Last Dance

Tue, 2 Dec 2008 10:08:07 -0800

NOTE: In between the previous entry and this entry I had mostly covered the story with quick videos. Here’s a link to my drive from Route 66 in Arizona to my parents in the Bay Area in time for Thanksgiving.
Video Link.

The final haul.

Reversing out of the driveway, RT didn’t feel like herself. She was sluggish. There was no motivation there.
Driving along her pep didn’t improve. I swore I smelled something burning.
I pulled into a gas station to fill up. Opening the car door revealed a wave of smoke. Was this the beginning of the end? Would I be able to make it to LA? Or at least within 200 miles so I could be towed into LA, ingloriously? Did I risk a spectacular explosion as I approached the coast? Would my death help my “click through” numbers?
The smoke was not coming from the engine, rather it was emanating from the back. It took me seconds to identify the problem (I’m getting good at this car maintenance thing).

I’d left the parking brake on.

A foolish error, yes. Not that foolish though. I hadn’t been using the parking brake at all during the trip because, well, it had stuff leaking around it and I had a feeling it would cause more problems then it was worth. My parent’s driveway though has a slight incline and when my brother parked his 2007 Chrysler Sebring behind RT I thought it best to depress the parking brake and avoid the slow motion disaster I saw playing in my head. Of course I didn’t remember doing this until after I’d inhaled enough burned rubber to qualify for an OSHA claim.
The instrument panel was no help in avoiding this mistake. The parking brake light is always on, so having it lit during this five mile drive did nothing to remind me to release the brake. I’m sure I’ve driven with a parking brake on in other vehicles but I’ve never seen that much smoke coming from a tire. It smoked for quite a while.

The drive down to L.A. retraced some of the steps Tinaseville and I had taken on the way up. That felt right. It inspired no nostalgia though. While a few things stood out such as a gas station beside a lettuce field where I’d filled up Tinaseville for about double the current price - most of the scenery felt unfamiliar. Things you pass one way are often unrecognizable driving back - ever notice that? The slight change in season I’m sure changed the environs as well. The mile upon mile of produce I saw growing three months ago had since been picked leaving behind empty fields, and the empty fields I had seen before were now dotted green. It was strange to see fields devoted to something other than corn. I saw lettuce and celery and a lot of other crops but no corn. I guess the rest of the country has corn covered. The untouched landscapes looked different from any place I’d been - but that’s the way it always was on this trip. Each region felt like a different chunk of earth.

RT got her first glimpse of the Pacific, north of San Louis Obispo. We stopped for a bathroom break in Santa Maria and half heartedly looked for evidence of the recent fires that had scorched the area but I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t disappointed. We’d seen enough post-disaster sites on this trip.
When the road came close to the ocean again we pulled over and parked. RT’s front bumper was only a few feet from train tracks which were only a few feet from the beach and the world’s largest thing, the Pacific Ocean.

Only after I’d dunked my hand in the water (and produced a very lame final video) did I feel the end. I’d been mindful of the end now for the last several thousand miles, but it was at that moment when the trip actually ended. I felt it end, and I suppose by that I mean I felt a sudden loss.

It was a quick pang that snuck up on me. What was I losing? A lifestyle? An attitude? Something to do? Not so much. I think it was time. I had lost a time. Like most endings it made me sad, but only for a second.

I sat atop a boulder and looked out at the waves and the setting sun. I wondered what I’d write about this moment and about this day but I didn’t wonder very long. I tried to run through some of the trip’s highlights but it felt forced. Instead I just sat.

The ocean smelled of salt and seaweed and wet sand. The air was thick and warm and tasted sweet. The sky was purple and gray and orange. I hadn’t felt so relaxed in a long time.

When I returned to Rustataurus I gave her a pat on the dash board. I’d set out to kill her but she wouldn’t die. Perhaps an oil change was in order for a job well done.

I took out the pliers and switched on the lights - only one headlight was working again. I turned the key and shifted the transmission. The worn through floor mat beneath the foot pedals had collected sand from the Atlantic Ocean in Maine and the Gulf Coast of Texas, and now sand from the Pacific, too.

We drove a few hundred yards along the beach before turning toward the freeway onramp. “The road” was is our rear view mirror.

The past.

We merged into slow moving traffic, transforming into commuters we blended in with the countless lights, exhaust pipes and thousand yard stares.

Like most everyone else, we were just trying to find home.

