harmonica player, trying to win the crowd with ‘70s chestnuts by the Eagles, James Taylor, Pure Prairie League, the Beach Boys. Reminded me how fortune we are that it isn’t the ‘70s anymore, and never will be again.
Another night in Athens I left Steve to ESPN’s Sportscenter in our room at the OU Inn and traipsed up a bluff overlooking the Hocking River and the OU campus. Up there sits what once was the Athens Lunatic Asylum, dark and menacing, with more than 1,800 patients at its peak in the ‘50s. Behind barred windows patients had a panoramic view of the Hocking Valley. Plenty of sunlight and fresh air was the prescription for improved health. Of course some bizarre behaviors and procedures went on behind the barred windows. The focal point of the sprawling complex, spread over hundreds of acres, is a four-story fortress-like intimidating institution. It still stands, a series of set-back wings extending from the main entrance for a total 853 foot length. More than 18 million bricks, all manufactured on the grounds, went into construction of the rock solid building, along with concrete and a tin roof.
What was I doing up there in my bare feet alone with the ghosts?
Three shots of bourbon and a beer at dinner helped lubricate my way. Steve and I had been on the road five days at this point and needed some separation time. I needed a break from the steady rotation of ESPN updates that Steve never tires of. And it’s not all that ghostly up on the old asylum grounds. The hospital had been extensively renovated by OU’s Board of Trustees in the mid-‘90s, renamed The Ridges, and at the cost of four-million dollars turned into an art museum. The refurbished, stately central administration building was named Lin Hall in honor of former Dean of Fine Arts Henry H. Lin, the father of Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Now it’s one of those recognizable campus landmarks.
I spent the evening sitting up there on The Ridges working the right side of my brain. Call it a baby boomer’s fantasy guilt trip. Fantasizing about hardships we never had to face.
I thought back to our walk through the World War II submarine U.S.S. COD, docked next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie. “Find them, Chase them, Sink them” was the COD’s motto, accompanied by a graphic of a topedo smashing through the skull of the enemy. So damn cramped and confined. A city 312 feet long. Mess hall/movie theatre. Sleeping berths stacked four high in spots. Mini toilets, showers, washrooms, a laundry, a galley, They stayed trapped idown there up to 74 days on patrol. Twenty-two percent of all U.S. Navy subsmariners were killed in action in World War II. Death, how’d they live with it?
And I imagined what went on behind the dark brick walls of the asylum. Another self-contained city, with a dairy, a farm, a water system. Numb days and nights. Frozen stares. Music and dance shows were put on by patients. Lobotomies peeled back facial skin to run a spike up through the brain, sometimes successful, sometimes not. Screams. Shouts. Howls. Sobs. Most patients remained until they died, and were buried out back if not claimed by families. Rumors of chains on walls. False. Rumors of ghosts, of course. A dark, dank medieval basement for the craziest. An attic full of tight passageways. Lost patients. In the ‘50s and ‘60s the medication revolution commenced and mass institutionalization was out. Soon patients were out on the streets.
Yeah, it had been a damn good trip. There was the afternoon Steve displayed admirable patience, typically not found in large reserves in 17-year-old boys. After getting lost time and again, I finally found the Carter Family Fold and A.P. Carter’s log cabin birthplace and the general store he owned next door. We were in far southwest Virginia in Poor Valley, up against the Clinch Mountain. Steve fiddled with his iPod in the car for a half hour or more while I roamed around shooting pictures. Then I struck up a conversation with a couple inside the Fold. The Carter Fold is a sort of micro-Opry, a barn with a wood-beamed ceiling, ceiling fans, 850 hard-back seats, and a stage with a wooden bench, room for a dozen musicians, and framed photos of the Carter kin and various guest musicians. Off to the left on a podium is an open Bible.
