Monday, December 24, 2007
recreating a beyond
the piece formerly known only as "the new song" is called "recreating a beyond," and is a little different. check it out on the music page!
Thursday, December 13, 2007
a history of solitude
[this is a section of an originally longer post]
So, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions about this trip. Living in a van and roaming around the country doesn’t exactly scream “airtight security.” Especially with my budget – I had weighed my money heavily towards being on the road longer with less comfort – there were any number of things that could go wrong. Sure, I had passing images of myself leaning against a broke-down van in the Mojave Desert as buzzards circled overhead, or of ending up bloodied, facedown in the toilet of some sketchy backwoods rest stop, but ultimately, those extreme scenarios didn’t really stick to the wall. What did was solitude.
...
Almost immediately, van life revealed itself as a true pleasure. All around me, American life rolled out, people woke up in the morning, went to work, lived, went to sleep at night, and the whole process reminded me of the natural drama I found in the woods in middle school. Like any kind of living, van life allows you opportunities to pursue the white whale, but the chase is not impersonal as it is in a world of books or full of adversity as it is in the woods - it’s simply pleasurable. In the long hours between stops, time stretches out, your mind relaxes, and your thought rate decreases. I found I had inadvertently traded in the nonsense intellectual flurry that so characterizes modern living for something slower and truer, a thought every fifteen minutes; enough time to take it and hold it in your hands, regard it, understand it. Spend enough time at this pace and the whole world settles into finer focus, your mind and soul fit into a clarity of thought and feeling. I felt no additional loneliness as the days stretched into weeks with little human contact. Instead, what contact I had was cast into a bold relief. A simple interaction, exchanging money with a toll clerk, ordering a plate of wings, whatever, somehow sprang from thoughtless two-dimensionality to meaningful, three-dimensional nuance; it became a room you could walk into and look around. Longer conversations become invariably profound. Avdo, a Bosnian construction worker and a marvel of human decency and innocence, overturned a year of study at Princeton in the course of a conversation.
My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.
My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.
...
All things considered, it’s not entirely surprising that finding real solitude again should produce reconciliation of mind, soul, and purpose. This was first made clear early in my travels to Acadia National Park. I shot up to Maine straight from New Jersey, intending to spend the rest of the fall trickling down through the northeast. I ended up spending most of my time stuck up there at the top of New England, unwilling to leave. Acadia National Park is a strange place in many ways; it’s hard to say what keeps bringing people back there, where the magic lies. There is no single, sweeping vista, no grand canyon or Niagara Falls, the grandeur is never overwhelming. But few places in the country have such a history of human investment; Acadia National Park has in some way been protected land for over a century now, and is currently one of the most popular nature reserves in the country. It is not quite wild; in the 1920s, Rockefeller created a series of walking trails and beautiful bridges throughout the island, and before a great fire in the 40s, it was dotted with magnificent estates of the super-rich. Now it’s less exclusive, and a ring road along the coast of the island permits people from all over to get a quick sense of the landscape, and to dig deeper only if they so desire. My life there was idyllic; I spent about a week and a half driving into the park before dawn every morning, watching the sun rise over the ocean, going for hikes, recording and exercising in the van, swimming in the clean, salty water, watching, listening, soaking it in, and leaving only after the sun went down over Cadillac Mountain. My favorite place to sit and think (or not think) were the rocks above Otter Point; I spent hours at a time there, watching the waves come in and the crows somehow find food amongst the cliffs. Then it was off to Sand Beach to get the blood flowing again. Here, at the only natural sand beach on the rocky coast of Maine, the water sometimes gets up into the fifties in the summer, and while I was there in October, I could sometimes feel ice crystals in the water. I would change into my bathing suit in the van and then take off at a run from the parking lot, down the hill, over the beach, straight into the water, never stopping until I could no longer touch the ground and I was far out in the chilly surf. Then I’d turn right around and do it in reverse, moving hard to keep my blood from freezing. I went religiously, once a day. Sometimes the surf was high and brown, sometimes the water was like polished glass. Sometimes I’d do it alone, other times there’d be bemused tourists gaping. “He must be training for something…” an old lady confided confidently. “How’s the water?” a big man asks in a Southern old-boy drawl as I shoot past, arms pumping, little wet droplets shaking every where. “Very cold,” I reply, not pausing to stop, “very good.”
Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.
Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
more new music
just uploaded another new song. this one really came out of nowhere and came together very fast. it's short and pretty self-explanatory, so I won't talk a lot about it here, but it's called paper vs. plastic. it features a somewhat new style of recording / approach to using noise, and I hope to continue moving in this direction in future pieces. I'm already going back to the last song I wrote before this and trying to fiddle with the noise aspects of it to bring them closer to this sort of sound.
check it out here and lemme know what you think!
check it out here and lemme know what you think!
Monday, December 3, 2007
new music
so, I uploaded a lot of new tracks yesterday, only one of which is actually new. its working title is, creatively, "newsong." let me know if you come up with anything better. it uses a guitar - mandolin - cello trio (which may well become my signature outfit this year) as well as the sounds of surf rolling into thunder hole at acadia national park in maine and of passing traffic coming down off frankonia notch in new hampshire. there are two themes, one of which is in 4/4, the other in 7/8. the 4/4 one is divided into 3/3/2, and the 7/8 is divided into 3/2/2, so rhythmically speaking, much of the song is a power struggle between the threes from the west and the twos from the east. now here's the trick; in the parts where either theme really settles into a rhythm, the noises also settle into their own rhythm, but in a pattern opposite to the instruments. For example, when strings start pounding out that 4/4, the surf undermines its regularity by crashing in 7/8. this way, the texture is always on the move, and the sound never really settles to a rest. not that it particularly wants to; this is the most simply exuberant music I've written in years. It's inspired mainly by the pure joy I find in living in the van, and in moving about. The sung words that appear briefly at the beginning and the end are from the american folk song Shenandoah, a homesick western settler's ode to his homeland. in my excerpt, however, he discusses being "bound away across the wide Missouri," and for me, that's a happy trip. america is vivified again and again by its tradition as a young frontier country, and it has beckoned generation after generation of young people to new frontiers, be they rivers, oceans, prairies or highways. on the frontier one can learn things hard to get anywhere else, but today, frontiers are fast disappearing. to a large degree, one has to seek them out and create them for oneself, and living in a van is a great place to start.