New Mexico

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:43:54 -0800

Before leaving Deming, New Mexico yesterday I stopped in a cafe attached to a motel. Seated at one of the tables was a group of five border patrol agents. This I thought was a lucky coincidence.
I was hoping I might get some insight onto the border situation and specifically I hoped I might “guard” the border with a group of citizens known as the Minutemen. I took a seat by the agents and when they finally (they definitely took a nice long breakfast) got up to leave I asked one about the Minutemen.
“They’re not around now. It’s real slow right now.”
The agent explained that this is normally a slow time for border traffic but the economy and other factors too may be a reason it’s so slow. I asked if the Minutemen were a help.
He thought about it a moment. “Usually they don’t see anything.”

When I was at the register paying my bill ten minutes later I heard a voice behind me.
“The Minutemen do a great job.”
I turned around and found a plump man with a white beard and sun blistered nose. We conversed for about ten minutes. He thought the Minutemen were great but the border patrol he wasn’t too keen on. He said there were too many bad seeds in the rank. When I pressed him further on this he told me the following - and I paraphrase:
“We need people down here but there’s a right way to protect the border and a wrong way and some of these guys are bad people. A while back they killed a guy. I have a cb and I heard the whole thing on the radio. They had some guys and they chased them back in the desert and starved them out - I heard the whole thing. Of course when it came out in the papers it was a much different story, but I heard it. They killed them.”
We talked some more. He’d lost 30 grand trying to start a newspaper. He owned a small radio station in town. “Things weren’t always the way they are around here. We got people claiming the holocaust didn’t happen and they’re teaching that in schools now. They’re winning. We gotta remind people it wasn’t always like this. There’s something wrong going on now and it’s my generations fault. We let it happen.”
I told him I’d been driving around the country, looking to find out how far you could take a $500 car. “Hell, I did that many years ago,” he said, “but with a $50 car.”
I listened to his radio station on the way out of town. The Alex Jones Show, a syndicated program out of Austin, was on. Jones was interviewing a female veteran of the Iraq War. The discussion was about how certain U.S. soldiers who know too much are being murdered by the government. Something like that.
It’s really hard to know who’s worth listening to nowadays. It really is.

Just Driving

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:12:04 -0800

The past couple days I’ve put a lot of miles on RT. Texas is a big state and an important state but besides my visit to Lakewood Church and my stop in Galveston, I blew through it. I’m glad I did though. There are certain regions that suggest themselves to certain things and I found that Texas is a place to drive. Maybe I could have gone to the Alamo or the place where Kennedy was killed (I think the anniversary occurred during my time in Texas) or cruised by Crawford to see how much brush President Bush will be clearing when he gets home. There was lots to see and do in Texas but once I got on the 10 I almost couldn’t stop. Maybe that’s a function of Interstate travel. In part I’m sure it is. But this part of I-10 was nothing like a lot of interstates. It was empty.
I was on the 10 for a bit in Louisiana and that was a little nutty. A suggestion: If you are traveling through Louisiana on I-10, travel the speed limit. The troopers there are all over the place. In fact, they play some very weird games. For example, I was traveling the speed limit but for a time I was behind someone going below the limit. After a little while of this I decided to pass and ... it was a state trooper. I was a little freaked at first but then I remembered everyone else had been passing him.
Later another Trooper came up from behind and passed me, then cut in front of me and went to the emergency lane. I’m not sure why - there was nothing there and he could have found the emergency lane in a much simpler way without cutting in front of me the way he did. The point though is that I saw quite a few people pulled over that night.
Back to Texas though. It’s remarkable how much things change between Louisiana and Texas. Maybe driving faster and further makes the differences more apparent but in this case I don’t think so. Between Western Louisiana and not too far into Texas the culture, the people and the land changes dramatically. Louisiana is swampland. New Orleans is an exciting place in part because historically it was a clash of civilizations and empires - Natives, French, Spanish, English, Afro-Caribbean. Western Louisiana is rooted in a French past and you can still see it. Texas is Spanish / Mexican and native pretty quick. In West Texas I stopped into a library in Ft. Stockton. There was a building nearby that was some kind of Comanche outpost. It was easy to see in many people’s faces their native heritage. Same with New Mexico. In this whole area everyone, even the very white people, look like they’d be comfortable wearing boots, long sleeve shirts, and jeans in 115 degree weather.
Once I hit El Paso I took a small highway that ran right beside the U.S. Mexico border for about 60 miles. Lots of border patrol agents and not much else. I thought I’d stop for the night in a town called Columbus, right at the border. I know I’m babbling but on this trip “history” has been most exciting when you see it intertwined with the present, not when it’s plastic-wrapped. It was too dark to get a great feel for Columbus, but there wasn’t much to get a feel for. There was something to me just really interesting in the fact that we were in a tiny, dusty town at the New Mexico, Mexico border and the town was named after Columbus. I wonder how that came to be? It’s not hard to imagine but - I don’t know, just interesting I guess.
I spoke to the three guys at the gas station for a moment. The only place to eat was a small grocery that had a deli. The tiny motel across the way? Not sure how much it costs but there’s usually no vacancy. The old guy in the corner looked 100% native american. The other two? A jump ball. They looked to have all kinds of heritage - spanish / mexican, native, one may have even been part asian - but of course native americans themselves have an asiatic ancestry. Why do I bring this up? I guess because people are part of the landscape and for whatever reason, maybe because in this part of the country there’s so much landscape, the faces stand out all the more. Or maybe it’s because the faces here seem even more a part of the landscape. I’m not sure. I drove on another 35 miles north to this town called Deming. My only stop was for a couple border patrol agents at a road stop. Am I an American citizen? Yes. A quick gander at the back window. Okay.
The two watched me as I bled into the night.
In Deming I checked into a $26 a night motel and it is easily the dingiest I’ve stayed in on this trip. One wall is marked up dry wall - the others are cinder block. I was walking barefoot this morning and stepped on a thorn that embedded itself snugly into my heel. At least it has running water.
Last night I had one of the better meals of the trip. A beer and three tacos with beans and rice. I thought back to Boston. I had Mexican food on back to back nights. The first was with my friend who’d been living in Italy and was dying for Mexican food. Poor guy. I know what I had last night was what he really wanted. The salsa and chips were so good. In Boston it tasted like I was dipping stale chips into Prago spaghetti sauce.