“Of the sisters, Anita had the best voice, that high soprano. June (Johnny Cash’s second wife) was the best entertainer and personality, but she wasn’t the best singer. And then there was Helen,” says Paul, a slight, retired U.S. Department of Agriculture attorney. Faith Collins, a volunteer at the Fold, has talked Hal into staying over another night so he can make the Saturday night show, this one featuring the old-time band Wayne Henderson & Friends. I don’t think I’d have that kind of luck convincing Steve. He’s not much for songs about lost loves, buried lovers, foggy mountain tops, wrecks on the highway.
“It’s in my genes to love music,” says Faith. “I was born dancin’. My dad sang gospel. Sang in quartets. People who don’t have no music in their cars, it’s like a morgue. I don’t understand. Soon as I get in a car I turn on the music. I always have music on in my house. You come here tomorrow night, you’ll be up dancin’. Two years up to 90 years old you’ll see them dancin’. The three of us come out of the kitchen dancin’.”
“I owe you big time,” I said to Steve when I had heard enough and finally returned to the car.
“No problem,” he said. “How’d you find this place?”
“You don’t unless you really want to.”
It’s like finding Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana’s home, which we did courtesy of the Dawg.
Dawg and I have known each other for at least 15 years, with him writing a number of short articles for my magazine. The Dawg played football at West Virginia University, and before that with Joe Montana for a season. Dawg was a skinny sophomore at Ringgold High School, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Montana was the senior starting quarterback.
The Montana tour doubles as a tour of Pittsburgh’s destitute Mon Valley. Donora, the Dawg’s hometown, has lost about two-thirds of its population since the mills’ belched and boomed in the ‘20s, 30s and ‘40s. Monongahela, Montana’s hometown, also has dropped two-thirds of its population since the 1970s. Both towns stretch up hills rising from the Monongahela River; both are faded blue-collar capitals with largely empty downtowns and blank, boarded up storefronts. A male resident of Donora today brings home an average salary of about $33,000.
“There’s nothing to do here. No jobs,” says the Dawg. “Used to be a bar on every corner. Millworkers would work all day, stop at the bar after work for shots and beers, get home for dinner, go to bed, get up and do it again and again every day. My dad worked one of the mills for 30 years. Never got sick. Now you gotta get out of here when you’re young or drugs will get you,” says Dawg. “It’s bad.”
A few weeks after our trip came to its abrupt conclusion, I was getting my hair cut, preparing for the court date in Virginia. Rose, who has cut my hair ever since I got out of college, had some muse-like advice. “You know, I know your back story well enough to know this about you. And your son should know this too, if he doesn’t. You’re a romantic.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“An imaginative romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A bourbon romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A mandolin romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“You live in the moment”
“Guilty.”
“You’re about experiences.”
“Guilty.”
“And you were on a mission on this trip.”
Rose has more insights than my shrink, and is of course a helluva lot cheaper.
“Yeah? What was that?”
“You wanted to give your son the experience you never were able to have with your dad.”
“Yeah, maybe it was a major ‘make-good.’ Making up for what I didn’t get to do since my dad died when I was 12. But my dad wasn’t a bourban man at all, never drank in front of me, didn’t know anything about NASCAR, and never would have taken me on a trespassing after-hours spin around one of the country’s most famous race tracks.”
“How do you know what crimes your dad might have had in mind? He was an artist, a romantic, he would’ve taken chances somewhere.”
The judge seemed in good spirits the afternoon he was to hear my case in the Halifax County Courthouse. “Let’s get these cases moving,” he said. “There are a lot of people here who don’t want to see me, and I don’t want to see them.”
He had no time for me, that’s for certain. “First thing here I want to say is that the state of Virginia law requires jail time for any speed over 90 miles an hour. The man was going 95. My god, I can land my plane going slower than that,” said the judge.
“I’m not going to touch this case. The law stands as is.”
Ms. Slatterhouse was caught by surprise, then jumped in: “Your honor, the defendant has driven 400 miles to appear here. He has completed an eight-hour driving course, and an orientation session for Habitat for Humanity.”
“I don’t care. Unless you can get the commonwealth attorney to advise against sending this man to jail…”
“When? Now?”
“Yes.”
A few sweaty minutes later my attorney reappeared with the smiling commonwealth attorney.