I also loaded a piece for voices called srebrenica. In 1995, the village of srebrenica, a UN-designated "safe area" fell to advancing serb forces. the defending UN troops, who had disarmed the villagers, continued retreating and retreating, afraid to fire the first shot and afraid of contravening international protocol, until they had nothing left to protect. men, women and children were rounded into buses and taken to football stadiums where they were shot, or locked shoulder-to-shoulder in warehouses with a bomb. it became the worst massacre of civilians in europe since world war II, and an enormous challenge not only to international humanitarian policy but to the very ideas of humanitarianism and even humanism. in studying the incident, it quickly becomes difficult to assign blame. from a distance, the inhumanity of general mladic, the ineptitude of the UN, and the demonic power-games of milosevic serve as effective targets. however, after closer study, one is ultimately struck by the manner in which violence and hatred seem like independent actors operating almost on their own physics. it becomes less a case of evil people employing violence than violence and evil employing people. and nobody is safe; even by following all the rules with the best intentions, we find ourselves in the midst of massacre. the text of my piece is the UN security council resolution that reaffirmed srebrenica's status as a safe area in the face of mounting hostilities, passed shortly before its fall. one voice simply reads the document, but other voices join with seemingly random nonsense syllables. however, they actually appear following a strict method. each time the first voice passes to a new clause, another takes the next odd syllable from the new clause and adds it to a regular rhythmic pattern. in other words, the first voice takes the the first syllable of the first clause, then the third syllable of the second clause, then the fifth of the third, and so on. each additional voice has an individual pattern of greater density than the voice before; the first introduces a quarter-note beat in 4/4, the second layers eighth note triplets upon that pattern, the third thickens to regular eighth notes, and the fourth introduces sixteenth note triplets. every time one voice completes its pattern, it simply repeats as a new voices begins its own. by the end, the resulting rhythms and syllables simply create a cacophony that drowns out the recitation of the original document.
the first movement of lost calls also appears here. lost calls is a piece for cello and answering machine that I wrote as part of my senior thesis at princeton. in this first movement, I dissect greetings in answering machine messages and examine their melodic qualities, eventually building a very short tonal trio for two cellos and voices.
finally, I included a short excerpt from my blue mountain suite, another of my senior thesis pieces. the recording is live, so its pretty rough, but its a fun piece. it's sort of a homage to the hills of central pennsylvania and the people with whom I grew up. the piece transverses 24 hours, and each movement follows a time of the day; this excerpt is from the "workday" movement. the pieces uses a lot of references to american folk music, as well as a lot of extended technique and general weird shit.
enjoy!
I also loaded a piece for voices called srebrenica. In 1995, the village of srebrenica, a UN-designated "safe area" fell to advancing serb forces. the defending UN troops, who had disarmed the villagers, continued retreating and retreating, afraid to fire the first shot and afraid of contravening international protocol, until they had nothing left to protect. men, women and children were rounded into buses and taken to football stadiums where they were shot, or locked shoulder-to-shoulder in warehouses with a bomb. it became the worst massacre of civilians in europe since world war II, and an enormous challenge not only to international humanitarian policy but to the very ideas of humanitarianism and even humanism. in studying the incident, it quickly becomes difficult to assign blame. from a distance, the inhumanity of general mladic, the ineptitude of the UN, and the demonic power-games of milosevic serve as effective targets. however, after closer study, one is ultimately struck by the manner in which violence and hatred seem like independent actors operating almost on their own physics. it becomes less a case of evil people employing violence than violence and evil employing people. and nobody is safe; even by following all the rules with the best intentions, we find ourselves in the midst of massacre. the text of my piece is the UN security council resolution that reaffirmed srebrenica's status as a safe area in the face of mounting hostilities, passed shortly before its fall. one voice simply reads the document, but other voices join with seemingly random nonsense syllables. however, they actually appear following a strict method. each time the first voice passes to a new clause, another takes the next odd syllable from the new clause and adds it to a regular rhythmic pattern. in other words, the first voice takes the the first syllable of the first clause, then the third syllable of the second clause, then the fifth of the third, and so on. each additional voice has an individual pattern of greater density than the voice before; the first introduces a quarter-note beat in 4/4, the second layers eighth note triplets upon that pattern, the third thickens to regular eighth notes, and the fourth introduces sixteenth note triplets. every time one voice completes its pattern, it simply repeats as a new voices begins its own. by the end, the resulting rhythms and syllables simply create a cacophony that drowns out the recitation of the original document.
the first movement of lost calls also appears here. lost calls is a piece for cello and answering machine that I wrote as part of my senior thesis at princeton. in this first movement, I dissect greetings in answering machine messages and examine their melodic qualities, eventually building a very short tonal trio for two cellos and voices.
finally, I included a short excerpt from my blue mountain suite, another of my senior thesis pieces. the recording is live, so its pretty rough, but its a fun piece. it's sort of a homage to the hills of central pennsylvania and the people with whom I grew up. the piece transverses 24 hours, and each movement follows a time of the day; this excerpt is from the "workday" movement. the pieces uses a lot of references to american folk music, as well as a lot of extended technique and general weird shit.
enjoy!
Saturday, December 1, 2007
so you can kiss goodbye to any narrative continuity this blog once had...
...and instead, I’ll just paint you a picture of a fast food evening. I’m driving through this cookie cutter town not far from the coast of Maine, packed in tight with its requisite gas stations and laundromats and lobster shacks. I drive down Main Street, a somewhat ragtag affair with October leaves and American flags strewn about the sidewalks. Night has almost fallen, but I can still read the signs. BELLYDANCING CLASS 6PM TUE DOG OBEDIENCE 6PM WED. I’m looking for a decent place to eat. It’s not forthcoming, and I’m tired, so I pull into the strip mall on the north side of town and opt for my old fail-safe. Every once in a while, I like to poison my body with a good, greasy Big Mac for dinner. It’s the most reliable meal I know; I can always count on finding it anywhere, those wide, yellow arches brightly shining my way towards familiarity. Each individual McDonalds will usually have some sort of locally specific knick-knacks hung up on the walls leading to the bathrooms. Here there is a handsome wooden sign slung on the bright yellow wall: “Old Jack’s Eatery,” it reads, “best burgers in Maine since 1912.” The rest of the restaurant, however, is comfortingly bland, universal in its facelessness, in the cheery void it evokes with its red plastic seats and yellow plastic counters, its happy meal figurines waving at you through a translucent plastic display case, the bright red ketchup dispenser with the little white cups stacked neatly nearby, and everywhere, that goddamn clown, grinning. When the robots become self-conscious and take over the world and enslave humanity, they won’t have to implant tubes into our stomachs to keep us fat until they can harvest our souls; they’ll simply keep all the McDonald’s running. Until then, however, the ketchup dispenser is still filled by a pimply red-headed teenager named Carl, and that thought always keeps me hopeful. Or at least keeps me from running out screaming.
Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.
Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.
Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.
Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.
I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.
Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.
Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.
Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.
Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.
Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.
I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.
Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
in and out of noo yawk ceedeh
[this is a section of an originally longer post]
The surf on Long Beach Island is usually placid, but this week was different. I’m not sure if there was a storm off the coast or what, but the waves were enormous. One of my great pleasures in life is swimming in high surf, so I was hooked. I wound up spending almost a full week at Barnegat Light, swimming in the ocean and stealing wireless off the beach houses to update the blog. The first few days were sunny, but towards the end of the week a thick mist rolled in, blanketing the coast with white for the rest of the week. It was the very beginning of the off-season, which is apparently the deadest part of the year. All the restaurants were closed and most of the houses vacated, and I had almost the entire beach to myself. The surf, however, continued at full force throughout the week. It was a tricky sort of surf, smaller waves leading you far out only to be crushed beneath the pulverizing masses of water that crashed beyond the first breakers. Intermittently, the big ones would come in close, tricking event the more cautious swimmer. The day before I left, a woman was led from the water stunned, bleeding from the lip and sporting a big bump on the back of her neck.
Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!
...
Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.
Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.
The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.
...
Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.
Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!
...
Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.
Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.
The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.
...
Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.
Friday, October 26, 2007
running to the sea
My overall thrust was to the east; my sister had arranged for a video to one of my songs, and although my presence was entirely extraneous, I wanted to be there for the shoot in Manhattan. In the meantime, I had a week and a half to kill, so I decided to work my way through the northeast portions of Pennsylvania. This took me first to the coalmining regions where I had begun the project, and then into areas with somewhat more diversified economies, but ultimately similar stories. As I drove east, the monopoly of coal was gradually undermined by the appearance of cement factories and steel mills. Nevertheless, the towns mostly looked the same: desperate little affairs, doggedly clinging to the sides of darkly wooded hills. Many of these communities were dragged down with their crashing industries, and now lie in varying degrees of depressed isolation. A few found creative ways to survive and sometimes even reinvent themselves. The strange little town of Jim Thorpe is probably foremost amongst these.
Originally known as Mauch Chunk, Jim Thorpe was briefly home to the athlete of the same name. Thorpe got his start in Pennsylvania, attending college in Carlisle. He was one of those rare super-athletes who comes along perhaps once a century. The first intimations of his extraordinary talent came when he walked past Carlisle’s high jumpers with a 5’9” impromptu jump in plain clothes. He went on to be a star competitor in pentathlon, decathlon, American football, baseball, and basketball. He was a multi-Olympic medalist, and as a Sac and Fox Native American, he fought his whole life to overcome discrimination that threatened his career and family. Towards the end of his life, he descended into alcoholism and depression, and died more or less penniless. The town of Mauch Chunk, at a loss as to how to overcome the economic difficulties following the fall of the Lehigh Coal Company, struck a deal with his family to rename the town and set up an elaborate monument to him in order to attract tourism – even though he never actually lived in Mauch Chunk. The trick seemed to work; Jim Thorpe is today a bustling mountain community, a surreal contrast to its neighboring communities.
Passing further east, I came to Allentown. This is the old capital of the Pennsylvania steel industry, and while it went into a deep depression following the collapse of American steel, it remains the third biggest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. After immortalizing the city in a song, Billy Joel was awarded the key to the city over the protests of some residents. Driving through, I felt like I was right back in Harrisburg. I bumbled about the town trying to find the access to 495 so I could continue further south and east, and after passing promising but somewhat ramshackle public monuments and plazas, I found myself in the ghetto. The transformation was extraordinary. After traveling for weeks through the countryside of Pennsylvania and New York and seeing almost entirely white people, the population was once again entirely black. I could have convinced myself I had just stumbled into a section of Allison Hill that I had never known existed. There were the same streets with the same houses and the same trash. There was suddenly rap on the radio and on the sidewalk, children playing on the stoop, big fat ladies with hoop earrings and shorts in plastic chairs watching them from the porch, grandfathers in hats tottering over the pedestrian crosswalks with canes, and packs of young men slouching about with game in their lope and a desperate territorialism in their eyes, leaning forward to step ahead and reaching back to pull up their pants. One looked up and pierced his menacing, carefully delinquent gaze through the windshield of my van. Our eyes locked immediately in the age-old contest that grips young men together in rivalry down every generation, igniting the jealous spirit of a mountain ram within blood long-brewed for just this purpose, ripe and ready in the razor thin margin of a single glance to spur even the most pacifistic into locking horns. I made a point of holding his gaze until my van rolled off his block. It felt familiar.
The next intersection, however, led me out of the neighborhood and into a small shopping center. A middle-aged blonde woman sat on the grass beside the parking lot screaming gibberish at the passing traffic. I doubled back to try and surreptitiously record her ranting, but when I made it back around the block, she had calmed down. Immediately after, I saw signs for 495, and was once again launched into the countryside.
