30 October 2011, 11pm, between Philadelphia and D.C.

There is an intimacy to the last row of a tiny puddle jumper in the dark of night, the arm rest up, a loveseat.  Me and the boy with the big knees, who smelled like fresh-air and rouged cheeks.  Sitting so close, I memorized his knees and shoes, his fingers turning the pages of his book, but I never saw his face.

4 November 2011, sundown, Charlotte, NC

Watching from the plane the autumnal blush of the northeast, the paved tongues unfurling in front of homes in planned communities, the beautiful detritus of haphazard cemeteries, littered with broken graves, small but distinguishable from the air. The red sun marking the difference between the pink below and the blue above, setting the clouds on fire.  A sunset so simply wrought, like a piece of art in a hotel room, but alive, something you expect you won’t see again in just that same way. Which is probably what impressed the painter.  Anyway, something I would not have seen but for the geographic mess of re-routing.  And then through the clouds it was gone.  A fleeting glimpse settled into dark.  When I think again of Charlotte, I’ll probably forget I’ve seen anything of it.

9 Nov. 2011, Nashville

After so many hours spent in airports and in planes, all of these cities and towns, destinations, Denver, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Providence, have become little more than a name on a map to me, measurable by the two hours it takes to get there, which could be five, which could be 50 minutes.  On one hand, it reduces every city to the letters in its name, robbing it of what makes it unique.  But on the other, it makes me feel somehow closer to them all, makes them feel realizable.  I sat next to a woman from Wilmington, an Evangelical man from Nashville, a man who works for the government from Lafayette, CA, a businessman from San Antonio, a doctor from Toledo, a young man from India, reading in Hindi.  Everywhere is possible.

2 December 2011, Ft. Lauderdale, FL & Houston, TX

It seemed that everyone we encountered in Florida was from New York.  Snowbirds, retirees, emigrees.  I met a man in the Fort Lauderdale Airport who had moved from Vermont two years ago.  ”You’re not from here are you?”  No.  ”No one’s from here.  It’s very strange.”  He was traveling with his 2 and a half year old daughter, Tess, and took care to give her pigtails.  They were on their way to Alpine, UT, to visit her great-grandparents. We watched each other’s bags, spoke for a half hour before boarding, saw each other in passing in Houston.  And that’s that.  These ephemeral encounters with faces somehow familiar are disorienting, like seeing people from disparate parts of your life together in a dream.  I will never see these people again; no matter how small the world is, that’s assured.

I never knew if my birthday fell in summer or in fall.  Every year it was different, sometimes tinged with the hot glare of summer, despite being stuck in school (which was always exciting, anyway); sometimes the leaves had already turned and I could immediately wear the new sweater I received as a present.  This year it was definitely summertime, in the 90s and with a night that didn’t cool.  The celebration lasted more than the usual week, with a belated road trip to Los Angeles and a stop at the Madonna Inn.  Their pink champagne cake is my two-year old self’s only desire.

This time of year, when the weather is mysterious and wavering, is my favorite time.  Indian summer, that liminal season before the cold stays for good, after the sun has shut one eye.  When the stickiness in the air gives way to smoke and dying leaves. Liminal like twilight, when the sun extinguishes itself in the big puddle out west, lights flicker on in houses built into mountains, neither dark nor light outside.

“I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us.  I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires.  We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in.  Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.” —  Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

somewhere between summer and fall, 2011

The water was cold.  It was thick, like slush ice.  Only it kind of lived.  One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been running under this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come spewing up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was a part of the water, of the waiting and the threat.  –  William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

The river is wide and high.  Tree tops peak out of the muddy water, hinting at the depths below, which is normally dry land.  A staircase off the Moonwalk in the French descends into the river like a blind plank walk.  A playground on the banks in Algiers is almost completely hidden.  But the weather is mild and the steadily rising tide is easy to ignore somehow, despite the sense that everything in this city seems related to Katrina, in a way diminishing the city’s history prior to the disaster.  Maybe because everywhere you turn you come back to the river, the way the city curves around all those bends earning it the nickname the Crescent City.  But there is more than fear associated with the waters, commerce, joy even.  At the End of the World, three men were fishing for catfish, cleaning up, pulling large, ugly, slippery things from the water, some weighing as much as 50 pounds.

The tide continued to rise and rural outskirts were flooded, deferring anymore damage to the city for now.  Reports from other cities, other countries, of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and droughts are just as alarming and the scary thought that extreme weather is now normal is not so easy to ignore.