“I was going out to lunch when I was grabbed to hear this case, your honor,” said the commonwealth attorney. “The trooper says the gentleman was very cooperative when arrested. Given his clean record, the commonwealth does not advise jail time.”
The judge took a breath and looked me over. Maybe he saw another carpetbagging Yankee in a nice jacket and tie, fresh hair cut, trying to squeeze his way out of a tight spot with courtesy and remorse. Hell, all the locals in the room wore flip-flops and shorts. I was over-dressed. The judge wasn’t having any of it.
“I will reserve my comments on what I think of driving 95 miles an hour and keep them to myself. Since no one else here seems interested in this case except me, and the commonwealth has advised against jail…pause…$1250 fine. That’s it. Guilty as charged. I’ve traded you money for jail time,” he said to me.
Ms. Slatterhouse immediately advised me to appeal. That would require another trek down here. No, I was out of my element. A local got caught speeding at 92 MPH and the same judge dismissed his case completely this morning. No jail time. No fine. No nothing. Dismissed. I’ll pay the damn fine in full and hope Steve finds a college that gives him aid money.
Otto stared down at the phone he had just hung up. He paused. “Well, that’s a revolting development.”
I had hired Otto, a portly attorney and friend of my wife’s father, to find me another attorney who would handle my case in Virginia — site of the “revolting development.” He found Ms. Stacy Slatterhouse, with an office across from the Halifax County Courthouse, and we had just debriefed her on the details of my case.
“I can’t promise anything,” said Ms. Slatterhouse.
Days before, Virginia state troopers snared me racing 94 MPH under clear skies and with little traffic on Route 58E along the Virginia-North Carolina border. I was in a 60 MPH zone. They swooped in and nailed me roughly halfway between Roanoke and Richmond, about 400 miles from home near Philadelphia.
94 MPH is double reckless driving, Ms. Slatterhouse informed us. The judge conceivably could reduce the charge to defective equipment. Then again, “94 is a high number, very aggressive driving,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. Ms. Slatterhouse also brought up the touchy business of my son, Steve, being with me when I sprung the trap. “The judge might take into account, how can I put it, some egregious parental role modeling,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. But Steve was sound asleep in the shotgun seat when the blue lights lined up behind us. “What? What’s going on?” he asked groggily, realizing we were boxed in by three brown and tan state patrol cars. His first question was the same one the trooper asked me as he leaned into front seat: “What on earth are you doing going this fast?”
“When you come down for your court date, and make no mistake, you must appear,” said Ms Slatterhouse, “bring along your toothbrush. Just a heads up. You just might spend some nights across the street from the court house in the county jail.”
“You know, I was up your way not long ago,” said one of the troopers after studying my driver’s license. I know. Everybody drives fast up there. It’s different down here. It’s a different world. Why don’t you let your son slide over and drive for a while? He’s driving age, isn’t he?”
Sure he is, we’re out here hunting for a college, after all. That’s what Steve and I had been doing for eight days. I told one of the troopers we were tired and just wanted to get home. A plea he has heard, oh, possibly thousands of times. My bad. I should have stuck with the “different world” rationale. Steve slid behind the wheel and locked in a steady 60 MPH. We said nothing. Hell, we were out of cell phone range and I couldn’t even phone home and freak out on my wife.
I wouldn’t say Steve and I committed to this trip with a high sense of purpose, like actually finding a school for Steve. No, we didn’t drill down too deep. My wife Suze suspected all along we had other plans, other goals for this summertime road trip. To be sure, we stayed away from anything organized, organized campus tours, orientations, interviews, print propaganda handouts. We breezed through campuses, sometimes not even getting out of the car, and went with first impressions and gut feelings:
Penn State — 41,700 students, almost all white. Sprawling vanilla campus without discernable personality. At least the massive football stadium is a walk away from the dorms. A steady rain while we were there left a bland impression.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania — Workable size, 14,310 students. IUP wasn’t on the initial itinerary, but like many decisions on this trip, we improvised on the move. Old projects-like dorms are being demolished for new two- and four-person suites with private baths. This is a trend all across campus America. Kids coddled at home want to bring as much comfort and privacy with them to college as they can. The campus lifestyle factor can be a significant determinant.