I arrived that night in Philadelphia, stayed with my sister and set off the next morning into New Jersey. I wanted to hit the Jersey shore in the off-season, and I had come at the right time. The highways to the coast are satisfyingly flat and uncurving, shooting straight through the heart of the garden state to meet the sea. I was about halfway there when I realized I had left a vital piece of recording equipment at my sister’s, said a very bad word and doubled back, just in time to meet the beginning rush hour into Philadelphia. I didn’t really mind, though; it felt good to be driving. I cranked up “Sweet Child of Mine” on the radio and jostled my way through the close-packed cars, singing loudly and grinning all the way. After picking up the abandoned equipment, I turned around again and retraced my steps, now catching the other end of rush hour. By the time I was back on the straight-shooting Jersey throughway, it was dusk. The length of the highway, scores of cars passed me going the other way, but I was almost alone on the east-bound side. I drove fast and smiled into the cold wind and coming headlights, enjoying my solitary speed on the eastbound track. I drove and drove, the road never seeming to alter or waver, gunning due east as the sun burned down behind me and the night grew ahead. I finally started seeing signs for the coast after dark, and navigated my way onto Long Beach island, a long, narrow lancet of earth jousting out from the mainland into the Atlantic. It was a strip of tiny seaside resort towns, now deserted at the beginning of the off-season. I zipped over their darkened streets, all the way to Barnegat Light, the last town on the island. By this time, the night air was heavy with salt, and lights were restricted to a space only a little wider than the highway, betraying the massive, black expanse of the sea beyond. I pulled onto one of the cross streets and drove a short way until it ended in a rising sand dune. Parking the car at the edge of the asphalt, I jumped out stripped down to my boxers, leaving a trail of clothes on the street. I ran up the dune, my bare feet pounding the sand and the cold wind buffeting my skin. Just a little bit further over the rise, and there it pulled into view, the ocean. Or rather, everything else disappeared, and I knew the ocean had to be there because nothing else was. A beach extended a long way forward to end in an inconceivably huger blackness, an unexplainable bulge of void stretching the length of my vision and the extent of the horizon. It swallowed everything, even the sky, with the lights of the whole nation to my back shrieking shrilly into the night and then dissipating, losing themselves in a truer black than one can see on land, a primordial black punctuated only by bright, hard stars. I was pulled the whole way from Philadelphia by that primal thrust that drives men to the sea, which challenges, draws, confounds and drowns us. It pulls us inexorably in, perhaps with some inborn memory or lightless intimation that this wet black hole is where we came from if we look back far enough, that our furthest fathers dragged their cold bodies from its depths before they had feet to walk or minds to understand their travels. And now, grains in the sands of evolution, we are driven back, again not entirely understanding why but irresistibly pulled by the enormity of millennia, by secrets whispered and roared in wild voices we could surely comprehend if we but listened. And I was completing the last few yards of this journey on foot, running at dead sprint down the long, cool beach, the shadow before me growing and extending until I could hear it, and then feel it meet my legs with a cold splash, and suddenly I was part of a new physics, the world was swirling, indistinct, and cold, and I was at the mercy of a far, alien universe that drew me in and picked me up, sent me under and thrashed me about, churning with a vast invisible power that did not know me and yet inspired everything that was its reflection within me. I felt explosions of strength and ferocity and sadness within me with every crash of cold, buffeting water, and swam out into the void until I could not feel anything beneath my feet but water, and met the extent of the secrets she was willing to share with me. Then I returned to the shore and walked back up the beach, exhausted.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
enso video!
So, in the relatively long interval since my last post, I've bounced up to Maine and taken the opportunity to get some serious recording done; hence the lack of prose appearing recently. Soon, however, my attention will return to the blog, so just sit tight.
In the meantime, check out this sweetness! Mary Anthony, matriarch of New York modern dance, agreed to choreograph a piece to Enso. My sister Katy, filmmaker Chris Scarafile and myself all met her a few weekends ago in her Manhattan studio to film, and this video is an early result of that work. Mary is now 92 years young, still teaching full time, and still as strong and beautiful as ever! It was an extraordinary blessing to work with such an illustrious figure, and I'm very excited about the product. The quality of the web version is necessarily god-awful, but it gives you a sense of things. The real deal will be premiered at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan at 6pm on Tuesday, Nov. 27, so if you're in the area, be sure to drop by; it's a great chance to see a truly great figure in modern art do her thing.
You can see the online version here.
In the meantime, check out this sweetness! Mary Anthony, matriarch of New York modern dance, agreed to choreograph a piece to Enso. My sister Katy, filmmaker Chris Scarafile and myself all met her a few weekends ago in her Manhattan studio to film, and this video is an early result of that work. Mary is now 92 years young, still teaching full time, and still as strong and beautiful as ever! It was an extraordinary blessing to work with such an illustrious figure, and I'm very excited about the product. The quality of the web version is necessarily god-awful, but it gives you a sense of things. The real deal will be premiered at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan at 6pm on Tuesday, Nov. 27, so if you're in the area, be sure to drop by; it's a great chance to see a truly great figure in modern art do her thing.
You can see the online version here.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
late september
Eventually, I found shelter at a 24-hour CostCutters lot and killed the engine, mist still swirling in my eyes long after I closed them.
I was getting used to van life. I took this first shorter trip in large part to make mistakes and learn from them, but I was impressed by how few mistakes I had to deal with. I was spending less money than I had expected, the traveling was almost entirely a joy, and the van itself was performing wonderfully. The only real practical obstacle remained the showering situation, which was a relatively small challenge in the grand scheme of things. I’d evolved (sort of) past my first heroic but basically inane night in the shoebox-bathtub, first acquiring what turned out to be little more than a bigger shoebox, and finally calling it quits and having an old-fashioned, outdoor shower on the side of a less active road in the Adirondacks. It was marvelously liberating after repeated attempts to twist myself into various pretzel shapes to get myself clean and keep the water off the rug at the same time. You can, however, get thrown in jail for liberating yourself from indoor showers, and I resolved to find a more sustainable solution.
This eventually took the form of a colorful inflatable kiddy pool, a mass of purple and pink plastic shaped into a butterfly, complete with goopy grinning face and flopping antennae. So far, the butterfly is the best solution, although I’m still not sure what to do with the damn thing after I’ve showered. While it deflates to store nicely in the shelves when it’s dry, I’m more often left with a large, wet, purple butterfly occupying a large part of the back of my cargo bay. We’ll see.
I'm going to jump ahead a little bit in an effort to get closer to the present. I traced the New York - Canada border, and then came down through Adirondacks to return home to Pennsylvania. There, I was faced with a disappointment: Anthony was not to accompany me. However, I was able to stack up on supplies, and soon headed east towards Lancaster, Ephrata, and the other towns of the Pennsylvania Dutch country.
I arrived in Ephrata in the very late afternoon. Main Street was closed, but people on foot were thronging past the barricades. “What’s going on?” I asked a cop as I slowly drove through the detour. “Town fair,” he replied through thick moustaches, expression masked by those dark shades that seem to be the style of choice for rural police the nation over. “Happens last weekka September every year.” It seemed a good event to check out. I pulled into a public lot manned by a boyscout unit, paid them the demanded three dollars, and set out on foot.