That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long.  Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.    –William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

On the cab ride from the airport, the driver, Ali, was perplexed by my questions about the cemeteries we passed and my eagerness to visit them.  I mentioned the famously ornate style of New Orleans cemeteries and their above ground tombs, built because of New Orleans’ unusually high water table, but his only response was, “It’s just slow cremation.”  There are 42 extant cemeteries in New Orleans; I visited two.  Cemeteries are the best places to visit in a city, like a park but quieter, more serene, and with more stories.

New Orleans cemeteries are called Cities of the Dead, something that sounds so ancient and mystical, like Egypt.  The ones I visited were not so impressive for their size but for their character.  St. Roch’s was beautiful and silent.  The chapel was built in the 19th century during an outbreak of yellow fever, and dedicated to Saint Roch, whose patronage is invoked against plague.  The reliquary is filled with crutches and mannequin arms and heads, things left behind by parishioners who were miraculously cured. The chapel is painted a perfect churchly blue.  Many of the graves are very old, people with German, Italian and Irish last names who died a century or more ago, which reminded me of something I had read once, about there being two groups of the dead in some African cultures, the recently departed and the long dead:

The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the Zamani are not forgotten but revered.  – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

Loewen also quotes from John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy:

It [the Zamani] is the final storehouse for all phenomena and events, the ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before.

St. Roch’s cemetery felt inhabited by the Zamani, long-dead immigrants whose grandchildren are already dead.  Maybe cemeteries feel so peaceful because they exist somehow outside of time, inhabited as they are by people who have left this world and survive only in some other dimension, maybe not forgotten but certainly left alone.

St. Roch’s and St. Louis No. 1 cemeteries, New Orleans

Arriving at night leaves the traveler with a skewed perspective.  Mid-City seemed dark and mysterious, dangerous even, the enormous granite elk in Greenwood cemetery portentous.  In the light of day, of course, things had changed.  All pigs look black at night.  Though there are a lot of homes still abandoned in Mid-City, it seems like a lovely neighborhood with a lot of families. Abandoned homes also seemed common in many neighborhoods.  The population post-Katrina is little more than half what it used to be, with empty houses lingering, some still with the hieroglyphic X’s and other symbols denoting unknowable things about the people who live(d) there.

The Lower Ninth Ward showed its own unique scars.  Juxtaposed with tours of the bizarre Brad Pitt Make It Right houses, many of the plots were completely vacant, overgrown with tall grass covering all but the last glimpses of former dwellings, pipes sticking up or a foot of foundation standing.  Signs for mold removal hung on most telephone poles, along with hand-drawn signs advertising “We Cut Big Lot Grass.”  Despite the devastation, though, the Lower Ninth had a lot of new construction, too.

New Orleans feels immediately different, and free.  In an evermore globalized world, where every city seems a variation on the theme, New Orleans is not.  I met a self-proclaimed prophet while waiting for the bus on St. Claude who told me many things about lasers shooting from helicopters hovering over the city and his inventions to cure cancer, but nothing more interesting than what he told me about why he loves his hometown.  He’s lived there all his life, except for a brief stint in Pennsylvania, and he returned eagerly because, as he says, “This is where I feel free.”  When we were hanging out at the End of the World, where the Industrial Canal meets the Mississippi, I overheard a woman say, “That’s what I love about yoga in New Orleans–even the teachers drink and smoke.  I’m used to New York yoga teachers who’re all vegetarians.  Here they talk about eating and drinking.”  There are sandwich board signs in front of most bars advertising “To Go Drinks” (exactly what it sounds like).  There are things you can get away with in New Orleans that make it feel outside the purview of society, the real end of the world, life after the world ended for many six years ago.  But more than just the laws, or lack thereof, is the spirit that emanates from the city.  People say hello to you when you pass; it’s rude not to.  As we rode down Palmyra Street on our bikes, children smiled, a man on his porch shouted, “Have a nice day.”

As we walked our bikes up Frenchman on my last night, listening in on the different songs emanating from the clubs, we stopped in front of a sushi place with an all-Japanese three piece band.  The trumpeter was singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” in his brassy voice. After the song finished, we rode home along Bourbon Street, all neon and noise, but after a couple of blocks chose a different route, I think so as not to lose the lullaby in our heads.  We wound through the Treme at midnight, empty, quiet, only a couple of lonely dogs chasing us for a few blocks.  As I rode on the sidewalk I caught a glimpse through an open front door of what looked like an abandoned house, and saw a pair of women’s bare feet, lying on the floor, sleeping I hope.