University of Pittsburgh — Probably too urban for Steve. Petersen Events Center, where the Pitt Panthers basketball team plays, is a NBA-worthy glass and steel palace. It also houses the student fitness center. Rec centers and student centers are other major “lifestyle” draws on college tours. A classroom is a classroom, a commodity when college shopping, but student centers with multiple flat screen monitors and food courts, and gyms with rock climbing walls, this is part and parcel of creating brand reputations and positioning schools competitively. After 18 years of training, our kids know what to look for when they shop.
University of West Virginia — Confusing campus layout. The school loses points as we lose patience trying to find the football stadium. We find it, it’s locked up, we climb over the gate and stroll the astroturf field. You’ve noted no doubt the emphasis we put on athletic facilities. Colleges pour millions into their athletic budgets every year; athletics is part of the lifestyle equation and brand building; so we feel obligated to check out their investments. Of course that’s horeshit. Steve and I are serious sports fans, have been all our lives, and we’ll take every opportunity (or risk) to walk the fields we see on TV. Beyond sportsdom, Morgantown has too much weedy, ramshackle off-campus housing winding up into the hills. I heard someone once say WVU is too “trailer park.” That’s a helluva image problem for the admissions people to deal with. They’ve got to free the state university from the baggage of the state.
The College of Wooster — Classy, leafy, brick-lined liberal arts campus. Immediately out of our price range. And as Steve asks, “What good does a liberal arts degree do for you?” “It’s your ticket to keep studying a few more years in a grad program,” I explain.
Ohio State University — OSU suffers from bad timing on this trip. Columbus is hot and crowded and we’re hot and tired. Still, we push on to locate the famed Horseshoe, Ohio Stadium, “one of the most recognizable landmarks in all of sports” according to the Buckeye web site. Colleges love to tout recognizable landmarks, and of course most of them are the towering football stadiums. After all, ESPN, CBS Sports, ABC Sports et al don’t come to campuses to photograph the library or the physics lab.
Ohio University — Steve would be a legacy kid here, with both his mom and I OU alumni. “It’s a party school isn’t it?” he asked. “Aren’t they all?” I answer. I think he’s looking to escape his legacy, and more important, that zoombifying eight-hour drive from Philadelphia. OU is in fact a perennial top five finisher in annaul national collegiate party power rankings. The admissions folks grit their teeth and prepare their spin every year the rankings come out. “Oh, that’s such an old story by now…”
Virginia Tech — Steve likes the slate stone architecture of the buildings circling the expansive grass drill field, the heart of the campus has a military feel like West Point. Va Tech is another school standing in the shadows of an enormous football stadium. As mentioned, Steve’s not one for long windshield time, and Va Tech, like OU, is a drive too far.
Actually Steve and I didn’t talk about specific colleges on this tour as much as we went back and forth on areas of study. Steve is taking a shotgun approach to what major to pursue, and I can’t keep up with the rounds of questions. “What do you do with a sports administration major? What if you combined it with journalism? Is journalism dead? What’s a sports information director do? ESPN did a show about them. Seems there is a lot of pressure to those jobs. How much do they get paid. What do you do with a general business degree? What’s business administration? What kind of job could I get in TV production? How do you a get a job with NFL Films or ESPN or The Speed Channel?”
“Wanna see Applachian Bible College?”
“What?”
“Just messin’ with you. You don’t have to figure out the entire arc of your career when you’re 17.”
“But if I don’t know what I want to do, maybe I shouldn’t go to college for a year. Maybe community college. It’s expensive. Give you and mom a break. I know we don’t have a lot of money now.”
As you can see, there are no secrets, financial or otherwise, in our small ranch house. But the boy is prone to thinking too much. Just like his mom, dad and sister. We all need to chill a little more. Of course the stakes of finding an affordable four-year college experience don’t lend themselves to chillin’.