The Ephrata Town Fair was an attractive scene. Hot dog vendors and amusement park games lined the sidewalks, and people filled the space between. Respectable older men in khakis and dress shirts walked arm-in-arm with their short wrinkled wives. High school skateboard punks walked impatiently around them, also navigating the mothers with strollers and overweight couples. Tattered bikers loped about in Lynard Skynard tshirts, and kids begged to play the watergun game or ride on the miniature Ferris wheel at the end of the street. “Try your brawn at our test of strength,” one announcer called, and almost simultaneously, another, “everyone’s a winner! Give it a shot folks, there’s a winner every game.” Townfolk recognized and greeted each other, shaking hands, backslapping. Electronic tweedles celebrated accurate horseshoe throwers, the air was thick with fried food and funnel cakes, and everywhere you looked, people were there, moving up the street on the right and down on the left, the occasional disgruntled child cutting across with a scream.
I decided to try playing for them. I walked up to one receptive looking vendor, a tiny pizza stand with two short, older ladies cutting up the pies and talking up the customers. I walked over to the one who was smiling. “Hi, I’m a classical cellist,” I began, immediately receiving an eyebrow of suspicion. “I was wondering if I could play by your stand. I don’t need anything from you, I just –“ “No!.” she said with a nervous smile. “Oh…. I can’t play?” “No, no!” she said, scuttling back further behind the counter, “we can’t do that!” “Okay, well, thanks for your time.”
I went from vendor to vendor, smiling and getting turned down. Their reactions reminded me of the AAA employee I scared in Pottsville. Suspicion, mistrust, fear. They averted their eyes as soon as they could, saying they didn’t think they were supposed to do that, or that they’d have to ask their supervisor, who wasn’t there. When is you supervisor getting back? I don’t know. Eyes low, scampering away to sell another funnel cake. Meanwhile, “Ding! Congratulations: you win!” and the more well equipped stands played the radio. “Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar” blaring over and over again over the whack-a-mole.
I wasn’t sure what was going on. Who outside of a college theory class is afraid of J.S. Bach? I decided I’d try to do it the right way, and got directions to the fair office. I explained my situation, that I was on a grant from Princeton University, that I was offering to play. The young lady behind the desk was thin, with a huge nose and permed, frizzy blonde hair. She looked receptive, but said she couldn’t help me. A few years back, the fair had trouble with pamphleteers, and now everyone doing anything had to work from an approved stand. “See, cos you could just be out at that corner, but you might be harassing the people across the street from you, see,” she droned out through her nose. “It’s crazy, though, I have the hardest time booking music for this thing.” I offered to play inside the fair office, where there was some sort of showing of prize vegetables. A few people poked about the tables, inspecting cucumbers; cucumber competition enthusiasts, I suppose. She looked at the edge of her computer blankly for a moment. “No, sorry, I can’t let you do that. But are you going to be around on Saturday? I have no idea who to put ahead of the pumpkin eating contest.” I declined, saying I’d be out of town, thanked her, and stepped out into the street again. "Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar.…”
Discouraged, I went back to my car and drove down to a truckstop. Please seat yourself, the sign read, so I did. They had the standard buffet set up, so I shoveled on some lasagna and mashed potatoes, adding some hamburger and veggie soup after picking some crud off the bowl. Take as much as you want, want as much as you take, please don’t waste! read the sign over the buffet. “Hey hun,” a portly waitress asked on my way back to my booth, “what’d you like to drink?” You have any beer? She smiled. “Oh no, we don’t sell that here.” I’ll just have some water, then. “DORIS!” the waitress screamed. “This young man wants a water!” I sat down and realized I was just opposite the TV. The sound was off, so I had to infer what was going on from the images and subtitles. Four well-dressed, multiethnic performers appeared to be singing or reciting quotes from famous Americans in front of a giant screen of waving grain fields. One was talking about the spirit of liberty. THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY IS THAT WHICH SHALL ALWAY STAND FOR FREDOM , the subtitles buzzed by. Another was saying something by Ronald Reagan about what we have to do IF WE ARE TO REMAIN THE LND OF THE FREE. They smiled and performed with a glazed earnestness, passing the microphone off to one another. I couldn’t see the audience except for the people right on the side. They were only one row deep in big chairs, men sitting politely in suits.
By the end of my hamburger soup, the program had changed to shots of Bono in his huge translucent goggles with African women carrying babies. The subtitles were getting worse. I’m not sure how they make those things, but I imagined an overeducated hamster cooped up inside the television, smoking and typing furiously. Every time he made a mistake, the letters paused, backed up, and then made another mistake without stopping. BONE NO SOUNDS ALARM AIDS AND POVERTY IN AFRICA, and then a little musical note.
I paid for the buffet and drove across the street to make camp in the local Walmart parking lot. Just as I pulled in, my iPod shuffled its way to the Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It jumped straight to the reprise of the aria from Gould’s second recording, made at the end of his life when he was quite mad, just before possibly committing suicide, generally celebrated as one of the greatest – and most eccentric – recordings of classical music ever. The performance is painfully slow and heartbreakingly beautiful. You can here him choosing, settling upon each note, moving with profound deliberation, this mad, gentle man, creating a little universe for himself and for you in every shift of tone and rhythm. And despite the best efforts of his recording engineers, you can hear him singing tonelessly, inchoately along, directing his fingers by some inner melody audible to him alone. I shut off the lights and sat in my darkened van listening, aware, as I always am when hearing Gould play Bach, that in my thoughtless digging I had stumbled into a sacred cavern. I had left the FM transmitter go for some time, and there was a popular station threatening to cut in on my frequency, but I didn’t want to stop the musical flow to adjust the channel. The static rumbled evenly, and Gould weaved his vulnerable way through it, singing hopelessly, agelessly, fending off a broadcast to millions just long enough to play me the final cadence.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
first trip north (pt. 4)
[excerpts from a longer post]
I move on, and eventually I’m stuck listening to a program called Evangelizing Today’s Child, featuring a clear-voiced man urging that the best way to win the War on Terror is to convert Islamic fundamentalists to Christianity. Once he wraps up by joining me in prayer, the program cuts to another man trying to sell me a book about how Muslims all over the world are turning to Jesus. “Let us send you this gift today,” he sooths, “it will encourage you, and make you feel safer.” He turns the mic over to a clear-voiced pop singer telling me over synthesizers and drum machines why yes savior, he believes, and I turn the dial. At the next FM station Garth Brooks is sighing, “when you find yourself down on your knees, and you’re praying to God and beggin’ Him please… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory.” In the news, there’s malcontent in Anbar province, where occupying American forces have so far not been able to supply reliable electricity.
I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”
Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.
