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HERE for photos from my trip.
Taking a ride on the wheel of fortune, I left Vermont. Where I end up was (and very much remains) an unanswered question. Apparently the wheel still spins. Regardless, here is my journey to date.
30 September 2007
I woke, packed, said farewell, and departed. With Middlebury in the rear view mirror, my future in no shortage of uncertainty, my life=s possessions and I drove south. At this point I was still waiting to here back from one prospective employer, and thus was in a holding pattern before either jettisoning myself to DC to begin work or begin working West.
I failed to acquire an atlas at this point of the trip which proved only mildly problematic driving into Brooklyn when I missed the turn on to the George Washington Bridge. Finding my way through the mild Sunday afternoon traffic was surprisingly easy given that I couldn’t see out of my rear view mirror nor check my blind spots when changing lanes. I was stopped less than 2 blocks from my final destination (Josh’s Apt) by some nameless festival in Brooklyn. The festival, as later exploration revealed, ought to have been named the Gentrification festival, although Josh insisted that every NYC festival may as well be a gentrification festival. I know all about this because I read Jonathan Letham’s Fortress of Solitude one day.
Brooklyn’s shore closest to Manhattan is now a haven of hipsters, recent-grads, and entry-level employees; the rest of Brooklyn is not. While walking from the blocks closest to the water toward the interior of Brooklyn, there was an unmistakable shift in racial demographics (as well as hipster density). Strangely enough, the price of the food decreased as we moved away from the white beachhead as well. Amusing, but not worth talking about more.
1 October 2007
Finding parking spaces in New York: To avoid the fine of parking on street set to be cleaned, I had to find a new parking spot. Since I still didn’t have a map, Atlas, or general sense of Brooklyn this was unnecessarily difficult. I found no parking spots in 2 hours of driving, and then went back to my original spot to find the street had been cleaned and simply re-parked my car. I headed to Manhattan intending to meet up with Josh over lunch to visit an art museum, but with museums inexplicably closed on Mondays I found myself stranded of things with which to occupy myself. So I began to walk. Starting around Central Park I walked back to Josh’s apartment in Brooklyn. New York is big. Along the way I observed a man with a pistol tucked away in the kangaroo pouch of his forest green hoodie, leaving only the handle and hammer exposed. This was disconcerting, but given the fact that it was a busy-ish park I wasn’t too concerned with my safety. Later, however, I was irked to find that if I had turned him in I could have received a fist full of Benjamins.
There was also a man comforting his vomiting dog and a sea of faces with expressions far moved from their immediate environment blindly moving through their day with seemingly important things on their mind. I feel sorry for the dog, for its lack of choice regarding habitat, but ultimately the emotionally detached humans are far more worrisome. Maybe it’s because I can relate. How else could you live in a city? Without the opportunity to physically remove oneself from people, the passivity is a defense mechanism against over. Evolutionarily speaking, there is no basis for living with so many people who mean so little. Humans are resilient, so I guess it works. I think this whole hyperawareness is partly a defense mechanism of my own. Earlier that afternoon, I learned that I didn’t get the job I was waiting to hear back from in DC while eating ice cream at Tasti D lite. Unconsciously irked by the snub I started rationalizing why I wouldn't want to live in a city. Rationalization/intellectualization is a pretty well established Freudian defense mechanism. If it were true, then I was merely justifying why I wouldn’t have wanted to live in DC had I got the job in the first place, this being the urban malaise of detachment, crime and sad city dogs. I suppose to there was a bit of projection going on as well. Maybe all those people I passed on my Odyssey to Brooklyn weren’t all that sad, but just wearing the mask I was placing on them. Although I’m still pretty sure the guy had a gun.
Without a place I needed to be, I was free to move about the country. Although meeting up with my Montana friend Adam, with a room available in Brooklyn, there was perhaps good reason to stick around. Why not?