Our road trip talk becomes much easier to handle when music is the topic, which happens at some point every day on this trip. In the back seat sits a cooler packed full of CDs. Steve’s a particular fan of what’s called “Brit Pop,” the wave of British rock and roll bands from the ‘90s. He started listening to The Clash and took it from there. Oasis. Blur. Pulp. Coldplay and Radiohead, the Libertines, Keane. Back to Led Zep, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who. Throw in a lot of Marley, a bit of Dylan and The Band. I don’t want to lay my musical prejudices on him. Pick out another CD, Steve. But what’s most annoying is the iPod generation’s itchy trigger finger that keeps pushing the damn forward button searching for another single track. They’re “single minded,” no different than the transitor radio craze in the ‘60s.
A more complicated topic that often comes up has to do with what I’d call “cultures,” for lack of anything more descriptive. Steve doesn’t use the word per se, but he’s something of an anthropologist. Now how do you make money out of that? For years he’s followed the NASCAR culture and the Formula One racing culture. College football cultures and traditions, especially the hardcore southern schools and midwest Big Ten schools in towns and states without professional teams. Texas and Ohio high school football cultures. Books like “Friday Night Lights,” and “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.”
Steve talks some on this trip about the rust belt culture we’ve been driving through.Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Akron. Canton. He finds something interesting in the decay and the people and the towns hanging on. He zeroes in on the tortured history of the Cleveland Browns. Something about the old school plain orange helmet he likes. And the Browns’ history of Hall of Famers, die-hard fans, the Dawg Pound, and never being in a Super Bowl.
Dipping into NASCAR culture was a main attraction of this road trip. We aimed to see the Bristol (Tennessee) and Martinsville (Virginia) tracks. The Martinsville track is the smallest NASCAR races on the circuit. Bristol, aka “Thunder Valley,” is a pilgrimmage shrine. If you took the grandstands at Daytona International Speedway, which stretch for miles, wrapped those stands around and around, coiled them tight as a drum, higher and higher around a half-mile oval, until you had a ten-story coliseum, that’s Bristol Motor Speeday. The “world’s fastest half-mile,” with 160,000 seats.
Twice a year NASCAR races at Bristol, on a spring Sunday and an August Saturday night. In mid-July, when we drove up to the track, it was after hours and the tours were done for the day. The museum was closed. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, with a few other straggler fans.
Damn if a gate to the track was open and some fans were wandering in. We walked down the rows of seat, slipped through an opening in the chain-link fence circling the tracks, and ran laughing up and down the steep raceway banks like concrete sand dunes. Suddenly a red pickup flies by us on the track. “Isn’t that the guys who were out here taking pictures?” asks Steve. Hmmm. Sure enough, track workers left open a drive-in gate down by turn one. Steve and I hurried back to our car.
“You drive,” I told Steve.
“Why?”
“You wanted to see Bristol. Well, nobody’s here and the track’s open. Take a few spins around.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yes. Who wouldn’t want to take their car out on Bristol and turn a couple laps. Damn straight.”
Steve guns our Mazda and its puny put-put engine around the high banks, once, twice, three, four times. That’s two miles. Then it’s my turn. Twice around for a mile. We laughed our asses off.
We weren’t laughing several days later when a patrolman caught us trespassing inside the Martinsville track. The thing is shaped like a paper clip, track walls are scarred and gouged by metal and rubber, with the stands sunk low in a valley, hard to see from the highway.
“Can’t you read? Read the signs?” an old, leathery guard asked me. “I could arrest you for being out here.” Of course two “No trespassing” signs hung on the fence right above where I had slid on my back to wriggle my way on to the track. “Come on, Steve,” I yelled. He was wandering the far end of the paper clip. “Sorry sir,” I said to the guard.
Before the old boy had more time to consider our fate, we were in the Mazda heading east on Highway 58. We were leaving behind the old south culture and heading toward home, to Philadelphia. “Racin’ the way it oughta be!” as the Bristol Motor Speedway motto says. Leaving behind strip malls and Hardees, Long John Silver, Arby’s, Subway, Wendy’s, Burger King, Sam’s Club, Daylight Doughnuts, Doggy Bakery, General Tire, Auto Zone, K Mart, CVS, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Food City, Walgreens. Cash Now. Cash 1. Bristol Cash. Gun’s ‘n Pawn.