I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.
As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I'll be gone again before I have a chance to.
On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour nonstop hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp set into a little octagonal roundabout at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.
It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.
Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breath in the clear air, and reach out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers.
He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.
...
The road goes darkly up and down, darkly winding about, climbing steep hills of darkness and then plunging off them again. I stop at the first intersection in miles, a pair of two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch their fluorescent, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of neon green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a greek chorus of crickets hidden deep in the woods. After watching the slow, thoughtless rhythm of the colors for a few cycles, I move again, north by north. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, emerging from the highest point of the road. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again. Then it seems I'm the only rider of this road, the only soul in a hundred miles, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt, a lonely little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, housing a whole nation.
Further on, the fog grows thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, beautiful scenery that I couldn't really see in the brightest sunlight is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.
I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”
Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.
I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.
As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I'll be gone again before I have a chance to.
On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour nonstop hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp set into a little octagonal roundabout at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.
It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.
Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breath in the clear air, and reach out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers.
...
The pier somehow becomes reminiscent of the Mulberry Street Bridge, my circular little space all the way out here on the end a miniature, water-born Allison Hill. This is one beautiful night that I just won’t be able to appreciate.
Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a kid like me.
So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”
Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a kid like me.
So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”
He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.
...
The road goes darkly up and down, darkly winding about, climbing steep hills of darkness and then plunging off them again. I stop at the first intersection in miles, a pair of two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch their fluorescent, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of neon green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a greek chorus of crickets hidden deep in the woods. After watching the slow, thoughtless rhythm of the colors for a few cycles, I move again, north by north. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, emerging from the highest point of the road. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again. Then it seems I'm the only rider of this road, the only soul in a hundred miles, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt, a lonely little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, housing a whole nation.
Further on, the fog grows thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, beautiful scenery that I couldn't really see in the brightest sunlight is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.
first trip north (pt. 4)
I move on, and eventually I’m stuck listening to a program called Evangelizing Today’s Child, with a man explain why the best way to win the War on Terror is to convert Islamic fundamentalists to Christianity. Once he wraps up by joining me in prayer, the program cuts to another man trying to sell me a book about how Muslims all over the world are turning to Jesus. “Let us send you this gift today,” he sooths, “it will encourage you, and make you feel safer.” He turns the mic over to a clear-voiced pop singer telling me over synthesizers and drum machines why yes savior, he believes, and I turn the dial. At the next FM station Garth Brooks is sighing, “when you find yourself down on your knees, and you’re praying to God and beggin’ Him please… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory.” In the news, there’s malcontent in Anbar province, where occupying American forces have so far not been able to supply reliable electricity.
I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”
Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.
I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.
As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I won’t.
On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.
It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.
Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings, recalling the wild joy I could ride like a wave when surrounded by natural beauty in earlier years. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breathing in the clear air, and reaching out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers, and something stirs in me. I could make it to Boston in a night, I think. She’s in Boston for another few days, finishing up her training before she takes the job overseas. I’d driven overnight to see her before, and the way I drive these days, I could make it to Boston in a night, easy. I step back from the edge of the pier, realizing that this is one beautiful night that I just won’t be able to appreciate.
Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a guy like me.
So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”
He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.
I find the whole thing vaguely unsettling. I remember standing in a dim kitchen, my arms steeped in dishes, and then freezing, rooted to the spot, a sponge dripping off a half-cleaned plate in my hand, as Elvis began crooning over the radio. Everything about me disappeared and I was transported to a hotel bar on a Caribbean island, surrounded by cheap furniture and old women with martinis, where we convinced the lobby guitarist, a tired, balding, jaded-looking man, to sing our song as an encore before he left, because we had just arrived, dripping from the ocean, and although he was sick of the gig, he saw us and he did, and we danced close in the middle of the hotel lobby, still wet, and so much in love, and it was a dream. Now I’m driving in the dark, and I’m transported once again, remembering a memory, and wondering disconsolately if I’ll be doing this same thing 42 years from now like the man in the monologue.
If the brushing of knees in a bar as a boy can be the transportive memory for an old man in Lake Wobegon, what’s left for us, we who traveled the world, who saved it, who ruled it, who for a while rose to the challenge of a love stronger than we thought possible? How can we ever escape memories like that?
The road goes up and down, winding about, climbing steep, invisible hills and then plunging down again. I’m one of the only ones on the road, a little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, over the hill. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again.
I stop at the first intersection in miles, two two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch its colorful, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of fluorescent green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a chorus of invisible crickets.
I continue north, and the fog becomes thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, conventionally beautiful scenery that I can’t really appreciate is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.
I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”
Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.
I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.
As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I won’t.
On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.
It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.
Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings, recalling the wild joy I could ride like a wave when surrounded by natural beauty in earlier years. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breathing in the clear air, and reaching out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers, and something stirs in me. I could make it to Boston in a night, I think. She’s in Boston for another few days, finishing up her training before she takes the job overseas. I’d driven overnight to see her before, and the way I drive these days, I could make it to Boston in a night, easy. I step back from the edge of the pier, realizing that this is one beautiful night that I just won’t be able to appreciate.
Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a guy like me.
So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”
He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.
I find the whole thing vaguely unsettling. I remember standing in a dim kitchen, my arms steeped in dishes, and then freezing, rooted to the spot, a sponge dripping off a half-cleaned plate in my hand, as Elvis began crooning over the radio. Everything about me disappeared and I was transported to a hotel bar on a Caribbean island, surrounded by cheap furniture and old women with martinis, where we convinced the lobby guitarist, a tired, balding, jaded-looking man, to sing our song as an encore before he left, because we had just arrived, dripping from the ocean, and although he was sick of the gig, he saw us and he did, and we danced close in the middle of the hotel lobby, still wet, and so much in love, and it was a dream. Now I’m driving in the dark, and I’m transported once again, remembering a memory, and wondering disconsolately if I’ll be doing this same thing 42 years from now like the man in the monologue.
If the brushing of knees in a bar as a boy can be the transportive memory for an old man in Lake Wobegon, what’s left for us, we who traveled the world, who saved it, who ruled it, who for a while rose to the challenge of a love stronger than we thought possible? How can we ever escape memories like that?
The road goes up and down, winding about, climbing steep, invisible hills and then plunging down again. I’m one of the only ones on the road, a little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, over the hill. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again.
I stop at the first intersection in miles, two two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch its colorful, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of fluorescent green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a chorus of invisible crickets.