New Orleans, 12-17 May 2011

Driving down Karl Marx Allee in the former East Berlin seems to be a better indicator of life under Soviet rule than taking snapshots of men in uniform at Checkpoint Charlie.  The bland yet bombastic, monotonous buildings, which are now being renovated as low-income housing, are a physical emblem of one objective of Soviet rule: the erasure of the individual.  These dilapidated relics also remind me of what W.G. Sebald wrote about large, state buildings in his novel Austerlitz:

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels.  At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence in ruins.

Karl Marx’s grave provides an interesting juxtaposition to the simplicity of Berlin’s Soviet architecture.  Situated on a prominent path in London’s Highgate Cemetery (a burial ground you have to pay admission to enter), adjacent to the posh neighborhood of Hampstead, visitors can spot Karl Marx’s enormous bust protruding from the top of his grave, which proclaims, of course, “Workers of all lands unite.”

Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin & Highgate Cemetery, London, August 2010

San Miguel de Allende, México, December 2006

We drove the quiet, wide-open two-lane, counting the other cars on one hand, passing family ranches with their names bent into iron and adorned with longhorns and wreaths.  The highway cut through nowhere, the place chosen for a Prada store and a joke, through Valentine, the smallest town I’ve ever seen.

We noticed the harbingers of something bigger.  We left behind signs for motels no longer standing and found ourselves moving from a town with a population of 200 to another ten times as big: Marfa.

The town was originally created as a railroad water stop, named by the wife of a railroad executive who was reading The Brothers Karamazov.

In 1975, three years after moving to Marfa, Donald Judd said, “There is no mystery in New York,” perhaps as a kind of explanation for the unlikely settlement.  There is plenty of mystery in Marfa.

The mystery lights, which can be seen every clear night nine miles east of town, glow in the distance of the Chinati Mountains.  No one knows what causes them.  Early guesses included campfires made by Apache Indians, but when settlers investigated they found no ashes, or the marauding ghosts of conquistadors, eternally searching for gold.  A pamphlet from the local Chamber of Commerce provides the testimony of a native Marfan: “Mrs. W. T. Giddings, who grew up watching the lights and whose father claimed he was saved from a blizzard when the lights led him to the shelter of a cave, considers the lights to be curious observers, investigating things around them.”

I wandered into a hardware store, lured by the smell of saddle leather and the neat bins of nails and screws.  After inspecting the tack I noticed a homespun natural history display set up against the back wall, an array of skulls, jawbones and mounts of local kill, ranging in size from mice to stags.  Two of the bucks were mounted as they’d been found: antlers in a lock, the way they died, unable to wrest themselves from their enemy.  The store clerk said there’s a lot less hunting these days, as much of the land has been bought up by private ranches.

Several movies have been filmed in Marfa, including Giant, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, but the movie that best captures the feeling of Marfa wasn’t filmed there.  The empty streets and old-fashioned (though not quite so run down) buildings smack of The Last Picture Show.  Appropriately, the Palace movie house is now a private residence.

As we pulled back onto 90 and lost Marfa in the rearview, we tuned into Marfa Public Radio, playing “Don’t Fence Me In,” serenaded by a singing cowboy as we eventually lost the station.

The Texas state motto is “Friendship,” as advertised on their highways and sidewalks.  Strangers smiled and said hello as they passed.  We could hear music coming from every restaurant along South Congress.

We pulled into the dusty fair grounds of the Austin Country Flea Market as the vendors were still setting up.  Mostly Mexican, their wares offered a wide range: window-tinting services and car grills, pet birds and bunnies, fruits, cowboy boots in every size, shape and color, a fortune-telling lady, a barbershop, lucha libre masks from Guanajuato, Mexican pottery, toys, piñatas, and every manor of tools.  One of the stalls selling tools had a table laden with machete-like knives, displayed in a pile and uncovered.  Seemed like a dangerous proposition, somewhat at odds with the sign at the entrance forbidding guns.

We navigated a residential neighborhood to find the Cathedral of Junk.  The backyard was empty of people, but very full—the Cathedral is built of computer parts, mannequin heads, street signs, bottles, CDs, surfboards, bicycle wheels, metal.  We toured the grounds with Vince, the junk king, and two neighborhood kids, Jajuan and Oscar, who pointed out their favorite spots.  Apparently six months earlier was the time to see it in its former glory, twice the size, before the City forced Vince to cut it in half in accordance with zoning laws.