Bristol is the “Birthplace of Country Music,” where the Carter Family came out of Poor Valley to first record here in ’27. Where hell-bent Saturday nights turn into solemn Sunday mornings. “Speak something worth hearing or be silent” commands one church message board. It’s not a long walk from the State Line Bar & Grille, Logan’s Roadhouse, Borderline Billiards to that Sunday morning coming down feeling at the Sacred Cross Church, Volunteer Baptist Church, the Faith Community Fellowship.
Bristol, the Carter Family, old time music, old time racing, they all were part of my romantic reflection until we were about two hours down the road on 58E and the blue lights came out of hiding.
It was a damn good ride while it lasted. Steve and I hit many of our targets. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a subterranean collection of musical misfits, outcasts and geniuses. The Pro Football Hall of Fame. A World War II sub. The Pittsburgh Vintage Car Grand Prix in rainy Schenley Park — MGs, Austin Healys, Jags, Rolls Royces, Lotuses. A 14-inning Pirates game after a torrential rain delay to see ace Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum, thin as a reed, hair like a surfer’s, last year’s Cy Young winner. An Indians game viewed from scorching left-field bleachers, with a clown in the top row pounding on a tom-tom drum that just made you sweat more.
We drove through mountains and hollows in West Virginia. Where the Ghent Fire Department features Mountain State wrestling. Where in White Sulphur Springs, Mud Bogs are organized on city property. Whoever can drive an ATV, 4x4 truck and/or SUVs the furthest distance in the mud pit in the shortest time wins.
One afternoon we drove 40 miles south on Ohio Route 3 from Wooster to Mount Vernon, a rich green stretch of farms, hay fields, pastures, soft hills and a hot haze out on the horizon. Classic Ohio Gothic. I counted 93 barns during that stretch of road. Small, large, aluminum, tin, wooden, brand new and rusted ruins.
We had buffet dinners at Iron Skillets and Golden Corrals. Load the plates high and come back for seconds and thirds. Our minor contribution in the nation’s obesity crisis.
There was that Blacksburg pub where a spunky waitress described what it was to be a Hokie, the Va Tech mascot. “Soon as you get here, the first day, you buy your Hokie tee shirt and from then on you’re a Hokie. It is a family. Especially after the killings.”
“Were you on campus?” I asked.
“Yes. You had to stay wherever you were. Sirens went off and the school sent everyone an email saying there had been a shooting and to stay where you are. We all spent the rest of the day texting and emailing our friends to make sure they were all right.”
“Did you know anyone who was shot?”
“Yeah, my friend Michael was killed, shot in the back.”
There was one night in Athens, Ohio, when Steve and I had dinner at The Oak Room, serenaded by one sorry out-of-tune townie singer-guitarist-harmonica player, trying to win the crowd with ‘70s chestnuts by the Eagles, James Taylor, Pure Prairie League, the Beach Boys. Reminded me how fortune we are that it isn’t the ‘70s anymore, and never will be again.
Another night in Athens I left Steve to ESPN’s Sportscenter in our room at the OU Inn and traipsed up a bluff overlooking the Hocking River and the OU campus. Up there sits what once was the Athens Lunatic Asylum, dark and menacing, with more than 1,800 patients at its peak in the ‘50s. Behind barred windows patients had a panoramic view of the Hocking Valley. Plenty of sunlight and fresh air was the prescription for improved health. Of course some bizarre behaviors and procedures went on behind the barred windows. The focal point of the sprawling complex, spread over hundreds of acres, is a four-story fortress-like intimidating institution. It still stands, a series of set-back wings extending from the main entrance for a total 853 foot length. More than 18 million bricks, all manufactured on the grounds, went into construction of the rock solid building, along with concrete and a tin roof.
What was I doing up there in my bare feet alone with the ghosts?