Anyway, the point I started out with in all this rambling was that the past couple days of driving have been great. I’d mentioned a kind of anxiety that the land and the drive initially produced in me, but since then it’s been a joy. Road trips can be about a lot of different things but one thing they all share is the driving and this is just great driving country. Really, the past two nights I’ve made myself stop. I’m sure I could have driven many hours more.
I know this entry was all over the map. I’d try and fix it but the road beckons.

Night Driving and a West Texas Motel

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:28:36 -0800

I’m traveling without a Texas map so I have very little idea of the possibilities for roads traveling west other than Interstate 10. In similar situations in the past I just winged it but I was fine doing some interstate travel for a while. First let me say that the freeways around Houston are probably crazier than they are in LA. There’s a lot of massive concrete circles in that area. Or was it San Antonio? I think it was both.
After the swamps of Louisiana (God, I haven’t even said anything about Louisiana. There’s something about that place I like though) and then the Gulf in Galveston I fought through some city driving past Houston and was then confronted by the big sky and the mostly flat earth of Texas. Over the next few hundred miles the landscape changed a little here and a little there - sometimes more trees, sometimes fewer. Then there was San Antonio when the sun was directly in my eyes and it’s a wonder there isn’t a massive car pile up on the 10 everyday at that time.
With it still light but the sun gone I became a little anxious. There’s something a tad overwhelming about how big and lonely it feels out here. On my way east through Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota it’s the same thing, but then it felt... freeing I guess is the word. When the darkness came that only made it spookier for a while. There was the impression that if you break down here there’s nothing to do. At first I felt like that set of astronaut’s tools that was lost on the space station - drifting through outer space. Over time though something changed. The darkness felt like a big blanket. I settled down. The radio stations got a little better. My mood was less antsy and more thoughtful.
I suppose this anxiety is in part a function of where I am in this trip. Those things I put on hold at the beginning of the trip are coming to the forefront of my mind. I’m wondering about Thanksgiving. It’s always been my favorite holiday. Where will I be? What should I do? Should I make a beeline at some point for the Bay Area in California? Rent a motel room in the desert and get drunk watching football?
I’ve also begun to try and put this trip in some kind of perspective. What the hell was it all about? Should I begin challenging RT even more? How? From the potholed brick streets of downtown Manhattan, to the dirt roads of Alabama to the interstate of West Texas, RT has yawned. What next? Chicken with 18 wheelers?
Sleeping in the back of a station wagon on side streets, in rest stops, and like last night, in a parking garage, begins to take its toll too, I think. In that sense, travel can remind one that life is pretty simple. Eat well and sleep well and you have a chance for a good, productive day. Don’t eat and sleep well and you’re climbing out of a ditch the whole day.
I stopped last night in Sonora, Texas only because I was getting low on gas and it wasn’t clear if there’d be another gas station for some time. The past couple nights of driving though I’ve been caught with heavy eyelids and then that has lead to all kinds of problems. Traveling into the Houston area I pulled off on a side street and immediately thought to myself “this is stupid.” As I took a u-turn I had a pick up come up on me flashing his high beams. He then swung to my side and wanted me to roll down my window. In what was probably another dumb move, I did. Our conversation didn’t illuminate me much further on what he wanted. He’d asked what I was looking for and I told him I was trying to get back on the highway. He told me I was going the right direction. Then there was something about thinking I had someone else with me. He also asked if I had a cigarette which I now believe, rightly or wrongly, that this was some kind of code. After I answered he said, “all right, be careful.”
It was the second time in the past few days I’d been in a mysterious place, having a conversation I didn’t quite understand, that ends with a Black man telling me to be careful. Each time it was said rather earnestly too.
Anyway, I found this motel that advertised out front a single room for $28. I learned from the old man with the John Wayne decorated living room that he was letting the rooms go for $20 tonight because there’s no water. “So you can’t shower, but there’s a bed and a tv and a bucket of water by the toilet so you can flush the ca-mode. That bucket should give you two flushes.”
I have learned the hard way that it barely provides one.