2 October, 2007
So I stick around NYC another day (but I really didn’t have a choice). I need to move my car again to avoid street sweeper fines, but when I get to my car it doesn’t start because my dome light was on all night. I think about hiring a cab to help jump my car, but instead wander in search of gas station/ repair shop that might have an emergency battery booster I could use. No luck. So then I search out hardware stores to purchase a said emergency battery booster. I find, purchase, and set out for my car to realize that 1) the unit first needs to be charged; 2) the unit needs to be charged at least 20 hours. This would push back my departure another day. When I get back to my car I find my car blocked in by a double parking Eastern European man, who coincidentally enough is waiting for the Street Cleaning period to expire so he can park his car. So I convince him to jump my car (I had jumper cables all along but no one I knew in the city had a car). While returning the purchased emergency booster, I pass a mechanic shop using the same booster I had purchased (but one they claimed not to have a couple hours earlier). In the end all is well . . .
I do more wandering, buy a NYTimes, read it in Central Park, watch more unhappy people (I count 6 people who seem genuinely happy for one reason or another), and then wander into some old cathedral for evensongs which were a nice change of pace. People don’t look genuinely happy all the time so the world must be recovering from the day previous.
I’m back in Brooklyn rummaging through various things in my car waiting for Josh to get back to his apartment when something begins vibrating in my pants (it gets even more exciting). It turns out that my cell phone (!!??) is ringing. (Yeah, so I got a phone anticipating calls from prospective employers, but you can’t call it.) In any case, the startling vibrations emanating from my nether regions throw my mono-tasking mind upside down as I exit the car, lock the doors, and attempt to answer the phone. I miss the call. I also miss my keys. Several hours later, equipped with several coat hangers, a pile of Choose Responsibility business cards, various tools, and two very good friends, the car-jacking begins. We come painfully close in a short period of time before a 6 Cops show up to assess the scenario (2 in a cruiser, 2 undercover coming up the one way in a taxi, and two in a surveillance van. Hearing the police blotter blare my physical description, I try to be serious; though I am breaking into my own car, I resist trying to be funny. The police are typical. One takes my license, I explain to another how I am from Montana but the car is registered in Vermont, a third asks me for my license and gets suspicious when I tell him I gave it to that other police officer. Once they determine that this isn’t a serious threat, they proffer all sorts of useless advice to gain entry into the vehicle. Either not observing, but more likely not caring to acknowledge, the scenario one suggests that we need coat hangers to go angle in from the window, from which there were presently protruding 3. Another tells us how it is done, but can’t seem to back the talk when I let him give it a try. After 15 minutes they all leave. But they showed up, and if anyone else had been trying to break into my car, I’m glad some concerned Brooklynite decided to err on the side of caution report a theft in progress. I wonder what would have happened if I ran.
We later receive some unrequested help from a Queens native dropping off his girlfriend at the apartment in front of which I was parked. Though he was surprisingly knowledgeable of what he was doing, he ultimately could not unlock the door. Finally, a locksmith happened to drive by (against the flow of the one-way) and offered to work his magic for a modestly steep fee. It turns out we were pushing the lock switch in the wrong direction. While Brooklyn is turning me into its native son, the bed, and then the road beckon.
3 October, 2007
The Road Trip begins in earnest. Eastern New Jersey is a god forsaken place, an industrial wasteland existing to service New York City. Western New Jersey is deceivingly in the same state. In Pennsylvania the scenery gets better, and the slow roading begins, as do the lapping seas of corn. For the rest of the day I am amazed at the ubiquity of it all: same crops, same fast food chains, same big box stores, cookie-cut towns that are no different than the next, that is until I get to Hershey. Home to the Hershey’s chocolate empire, Hershey is a very different place. Compelled to stop by the gravity of sugary-delight I fall into the tourist trap and take the tour of the chocolate factory. As soon as I step out of my car I realize that I am no longer 12, and more importantly, very much alone. The roller coaster-esque factor tour, a mishmash of Charlie and Chocolate Factory and the tunnel of Splash Mountain where the animals sing “It’s a Small World,” is informative only to an extent, but reveals little as to why Hershey’s chocolate is just about the worse chocolate out there. I score a box of marked down, discontinued Antioxidant chocolate bars, and leave with the unfulfilled desire to employ the personalized label maker to brand my own “How did I get here?” chocolate bars.