Three shots of bourbon and a beer at dinner helped lubricate my way. Steve and I had been on the road five days at this point and needed some separation time. I needed a break from the steady rotation of ESPN updates that Steve never tires of. And it’s not all that ghostly up on the old asylum grounds. The hospital had been extensively renovated by OU’s Board of Trustees in the mid-‘90s, renamed The Ridges, and at the cost of four-million dollars turned into an art museum. The refurbished, stately central administration building was named Lin Hall in honor of former Dean of Fine Arts Henry H. Lin, the father of Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Now it’s one of those recognizable campus landmarks.
I spent the evening sitting up there on The Ridges working the right side of my brain. Call it a baby boomer’s fantasy guilt trip. Fantasizing about hardships we never had to face.
I thought back to our walk through the World War II submarine U.S.S. COD, docked next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie. “Find them, Chase them, Sink them” was the COD’s motto, accompanied by a graphic of a topedo smashing through the skull of the enemy. So damn cramped and confined. A city 312 feet long. Mess hall/movie theatre. Sleeping berths stacked four high in spots. Mini toilets, showers, washrooms, a laundry, a galley, They stayed trapped idown there up to 74 days on patrol. Twenty-two percent of all U.S. Navy subsmariners were killed in action in World War II. Death, how’d they live with it?
And I imagined what went on behind the dark brick walls of the asylum. Another self-contained city, with a dairy, a farm, a water system. Numb days and nights. Frozen stares. Music and dance shows were put on by patients. Lobotomies peeled back facial skin to run a spike up through the brain, sometimes successful, sometimes not. Screams. Shouts. Howls. Sobs. Most patients remained until they died, and were buried out back if not claimed by families. Rumors of chains on walls. False. Rumors of ghosts, of course. A dark, dank medieval basement for the craziest. An attic full of tight passageways. Lost patients. In the ‘50s and ‘60s the medication revolution commenced and mass institutionalization was out. Soon patients were out on the streets.
Yeah, it had been a damn good trip. There was the afternoon Steve displayed admirable patience, typically not found in large reserves in 17-year-old boys. After getting lost time and again, I finally found the Carter Family Fold and A.P. Carter’s log cabin birthplace and the general store he owned next door. We were in far southwest Virginia in Poor Valley, up against the Clinch Mountain. Steve fiddled with his iPod in the car for a half hour or more while I roamed around shooting pictures. Then I struck up a conversation with a couple inside the Fold. The Carter Fold is a sort of micro-Opry, a barn with a wood-beamed ceiling, ceiling fans, 850 hard-back seats, and a stage with a wooden bench, room for a dozen musicians, and framed photos of the Carter kin and various guest musicians. Off to the left on a podium is an open Bible.
“Of the sisters, Anita had the best voice, that high soprano. June (Johnny Cash’s second wife) was the best entertainer and personality, but she wasn’t the best singer. And then there was Helen,” says Paul, a slight, retired U.S. Department of Agriculture attorney. Faith Collins, a volunteer at the Fold, has talked Hal into staying over another night so he can make the Saturday night show, this one featuring the old-time band Wayne Henderson & Friends. I don’t think I’d have that kind of luck convincing Steve. He’s not much for songs about lost loves, buried lovers, foggy mountain tops, wrecks on the highway.
“It’s in my genes to love music,” says Faith. “I was born dancin’. My dad sang gospel. Sang in quartets. People who don’t have no music in their cars, it’s like a morgue. I don’t understand. Soon as I get in a car I turn on the music. I always have music on in my house. You come here tomorrow night, you’ll be up dancin’. Two years up to 90 years old you’ll see them dancin’. The three of us come out of the kitchen dancin’.”
“I owe you big time,” I said to Steve when I had heard enough and finally returned to the car.
“No problem,” he said. “How’d you find this place?”
“You don’t unless you really want to.”
It’s like finding Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana’s home, which we did courtesy of the Dawg.
Dawg and I have known each other for at least 15 years, with him writing a number of short articles for my magazine. The Dawg played football at West Virginia University, and before that with Joe Montana for a season. Dawg was a skinny sophomore at Ringgold High School, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Montana was the senior starting quarterback.