I continue north, and the fog becomes thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, conventionally beautiful scenery that I can’t really appreciate is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.
Monday, October 1, 2007
first trip north (pt. 3)
The radio stations diminish steadily as I drive North of Pottsville. The buzz drifts on as I try to zero in on the remaining channels. The Righteous Brothers sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Some country singer wails about how he wanted to ramble and roam, but she wanted a family and home, building to a chorus of “Angeline, baby, I’m sorry / my future’s in the past / I broke your heart in a million pieces… but Angelina baby, my whole world was you.” NPR is doing a special on the army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, a group of trained skiers and rock climbers that worked in altitudes of up to 13,500 feet and in temperatures as low as -20ºF. They were instrumental in the battle for Appenine Mountains in Italy, where they took Riva Ridge, a heavily armed Nazi installation amongst sheer cliffs thought entirely impenetrable. I catch the news at two o’clock. OJ Simpson, cleared of double homicide charges in the 90s, is back in court for assaulting and robbing a sports collector and making off with his own memorabilia. The news turns local, where justice is also afoot. The Naked Thief of Carbondale has been caught after sticking up a convenience store wearing only a hat. They asked him why he did it; “because,” he replied, “I was bored.”
I hadn’t been planning to stop by Centralia on this trip, but my path leads me right through next-door Ashland, and so it seems silly not to go. The most devious feature of anthracite coal is not that it is difficult to light but that once lit, it is almost impossible to put out. Centralia is the greatest testament both to this rather obscure scientific fact and to the disastrous effect it can have on a community. This place was another small, bustling coal town in the earlier part of the last century, but now it is hardly there at all. At some point a vein of coal was lit inadvertently lit, probably by a garbage fire. While the trash part of the fire was quickly doused, the coal part spread stealthily underground, invisibly following tunnels of anthracite deep below the surface. The people above were largely unaware what was happening, even as the ground grew hot in places and thick smoke began pluming from the woods on the outskirts of town. For some time, residents tried pumping dubious chemical concoctions into the abandoned mines, and then new combinations some years later when the old ones failed to stop the smoke. No record was kept of the materials used, and there was no practical way to flush old additives out, so the effort amounted to a regular meal of volatile chemical combinations for the fire.
In 1981, the first accident happened. A child playing in the backyard of a Centralia home shrieked, and his parents ran out to investigate. The ground had opened up beneath him, and he was clutching grass, his feet swaying in a dizzy vacuum at the top of a hole some eighty feet deep, plunging into darkness and ending in burning coal. By this point the fire had already crept under route 61, melting and warping the asphalt. The highway was blocked off, a detour constructed. Around the same time, the owner of a gas station situated in the middle of town measured the temperature of his underground tanks at 172ºF, and the earth thirteen feet under them at over 1,000ºF. The U.S. Bureau of Mines came in to investigate, and suggested a variety of possible solutions. Their most realistic remedy was digging an enormous trench through the town to block off the lit coal lines, but the estimated cost was wildly above what anyone in this busy but humble town could imagine spending. Meanwhile, smoke had begun to rise all over town and cave-ins were becoming an ever-greater danger. People were complaining of nausea and dizziness, probably on account of the tremendously high level of carbon dioxide in the homes and streets, but who knows what other health threats are caused by a massive underground chemical-fed coal fire. It soon became clear that evacuation was the only feasible option.
The federal government provided $42 million to get everyone out. Families left and bulldozers followed. Mindful of the danger rubble could cause in an area where the ground was liable to cave under the weight of a child, the government meticulously cleared all the big detritus left from the leveled homes. The result was a strange, sad place that goes way beyond any ordinary conception of a “ghost town.” In most conventional ghost towns, where, say, miners flocked upon the report of gold and then promptly left once they found none, there are ruins, abandoned buildings, and the like. In Centralia, there is nothing. Or rather, there is a surreally complete infrastructure with nothing to serve. Most of the town consists of suburban grids with no houses on them, a familiar element torn unsettlingly from its context, like seeing only the headlights and fenders of a car driving silently down a dark highway. These are not streets with no names; there are signposts on roads where nobody lives, and stop signs at intersections where nobody drives. Only the ghostly footprints of what was once a town remains. Here a collection of asphalt steps leading up to a front porch that no longer exists; here a driveway leading neatly into an empty lot; here, cruelly, a fire hydrant. Some of the remnants are simply bizarre. In one scraggily, overgrown patch of conspicuously open grass, a refrigerator sits on its side. Everywhere, smoke rises.
Of course, the government couldn’t force people out who wanted to stay, and some did. These are stubborn people, remember, some of them descendents of Irish sharecroppers who would wage rural peasant wars to protect their plots. Centralia’s continuing habitation is the weirdest – and the scariest – thing about the whole affair. Punctuating the eerily vacant landscape are four or five inhabited residences. They are almost all in different parts of town, mostly narrow wooden townhouses, the sort meant to be stacked in tight with identical structures to line a street, only here they are alone, standing vertical, narrow and awkward. In the driveways, neatly parked cars compliment the actual presence of a house, and seem to willfully ignore the scores of identical but pointless driveways surrounding. The houses are painted brightly but shuttered. In one intersection, a gaily-painted wreath hangs on a tree, reading “WE LOVE OUR HOME.” These are the people who keep their town on my Pennsylvania road map, who keep the post office open and demand the construction of a bright, spanking-new fire station on main street (the only two buildings on main street). I have been to Centralia many times now, however, and I have never seen one of them. I suppose if I were that committed to my hometown, I would shutter myself in and avoid poking, curiosity-seeking intruders, too. I’m not sure whether to admire or fear them. I’m not really sure what decades of carbon-dioxide inhalation does to a person, or decades or living in an abandoned town, or, for that matter, what sort of person willfully demands to stay in that sort of environment after all their neighbors have left. They may be heroes, or horrifically mutated monsters, or, for all I know, dead on the cellar floor. How long would it take somebody to find out?
