The Search For American Freedom

There is a massive hole in the middle of the Arizona desert and I’m not talking about the Grand Canyon. The hole is south of Winslow and can be reached by a short detour off Interstate 40 where its approach is proclaimed by a series of increasingly importunate road signs that remind one more of the cardboard placards painted by panhandlers rather than directions to the site of a serious scientific oddity.

For it is a meteor crater which we’re talking about here, not the biggest ball of yarn, or the tallest cross in the western hemisphere (which I drove past today in the Texas panhandle; it looked like unusually thick telephone pole). The Barringer Crater, as it’s called (named for mining engineer Daniel Barringer, whose family still owns the site), was formed by a piece of intergalactic rock that managed to plummet to earth about 50,000. It's supposed to be pretty impressive and, if you want its stats, here they are: it is approximately 4,000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. Moreover, it rises dramatically above the surrounding desert by about 150 feet. On the other hand, it costs $15 just to take a peek and for that amount of money I could purchase about 70 miles worth of gas, so I drove on, choosing, as I have done most of this trip, to view America at a speed of 70 miles per hour, stopping only as necessary to refuel and sleep.

I just did this two months ago, so please view the archives for an account of the more leisurely and, it has to be said, optimistic drive west. Now the car is in reverse – not literally, of course – and I find myself retracing my steps and assuring myself that what must seem to the world like a retreat is really an advance, a renewal of sorts, a more determined settlement in New York after some sort of western epiphany. There is, however, the distinct possibility that I am returning simply because I am tired of driving.

I am typing this post, by the way, in a surprisingly pleasant Starbucks near Oklahoma City. The Cadillac sits outside, loaded with everything I brought to California and more. This morning I greeted 2008 in a motel room in Amarillo, Texas, wondering at the old face I encountered in the bathroom mirror. I have not been carded by any of the gas station attendants who’ve bagged the 40s I’ve bought and brought back to the motels to numb my evenings. It is amusing to reflect that I once fervently desired the cessation of the intrusive practice asking for identification for the purchase of alcoholic beverages. Now its occurrence is pleasant and reassuring.

So, what’s next? A thousand or so miles back to Virginia to pick up the rest of my things and then a swift resettlement back at 113th Street, followed by unpacking and perhaps some repainting and recarpeting. When I left Santa Barbara on Sunday morning, I removed my sweater at a gas station and drove all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona in shirt-sleeves. But there was snow on the ground in Flagstaff and the temperature plunged that night to a low of nine degrees. I put on my sweater again and added a jacket and unpacked my suitcase. If the past few months have provided anything, they have inured me to almost any displacement.

The photo above was taken on Monday morning, as I left Flagstaff.

Is This Home?

Well, it’s happened at last. I am blogging tired. What is blogging tired? Well, it’s kind of like blogging drunk only a yard more irritable. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

What did I do today to make me so tired, you ask? Well, first of all, I woke up in Virginia at five in the morning, which, as my internal clock has now adjusted to Pacific Time, felt more like two in the morning. I was not exactly eager to face the day, let me tell you.

But face the day I did. My parents drove me to Dulles, bid me farewell, and after submitting to the TSA grunts (I inwardly commiserated with a particularly bewildered oldster who’d been pulled aside for a pat-down), I was in the terminal. I had about an hour, so I decided to get breakfast at the only place open, a bar & grill called (I think) Max’s. The eggs and potatoes were fine but the bacon was burnt to an unpalatable crisp. I was also given—and therefore charged for—an orange juice which I did not order, but after I drank it and enjoyed it, I decided not to make a fuss. Do you see how hard my life is?

We boarded the plane and it took off more or less on time. I watched as the cars, trees, and houses of northern Virginia receded into model scale. Soon we were above the clouds.

There was an annoying family seated across the aisle. They had brought a portable DVD player (who buys these crappy, useless devices?) and were watching Home Alone on full-blast without headphones. I complained about this to the stewardess but I don’t think she was entirely on my side, and instead of asking them to turn it off, she simply requested that they lower the volume. I bitterly read Maugham’s Of Human Bondage with my fingers stuffed in my ears.