The Montana tour doubles as a tour of Pittsburgh’s destitute Mon Valley. Donora, the Dawg’s hometown, has lost about two-thirds of its population since the mills’ belched and boomed in the ‘20s, 30s and ‘40s. Monongahela, Montana’s hometown, also has dropped two-thirds of its population since the 1970s. Both towns stretch up hills rising from the Monongahela River; both are faded blue-collar capitals with largely empty downtowns and blank, boarded up storefronts. A male resident of Donora today brings home an average salary of about $33,000.
“There’s nothing to do here. No jobs,” says the Dawg. “Used to be a bar on every corner. Millworkers would work all day, stop at the bar after work for shots and beers, get home for dinner, go to bed, get up and do it again and again every day. My dad worked one of the mills for 30 years. Never got sick. Now you gotta get out of here when you’re young or drugs will get you,” says Dawg. “It’s bad.”
A few weeks after our trip came to its abrupt conclusion, I was getting my hair cut, preparing for the court date in Virginia. Rose, who has cut my hair ever since I got out of college, had some muse-like advice. “You know, I know your back story well enough to know this about you. And your son should know this too, if he doesn’t. You’re a romantic.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“An imaginative romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A bourbon romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A mandolin romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“You live in the moment”
“Guilty.”
“You’re about experiences.”
“Guilty.”
“And you were on a mission on this trip.”
Rose has more insights than my shrink, and is of course a helluva lot cheaper.
“Yeah? What was that?”
“You wanted to give your son the experience you never were able to have with your dad.”
“Yeah, maybe it was a major ‘make-good.’ Making up for what I didn’t get to do since my dad died when I was 12. But my dad wasn’t a bourban man at all, never drank in front of me, didn’t know anything about NASCAR, and never would have taken me on a trespassing after-hours spin around one of the country’s most famous race tracks.”
“How do you know what crimes your dad might have had in mind? He was an artist, a romantic, he would’ve taken chances somewhere.”
The judge seemed in good spirits the afternoon he was to hear my case in the Halifax County Courthouse. “Let’s get these cases moving,” he said. “There are a lot of people here who don’t want to see me, and I don’t want to see them.”
He had no time for me, that’s for certain. “First thing here I want to say is that the state of Virginia law requires jail time for any speed over 90 miles an hour. The man was going 95. My god, I can land my plane going slower than that,” said the judge.
“I’m not going to touch this case. The law stands as is.”
Ms. Slatterhouse was caught by surprise, then jumped in: “Your honor, the defendant has driven 400 miles to appear here. He has completed an eight-hour driving course, and an orientation session for Habitat for Humanity.”
“I don’t care. Unless you can get the commonwealth attorney to advise against sending this man to jail…”
“When? Now?”
“Yes.”
A few sweaty minutes later my attorney reappeared with the smiling commonwealth attorney.
“I was going out to lunch when I was grabbed to hear this case, your honor,” said the commonwealth attorney. “The trooper says the gentleman was very cooperative when arrested. Given his clean record, the commonwealth does not advise jail time.”
The judge took a breath and looked me over. Maybe he saw another carpetbagging Yankee in a nice jacket and tie, fresh hair cut, trying to squeeze his way out of a tight spot with courtesy and remorse. Hell, all the locals in the room wore flip-flops and shorts. I was over-dressed. The judge wasn’t having any of it.
“I will reserve my comments on what I think of driving 95 miles an hour and keep them to myself. Since no one else here seems interested in this case except me, and the commonwealth has advised against jail…pause…$1250 fine. That’s it. Guilty as charged. I’ve traded you money for jail time,” he said to me.
Ms. Slatterhouse immediately advised me to appeal. That would require another trek down here. No, I was out of my element. A local got caught speeding at 92 MPH and the same judge dismissed his case completely this morning. No jail time. No fine. No nothing. Dismissed. I’ll pay the damn fine in full and hope Steve finds a college that gives him aid money.
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