I made my next stop at Gettysburg, PA, a town appreciably nicer, quirkier, and tourist preferred than most of the other towns through which I traveled that day, with dual intent to revisit the battlefield and to check my email by blending into the college population at the library. I regrettably spent too little time on the battlefield, but it was getting dark, I knew neither where I was staying that night nor where I was going the next day. Glorious internet saved me on both accounts. I found a campground at Catoctin State Park in Maryland 30 miles away, and found out that my friend Liz was celebrating her birthday the next day in DC, but a hop, skip, and jump from where I was. So delaying my plans to head west with vigor, I was East Coast contained but one day more.
4 October 2007
Catoctin State Park is very nice. Wednesday nights are evidently not too busy at the campground, so I nearly had the place to myself. An early morning fog provided for a filtered light screaming for a photographic record, leading me to delay my DC arrival in favor of Antietam Battlefield to get pictures of Burnside’s Bridge, which mind’s eye rendered as veiled in dewy wisps of vapor moving slowly downstream. Naturally the fog burned off before I arrived. I relearned the battle’s unfolding, saw the sights (bridge included), found a memorial dedicated to the first governor of Montana, and traveled onward to DC via an untraveled road that snuck into West Virginia for a short stretch.
Washington, DC is very fine place, with unexpectedly navigable roads. Arriving early, I parked in the heart of the Mall and began my ambulatory circulation of the “sights.” I had once upon a time seen the real sights, so instead found my way into the House Representative’s Offices, the Supreme Court, Library of Congress, very near but not inside Capital Building, a Senate Office Building, and the Botanical Garden. While wandering in the Senate Office Building I happened upon a Montana flag, for which I couldn’t help stopping. It was the office of Montana’s newest representative Senator Tester. He’s the first senator to publish his daily agenda for public record, and probably the only organic farmer, former high school music teacher, and is the most out of place guy in the senate. While chatting with his aides he happened to come out of the back office to say hello. I was in the middle of reminiscing about the Big Sky Society we had founded at Middlebury, which I think amused him. I got the obligatory picture to prove it all. Later, while trying to utilize the pass Tester’s office provided me into the Capital Gallery, my car was being slapped with a $100 parking fine. I was too late to gain access in the Capital, and now am merely left ruminating whether Senators can pardon parking tickets.
I met up with my friend Liz, another Montanan friend Libbie, and several others for a fine evening at a DC eating institution Ben’s Chili Bowl, where only Bill Cosby gets free food. Using the metric of where could I drive to in less than 10 hours I determined that I would next head to Kentucky.
5 October, 2007
This day I drove to Mammoth Cave National Park Kentucky—avoiding Eisenhower’s Interstates until Kentucky the trip was notably longer than Google’s asserted 8 hours and change. I wouldn’t have thought West Virginia to have been as beautiful as it was. Everyone in the East jokes of its economic shortcomings and inbred countenance, but it’s a looker of a landscape. If ever traveling coast to coast plan to detour through Seneca Valley National Recreation Area. And though my car’s engine would have preferred the roads to be graded slightly less steep, it does make for fun driving (even with the heat blasting on a 90 degree day). With Kentucky, the natural landscape is actually grass, and not long prairie grass, but more as if Kentucky were one giant golf course (that would make Mammoth Cave the cup). Kentucky is the only state which could easily grow corn but prefers horses and grass, and in some cases tobacco. Sadly, not once could I find a bluegrass radio station. Transylvania College sponsored this day’s internet access, though the librarians were suspicious since it was very late on a Friday afternoon. I arrived at my campground after dark—as I suppose I did at every campground—and summarily locked my keys in my car. I had luckily unpacked my cooking and sleeping gear, when fumbling for money to pay the camping fee to the rangers making final rounds, my keys fell out of my pocket on to the seat of my car. Finding that my tent poles and tent stakes were neither long enough nor skinny enough to snake between the window and frame and reach the unlock button, I waited until later when I could “borrow” unscrewed car antennae from my fellow campers. These proved inches too short, and I resolved to fix the problem in the morning.