Lakewood Church, Houston, TX.

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:29:46 -0800

Why did I drive half the night and sleep in a parking garage to attend Lakewood Church? Two reasons. The first was that I wanted a mega-church experience. The second was a smile.

If I had any ability to draw and you asked me to imagine the devil I would draw Joel Osteen. Seriously. He looks like I imagine the devil. His smile is so forced, his suite is too big, his wife looks like a whore.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t dislike the guy. In fact, the devil - I mean, Joel - seems kind of cool. I mentioned his wife looks like a whore right?
I wanted to get the mega-church experience on this trip and Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston fit the bill. That Joel’s face is constantly on television made this visit all the more luscious to me. That said, I never stopped for more than a minute on one of his services while flipping the channels. His phoney smile always got my attention but he never said anything crazy enough for me to continue watching.
Without ever going to a “Mega-Church” I thought they were successful because they were an amalgamation of entertainment, pop-psychology, and religion. That sounds pejorative but I wasn’t sure if it was “wrong” or not. I mean, what makes kneeling in a place of stained glass so much better? I don’t know. If I had one prejudice going in though, it wasn’t that they were making money off the vulnerabilities of people - who doesn’t nowadays? - but I believe, especially after my church visits on this trip, that a church can provide and foster a sense of community better than any other institution in America. How then, I wondered, could a place that holds its multiple services in a basketball size arena foster community? What kind of community would it be? What kind could it be?
I walked through a side entrance, through the children’s section and found a wall with lots of Church literature. There were pamphlets for men’s groups, marriage counseling, etc.

This was the first service I’d been to in some time where I didn’t take notes. I was prepared to take notes but there was little to take notes on.

I was grouped with two guys from Boston. Neither ever looked at me. We were ushered to the front - the third row. I felt like a VP - a friend of the performer at the concert.

Sitting next to that guy who was invading my space.

The first three quarters of the service made me uncomfortable. I recognized at a certain point that I had my arms crossed tightly across my chest - and they never unfurled.

The first half hour at least was basically a concert. The singing at the Chicago church was of a professional quality but it felt like they were professionals singing for their church. I don’t know what the deal is with this group, but it felt like they’d been auditioned and choreographed and instructed to point and look to the sky frequently.

I felt like I was watching sketch comedy.

I’d been impressed throughout my trip that I’d been always made to feel welcome in churches. Here they did the same things - a hearty handshake, big smile and firm welcome but it felt phoney. I couldn’t tell if it felt that way because it was all so big or not. It made me wonder if every other place had been phoney as well but because it was smaller I didn’t notice as much.

It felt a lot like the movie Fletch 2.

It was easy to see right away the Osteen had read lots of self help books - the kind that tell you to never stop smiling. He never stopped smiling.
I imagined at some point he must have had terrible headaches from freezing his face like that but now he was in smiling shape. His face was probably permanently in that position.

His wife, Victoria, whose new book was advertised throughout the concourse in banners with her face, gave me the worst feeling of all.

She read like a woman who just yearned to be famous - not talented enough to do

He reeked of a pop-psychology manipulation techniques. Never stop smiling, greet people with a hand shake, hold them on the shoulder.

But when he preached he had a different feel.

He’s a small man that wears a big suite. That sounds like some kind of southern saying that insinuates something but it’s not. It’s literally the truth.

Joel’s church and I assume most other mega churches are successful for the reasons I suspected.