We reached Colorado and the snowy Rockies which jutted out of the earth like white volcanoes. An hour later, the pilot pointed out the Grand Canyon which, thankfully, was below my side of the plane, so I had a clear view of it. “It’s so vast,” I thought. “It goes everywhere.”

A little before 11 am, we were descending over Greater LA, which looked bright and warm under all that sun. This is the only view of the freeways that makes them look grand, I told myself; from above. When we touched down, I closed my eyes, as I often do before a landing. Moments later, I was in the terminal, heading for Baggage Claim.

Happily, my bag was first out of the chute; the only time that’s ever happened to me. I headed out to the bus line to determine where I could catch a bus to Encino.

You cannot catch a bus to Encino. You can catch a bus to Westwood, from whence you can catch a bus to Sherman Oaks, from whence you can catch a bus to Encino. Once I’d figured this out, I determined that an hour and a half would be a long time to go without food, considering the last time I’d eaten was over seven hours ago. There was no food in the terminal I’d left, however, so I had to drag my bag several terminals down, where I managed to snag a vanilla milkshake.

About an hour later I was in Westwood, where I had a good deal of trouble tracking down the next bus I was to take. Eventually I found it and soon I was on my way. As we made our way over the Santa Monica Mountains, I began to muse on the irony that it was taking me almost a third as much time to get from LAX to the Valley as it had taken me to get to LAX from Virginia. I decided not to dwell on this. Soon I would be home, where I could have something to eat and take a nice afternoon nap.

Sadly, it was not to be. When I arrived, around 2:30 in the afternoon, my house had a guest who I had not been anticipating, and he was sitting on the living room couch, thoroughly engrossed in a full-volume screening of Bruce Almighty on the flat-screen television that dominates the wall adjacent to my bedroom.

“Do you want me to turn it down?” he asked me.

Rather than responding truthfully and thereby risk getting into an extended conversation about it, I said, “No, I’ll just be leaving.”

Which is what I did. And so I’m here. At the Coffee Fix, my home-away-from-home on Moorpark in Studio City. And now I truly am exhausted. I think I’ll finish this mustardy sandwich I have before me and by the time I’m done, perhaps sleep will be prepared to do its worst: overcome even the most vociferous of screwball comedies screaming from the next room. If I can sleep through that, I know I’m set.

Tour Americana! Part Three (The West)

I arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona as the sun was setting and after finding a motel on Route 66, I headed downtown to get a drink. I gave myself a quick walking tour and then ducked into one of the many sports bars and I sat at the bar and read The New York Times on my iPhone.

It got dark early and when it did it became very cold. Although the high temperature that day had been in the 60s, the low dipped down to around 28 degrees, which I thought was delightful. Downtown there was a mixed crowed of college students and retirees on the streets. There was a large number of high schoolers as well and they gathered at the town square to hear a local band play. It was too cold for me to linger, though, so I kept walking.

Flagstaff has a city ordinance that keeps its streets dark at night as a courtesy to the Lowell Observatory, which is nearby. The darkness seemed to enhance the coldness which, combined with the town’s frontier architecture and nearby alpine mountains, made me feel more like I was in Alaska than Arizona. I liked Flagstaff a lot.

My mother’s parents met in Flagstaff, incidentally, but I don’t know much about the circumstances and I don’t know if they ever returned.

All the motels are located along the northern side of Route 66. Railroad tracks run parallel to the southern side, and if you stay in one of the motels, prepare to have your sleep interrupted at irregular intervals by the thumping of machinery and the high shriek of the conductor’s horn. Katherine, when I was talking with her on the phone that evening, asked me what the noise was. “You can hear that?” I asked.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into town for breakfast. I looked at the map and saw how close I was and determined that I would make it all the way to Los Angeles that day. I was on the road a little after eight.