6 October, 2007
I woke early, now a time zone ahead of my fellow campers, agitated by my own stupidity. Thinking creatively (thank you Middlebury) I went to the recycling containers and found an old, rusty coat hanger. Unfortunately, the wire was too flimsy to depress the unlock mechanism. I turned my attention to fishing out my keys which were on my car seat. Long story short, I miraculously hooked the key ring on the end of my hanger without having them slip off as I pulled them toward the window. I was aided by my neighbor camper (classic Kentuckian!) at this final crucial moment of detaching the key from the key ring still inside the window using tent stakes and his marshmallow roaster. Again, all is well.
I buy tickets for the earliest Mammoth Cave tour, named as such because it has over 300 miles of tunnels (the longest system in the world). Nevertheless, I was satisfied my tour managed our two miles in two hours considering the group’s demographics. We had an Amish family, an 80 year-old great grandmother, and probably 90 others. The tunnels are big, and interestingly were first mapped and explored by slaves employed by area landowners. Bat guano deposits made certain sections of the cave lucrative nitrate mines for gun powder during the War of 1812. Slaves had the lucky job of hand pumping the liquid nitrate solution out of the cave. In all, the cave is well worth a visit if you find yourself in Kentucky
I look for the nearest college to plot my next move and end up in Louisville. Per usual, I find out that there is something very close by I must see. I am destined to head north as well. For a short while I resume Interstate travel because it is late in the afternoon and I want to arrive in Petersburg, KY before 5:00. That is, when the last tour at the Creation Museum is scheduled to depart. Now you may remember from an article in the New York Times this summer about this 30 million dollar “natural history” museum. In short, it’s purpose is to validate the Biblical creation story using mutant forms of geology, biology, paleontology, and climatology, all while vilifying human reason. Check out the pictures to get a sense of the place. I falsely assumed there would be more hecklers like myself at the museum, which instead was densely(!) populated with families and student groups from all parts of the country (as the parking lot would reveal). As a singleton with Vermont plates, I was definitely given the furrowed brow by the traffic directing security guard. I decided to play naïve and blend in, parting my hair, tucking in my shirt, and dimly smiling, erstwhile surreptitiously taking photographs when no one was looking. The level of detail in the models of humans and dinosaurs, of Noah’s Ark, of the consequences of Human Reason, were remarkably well done ($$$$$$$$$$$). I’ll refrain from identifying and correcting the ad nauseum gaps of logic, scientific explanations, and internal logic at the museum, but I cannot resist commenting one video in particular.
The video is in regards to how some scientists assert that dinosaurs are millions of years old and others (scientists as the video would suggest) believe they are only 5000-6000 years old. The video is shot at a bone dig, where an Asian paleontologist explains that dinosaurs are millions of years old. Then another guy, middle-aged paunch and all, explains that through using the Bible, the true word of God, it is clear that Dinosaurs lived only 6000 years ago. He then goes on to say that when scientists begin at different starting points they reach different conclusions. Then the narrator says something to the effect, “I believe in the omniscience of God, while my friend Lee here believes in human reason.” Lee squintingly looks up from his work and the video fades. There is a subtle racism permeating the video, that to me suggest Asians and their religions (assuming altogether that they are not Christian) are inferior and uninformed to the Truth.
The first thing I realize when leaving the museum is that there isn’t a jingle of keys in my pocket. Awash in an absolute hopelessness of spending anymore time and perhaps needing to interact with the museum crowd, I get back to my car to find the doors locked (3rd time—holy trinity, a sign from God no doubt). Luckily I left a window cracked such that I can reach in and unlock the door. A very serious endorphin rush follows. Within a mile of leaving the museum and crossing into Ohio is a giant Nuclear facility. And then more corn. I camp in Indiana. It’s hot, humid, and my neighbor campers are watching battery-powered television next to their campfire.
7 October, 2007
As it turns out, by day light the State Park I am staying at is actually quite nice (if pictures are to be trusted). I find the quintessential Vermont landmark, a covered bridge, not far from the campsite and feel a bit rejuvenated. Although from there I drive through endless fields of corn toward Chicago.