Vince used the word Bubbaland to describe his neighborhood.  Having lived in Berkeley he’s known his fair share of weirdos, but he dislikes the common city motto, “Keep Austin Weird.”  As opposed to more gentrified neighborhoods, Bubbaland is where he feels most comfortable.  South of SoCo (South Congress), Bubbaland or LoCo (lower Congress), is where all the Bubbas live, the O.S. (original slackers), the good ol’ boys who smoke weed, the guys who were always in Austin, there before the hippies and yuppies, there until the City finally squeezes them out too.

At two in the morning, with the smell of Texas in the air (that unquenchable smell of burning), and Bulleit bourbon swirling around in our stomachs, donuts were proposed and readily accepted.  Our host pulled a quick U-turn and drove us to the outpost, Mrs. Johnson’s Bakery, open at that hour for whatever reason, the place to be, though it seemed only we knew it.  Conveyor belts chugged along, producing row after row of perfect donuts, the hottest and freshest I’ve ever had.  Eating them, standing in an abandoned-looking house-cum-bakery, we felt very far from it all–maybe it’s the effect of driving somewhere, through two days and nights, that hammers home just how far away you’ve gotten, and though we recognized it, we were where we wanted to be.

Austin, TX, 3 – 6 December 2010

What a strange, and alluring, and transporting, and wonderful feeling is in the word: road!

Gogol, Dead Souls

It always seems so desolate, driving along highway 5 in central California.  Signs of life abound—houses with no neighbors, orchards, billboards for fruits and nuts, others reading “Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl.”  Tractors pulled up alongside the highway, abandoned mid-task by their faceless drivers.  This was the first time I can remember actually seeing the men who till the fields that feed the state, wearing overalls, working their land, chimneys smoking in those lonely houses.  People are everywhere.  Even a sign left by some passer-through that reads, “Tom McCleod slept here,” begging the question, Who is Tom McCleod?

The snow at the top of the Tejon Pass reminded me of another such journey in winter, when, cresting the Grapevine in the dark of night, it started snowing, cars slowed, nearly stopped, with concern or wonder.  It’s a dull road but not without its moments.

Helen and I left town before the dark, before we intended.  The light reached us not before we were out of the county, but before we were out of the state.  The sun took forever to rise.  In the half-light of dawn and distance, things appeared different—a gnarled tree on a far hill looked like an elephant-shaped tree.  When we passed it we found that it was in fact an elephant, rearing its trunk, advertising a nursery.  The colonies of power lines hanging overhead formed a shape that looked like a draw-bridge.  Eventually the full light of day was upon us, the shortest days filled with so much road.

Roadside dinosaurs saluted us as we tore through their prehistoric land.

We entered Arizona, which brought with it that red earth, like Mars, and Saguaro cacti.  We kept our eyes peeled for the ones that look like they’re boxing.  We passed through Phoenix, stopped in Tucson.  Happened upon a bar and grill that’s been around since the ‘30s.  A sign on the door read “No Firearms.”  It felt like a dangerous town.

We found our way to New Mexico, but saw little as the darkness covered us once again.  We fell asleep in a roadside motel to the whistle of trains, and awoke before the sun, and saw nothing of Las Cruces.

We passed through the Borderlands, an ominous name for an ominous place, where we heard tell of the mass graves of Juárez and saw that city’s lights and industry from across the border.

We entered Texas for my first time.  We passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint and asked if we were crossing into Mexico.  The agent inspected a glass jar of granola, because you can’t be too sure.  We rolled on.  We changed time zones twice but just when and where we couldn’t say.  We didn’t notice it, but the sky was getting lighter imperceptibly faster as we rushed east through the winter dawn.  We read sign after sign for want of something do to—strange signs, portentous: Hazardous Cargo, White Sands Missile Range, Horizon City, state prisons, no hitchhiking.

We left the interstate and pounded the two-lane blacktop into nowhere, amazed at the places people plant themselves.  We passed through Valentine, Texas, devastated by an earthquake in 1931, still the most powerful in Texas history.

We saw longhorns and big road kill, signs for “CHURCH.”  Billboards with ads, others with advice: “We need to talk. – God”.

We got there and turned back and were somehow excited by the same journey in reverse.

We waited through two hundred miles and 247 billboards for Dragoon, Arizona, where we paid one dollar cash to walk through three covered barns filled with dubious artifacts, as roadfarers have for nearly one hundred years.

Was it New Mexico or Arizona?  We saw two hitchhikers on the highway with huge grins and a sign that just read “WEST.”

Hwy 10, December 2010