Arizona along Interstate 40 is a mostly flat and barren desert and after a few hours I was getting bored. I decided, without much forethought, to take a detour. A few miles south of Kingman, I pulled off the Interstate and got on Route 66.

The glory days of this storied highway are long past but I am pleased to report that it lives on in the hearts and minds of many a bearded motorcyclist and they were pretty much my only company on the lonely two-lane road. The pavement itself is narrow and cracked. There is no shoulder. Its two lanes, one in either direction, aren’t very commodious even for a motorcycle, and my Cadillac felt like a quarterback in a laundry chute as it thundered down the road.

It started out as flat and dull as the Interstate. I had been hoping for some roadside attractions, like a diner or a gas station, but there was nothing. There were some pretty serious mountains up ahead but they didn’t impress me much. I was looking for signs of life.

It was boring and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The road, which had been straight as a rod, became more curvaceous and irregular. Then, very quickly, it became impossible. Without realizing quite how I got there, I found myself hugging the side of a mountain and terrified for my life. There was no quardrail. The highway seemed to have become narrower and it curved at ninety, one-fifty, and nearly one-eighty degree angles every hundred yards. I could barely manage five miles an hour. Any faster and I would plunge to the most pointless death imaginable.

Moreover, I was alone. The motorcyclists had long since passed me and I was now on my own. There were few roadsigns but those I saw mentioned a town called Oatman which was about five miles away.

They were surely the longest five miles I had ever driven. Route 66 was horrifyingly switchback the entire way. Moreover, as I was driving west, I had the privilege of being on the edge of the mountain rather than the inside. Even though there seemed to be no one on the road, I could hardly straddle the lanes since every few yards I was rounding a corner into god-knows-what. I sweated through my shirt and sat on the edge of the seat and after forty minutes or so I traversed the hellish five miles.

And then I arrived at Oatman. It basically meant rounding a corner and then finding myself in the company of aged motorcycle anarchists and their sunburnt women, Arizona mountain men, bearded survivalists, and packs of burros roaming the street.

Oatman is an old mining town that began as a tent camp in 1915. Aside from the t-shirts and touristy knick-knacks, not much seemed to have changed since its founding. I got out of my car and walked around, careful to avoid the burro shit clumped along the street. There were leathery motorcycle geezers everywhere, drinking beer at two in the afternoon. The largest—and oldest—structure in town is the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard improbably honeymooned (he liked to gamble with the old prospectors).

I stayed for a little while and took a few pictures. It was a strange experience. The town is literally in the middle of a mountain, nestled between peaks. Its eastern approach had been treacherous, and its appearance suddenly along the road had been startling. And welcome—I was glad to simply see some other living humans.

The rest of Route 66 as I took it leading back to the Interstate was mercifully straight—or at least manageably so. It took me less than an hour to reach the California boarder, in a town called Needles. I stopped there and put some gas in the car and thundered on toward the coast.

Tour Americana! Part Two (Little Rock)

My mother spent a portion of her childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, but when I stopped there around noon on November 1st, I was unable to locate the street she lived on. She had told me it was near the Governor’s Mansion, which I did manage to find—a modest two-story Colonial behind a wrought-iron fence in an otherwise iffy neighborhood. She also remembered that it was close to Little Rock Central High School, which she said she remembered well, although she did not go to school there. Then again, anyone, I would suspect, who lived through the 1950s in America, remembers this school. It was here that the 1954 Supreme Court integration mandate from Brown vs. Board of Education ignited a firestorm of southern bigotry. In September 1957, nine black students arrived to enroll at Little Rock Central High, but were met by an angry mob determined to resist integration. Eventually, the threat of violence swelled to such a point that the students were sent home.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, as righteously indignant as he was ornately named, wasn’t much help. He sided with the segregationists, who, determined to block the black students’ entry, had set up camp in front of the school. Governor Faubus sent in the police—not to disperse them, but to augment their numbers. The next day, at the request of Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann, President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school. At the same time, the President federalized the entire state’s National Guard force, effectively taking it out of Governor Faubus’ hands.