7,8,9 October, 2007
My time in Chicago was a reprieve from the Kerouac life-style I had been living (although I have no basis for whether that is true or not since I’ve never read On The Road—I did read the first chapter in a bookstore in Brooklyn at the start of my trip and thought I was at a different junction than he at present). Chicago was great, with plenty of hanging out with my sister and fiancé and friends Conor and Ellen. Most notable, pertaining to this entry, was that my car had a flat tire one morning. At the tire shop they claimed the damage was irreparable, and that I would need a new tire. But, since my Subaru is all wheel drive I would need to get all 4 tires replaced so as to maintain equal tread wear between tires, which otherwise could damage my differential/drive train. Only when removing the tires did they also find that I needed a new wheel bearing, otherwise my wheel could/would fall off while driving. This replacement, exceeding my remaining funds, would have to wait, and would hasten my expeditious return to Montana from Chicago. I was intending to turn south from Chicago to Oklahoma and Texas. I cannot help but feel as though I’m being had whenever I’m in an car shop. Knowing nothing about cars, I am helpless against mechanics recommendations however absurd. In this particular situation, I must say that seeing a mechanic in the back hitting my tires with a sledge hammer played no small role in dissuading me from replacing the wheel bearing. Maybe its standard practice, but I’m sure it can’t be good for wheel bearings.
10 October, 2007
I drive a long ways. 14 hours to the Badlands of South Dakota. I see plenty of Corn, and eat lunch at Chinese restaurant in somewhere Minnesota called Happy Family—probably the highlight of the day. Everything begins to open up as I enter the West. Though there are fewer people, cars, and towns, there is an explosion of road signs, something doing with the fact that there isn’t much else to look at, or much other reason to stop at any of the places suggested by the signs other than the fact that they are on the signs; if you don’t stop at one of them (whatever it may be, there may not be another place to stop for a long time. There is a very nice sunset. I turn as little as possible thinking that if indeed my wheel bearing goes kaput, I will be going straight ahead. I arrive in Badlands National Park well after dark hungry. There is a howling wind which my stove finds disagreeable, as does my tent. Human intervention remedies the mild problems and the long day is over.
11 October, 2007
Here I’m still on East Coast Time, which is frustrating when I wake at 5:20 AM. I get a great sunrise, with a prelude of several hours of periwinkle, tangerine, and rose hues. The Badlands are absolutely breathtaking, and completely uninhabitable. In essence, The Badlands are where, if I were a settler in the days of yore, I would attempt to scratch life into the earth out of sheer stubbornness, die of starvation, leave behind a sun-bleached cross marking my grave, and maybe receive a valley in my name for my stupidity. It is the desert in Settlers of Catan. I grab breakfast at the famed Wall Drug Store, whose Maple Donuts could use real maple flavoring. From there I head to Mount Rushmore, an unnecessary necessity if you are in the area. Soon after I find myself forking over an entry feel to an uncompleted memorial to Crazy Horse, Native American extraordinaire stabbed in the back by American Troops. This memorial will be the largest sculpture in the world, taller than the Washington Monument, larger than the Giza Pyramid, 50 years in the making. It is big . . . Lord of the Rings big, and vehemently anti-government. Native Americans, having been duped by the Government too many times have refused several times the Fed offered 10 million dollars to help finish the project. I find this, like most things, simply amusing.
I head to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming for the obligatory snapshot, where upon I hear the first foretold squeak from my doomed wheel bearing. I make a beeline to I-90 and set the cruise control. Wyoming is desolate on the surface, which belies the wealth it now reaps from underground. Wyoming is pocked with oil and natural gas wells. Where there is 64 miles between interchanges on the Interstate, the countryside is abuzz with dirt roads, bull dozers, and slow-nodding pump stations. At one point, there is an endless train of coal heading east. I attempt to count the number of cars, but would better guess the number of miles the train stretches. On the horizon I see the processing plant from which the coal is packed onto the trains. A quarter mile past the plant there is a hillside spilling out singlewide trailers packed in formations undoubtedly becoming of a company town. The economic chain of opportunity and outcome are too easy to connect. The train heads east to fuel the rest of the country. The pictures are an allegory of the nature of Wyoming’s economy and its relationship to the rest of the country. I see mountains, snow and I am finally home (6 hours later).