The students were enrolled and did attend classes that year, during which they were the victims of their white classmates’ racist calumny and occasional violence. Meanwhile, the protests from Little Rock Central High’s parents continued. By the end of the year, the Little Rock School Board—with the support of Governor Fabulus and the Arkansas State Legislature—decided to cancel classes for the entire next year rather than integrate the schools. Eventually, further court decisions forced the School Board’s hand, and classes were reopened in 1959—and begrudgingly integrated.

The school itself, it should be noted, was constructed in 1927 and is outlandishly beautiful—and immense. Its entrance is reached by two grand, mirrored stairways, which rise above a series of Italian archways, and a small reflecting pool. The building is triangular in shape, with twin two-story wings jutting outward as you face its front. Its size is all the more astonishing in the neighborhood of modest one- and two-story houses in which it sits. Across the street is a new museum, run by the National Park Service, which tells the story of the Little Rock Integration Crisis and honors the “Little Rock Nine,” as the black students who integrated the school came to be known. The museum opened just over a month ago, in September 2007.

Tour Americana! Part One

Last week I drove from my parents’ house in northern Virginia to Los Angeles. The trip took six days and covered about 2,700 miles and seven states. I started on Tuesday, October 30 around noon. Earlier in the day, I’d stopped at my mother’s sixth grade class to say goodbye to her. She introduced me to her students and told them that I was moving to Los Angeles which, I was disappointed to note, didn’t seem to impress them very much. We hugged, and one of the students asked my mom if she was going to cry. She didn’t, as far as I could tell, and in any case, in about an hour I was on Interstate 80, heading west.

In Roanoke, Virginia, I stopped at a Triple-A travel office where I was given several heavy bags full of books and maps. The agent I spoke with asked me if I was driving alone. I told her I was. “So,” she said, “Do you have a job out there?” "No," I replied, "Not really,” as though there were varying degrees between having and not having a job. Maps in hand, I saddled up again and drove south to the town of Wytheville, Virginia, which is where I ended up spending the night.

I awoke the next morning to a frost and I used the plastic Kaplan ID, which I still carried in my wallet, to scrape the ice off my car. I stopped in at several Wytheville eateries, hunting for breakfast, but in each, the stench of cigarettes and grease overwhelmed the appetite and I decided to wait until Knoxville to eat. Actually, the biggest struggle of my journey consisted in locating food. Driving the Interstate Highway system, one is presented with endless opportunities to gorge on fried mystery meat of questionable nutritional value. I became obsessed, as never before, with finding fresh fruit and vegetables. In Knoxville, I found a brewery downtown where I was served pasta and beer and that was about as good as it got.

There was something strange about Tennessee, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. In the brewery, for instance, they were playing John Carpenter slasher films at two in the afternoon. When I stopped at Nashville later in the day, I encountered several odd characters walking the streets, and in a downtown coffee shop I was served by a suspicious-looking man in a comically oversized cowboy hat. Something was going on here but I was dazed from driving and hardly knew what day it was, let alone that it was Halloween.

Downtown Nashville was dead at five o’clock, which suited me fine. I walked around for about an hour, took some photographs and moved on. This was pretty much what it was like the whole trip. Most of the cities I visited were moderate in size—in any case, much smaller than New York, of course, and getting into the center of them and then getting back out proved to be pretty simple. I could usually manage a quick survey in about an hour or two and finding a place to park was never hard. The density in these places was largely confined to a few square miles, and all of the cities were well-served by freeways, so entry and escape never included the stop-and-go misery that’s de rigueur in New York.

After Nashville, I drove on for another hundred miles or so until I came to Jackson, Tennessee, where I found a cheap motel room. Finding affordable motels was usually easy, especially as I only had two criteria to fill: 1) that the rooms don’t reek of cigarette smoke, and 2) that the hotel have Internet access. By the time I reached Jackson, I had crossed into Central Time, and it was eight o’clock in the evening. I ordered pizza and after a few hours was asleep.