Early on, Centralia became a bizarre kind of port-of-call for Arthur, Edmund, and I. We first learned of it in a book of Edmund’s called Weird Pennsylvania!, and resolved to make a visit. This was back in our senior year of high school, after applying to college and in the heat of that tense, breathless time when the letters are coming in and it feels like your whole life is being decided by the contents of your mailbox. Arthur, I think, learned of his acceptance to Georgetown the morning we left. Anyway, we went, and had lunch in a diner in Ashland where we were amazed that you could still get vanilla coke made with real vanilla syrup, and drove into the smoking town. You can walk anywhere in Centralia; the only barriers are big signs on all the main entrances to the town reading something like “DANGER. Toxic fumes and ground prone to sudden collapse. Entering this area may result in serious injury or death.” Strong stuff, but that’s all. We took pictures under them and tromped around, smelling the sulphuric fumes and weirder smells, hoping one of us wouldn’t suddenly turn a color usually seen only in oil spills and drop dead. We went out on the abandoned high way, crawled over the big cracks, traced the warped median line over strange hills and valleys of asphalt. It felt like walking on the set of some post-apocalyptic film, except it was real, and it was a contained sort of apocalypse, relegated only to the bounds of a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In places, the highway was streaked with a graffiti – pictures of skulls, swastikas. “kill all niggers.” “WELCOME TO HELL.” We pulled our coats tighter against a cold wind that tore at the ashen sky and hurled the smoke about. It was the perfect day to visit Centralia. We returned later, together on fall break, with college friends in the winter. In some truly strange way, the town became some sort of symbol or beacon of our friendship.
Returning this time in the van, the weather is incongruently sunny. I decide to pass-up the $8.50 Ashland coalmine ride, instead resolving to have lunch in the town of fumes. I pull in to the familiarly empty streets, but the do-not-go-here-or-die sign is gone. Its posts remain, however; I assume it has been stolen, and wonder how many times it’s stolen each year. I drive on top of a hill and look around. No smoke today it seems, but I feel confident there’s still something burning beneath my tires. One mine fire authority was quoted in an issue of Newsweek as saying that if the rate of burning held steady, Centralia would roast for a thousand years. I open the side door to the van and sit in the threshold, eating tuna fish and watching two enormous dump trucks haul slate-gray gravel up a faraway mountain. They look tiny across the valley where Centralia lays down its empty grids, and the growl of their engines and the muted boom of their falling loads echoes listlessly between the hills, quieter than the soft rush of breeze and grasshoppers. They rise up, dump the stuff, and then glide back down, trailing a cloud of dust ten times bigger than themselves. Here in Centralia, the coal is burning, but across the way, they’re still digging for more. I pull out, eager to move on while there’s still light. The trucks, still revolving in their quiet, remote clockwork, are beautiful.
I hadn’t been planning to stop by Centralia on this trip, but my path leads me right through next-door Ashland, and so it seems silly not to go. The most devious feature of anthracite coal is not that it is difficult to light but that once lit, it is almost impossible to put out. Centralia is the greatest testament both to this rather obscure scientific fact and to the disastrous effect it can have on a community. This place was another small, bustling coal town in the earlier part of the last century, but now it is hardly there at all. At some point a vein of coal was lit inadvertently lit, probably by a garbage fire. While the trash part of the fire was quickly doused, the coal part spread stealthily underground, invisibly following tunnels of anthracite deep below the surface. The people above were largely unaware what was happening, even as the ground grew hot in places and thick smoke began pluming from the woods on the outskirts of town. For some time, residents tried pumping dubious chemical concoctions into the abandoned mines, and then new combinations some years later when the old ones failed to stop the smoke. No record was kept of the materials used, and there was no practical way to flush old additives out, so the effort amounted to a regular meal of volatile chemical combinations for the fire.
In 1981, the first accident happened. A child playing in the backyard of a Centralia home shrieked, and his parents ran out to investigate. The ground had opened up beneath him, and he was clutching grass, his feet swaying in a dizzy vacuum at the top of a hole some eighty feet deep, plunging into darkness and ending in burning coal. By this point the fire had already crept under route 61, melting and warping the asphalt. The highway was blocked off, a detour constructed. Around the same time, the owner of a gas station situated in the middle of town measured the temperature of his underground tanks at 172ºF, and the earth thirteen feet under them at over 1,000ºF. The U.S. Bureau of Mines came in to investigate, and suggested a variety of possible solutions. Their most realistic remedy was digging an enormous trench through the town to block off the lit coal lines, but the estimated cost was wildly above what anyone in this busy but humble town could imagine spending. Meanwhile, smoke had begun to rise all over town and cave-ins were becoming an ever-greater danger. People were complaining of nausea and dizziness, probably on account of the tremendously high level of carbon dioxide in the homes and streets, but who knows what other health threats are caused by a massive underground chemical-fed coal fire. It soon became clear that evacuation was the only feasible option.
The federal government provided $42 million to get everyone out. Families left and bulldozers followed. Mindful of the danger rubble could cause in an area where the ground was liable to cave under the weight of a child, the government meticulously cleared all the big detritus left from the leveled homes. The result was a strange, sad place that goes way beyond any ordinary conception of a “ghost town.” In most conventional ghost towns, where, say, miners flocked upon the report of gold and then promptly left once they found none, there are ruins, abandoned buildings, and the like. In Centralia, there is nothing. Or rather, there is a surreally complete infrastructure with nothing to serve. Most of the town consists of suburban grids with no houses on them, a familiar element torn unsettlingly from its context, like seeing only the headlights and fenders of a car driving silently down a dark highway. These are not streets with no names; there are signposts on roads where nobody lives, and stop signs at intersections where nobody drives. Only the ghostly footprints of what was once a town remains. Here a collection of asphalt steps leading up to a front porch that no longer exists; here a driveway leading neatly into an empty lot; here, cruelly, a fire hydrant. Some of the remnants are simply bizarre. In one scraggily, overgrown patch of conspicuously open grass, a refrigerator sits on its side. Everywhere, smoke rises.
Of course, the government couldn’t force people out who wanted to stay, and some did. These are stubborn people, remember, some of them descendents of Irish sharecroppers who would wage rural peasant wars to protect their plots. Centralia’s continuing habitation is the weirdest – and the scariest – thing about the whole affair. Punctuating the eerily vacant landscape are four or five inhabited residences. They are almost all in different parts of town, mostly narrow wooden townhouses, the sort meant to be stacked in tight with identical structures to line a street, only here they are alone, standing vertical, narrow and awkward. In the driveways, neatly parked cars compliment the actual presence of a house, and seem to willfully ignore the scores of identical but pointless driveways surrounding. The houses are painted brightly but shuttered. In one intersection, a gaily-painted wreath hangs on a tree, reading “WE LOVE OUR HOME.” These are the people who keep their town on my Pennsylvania road map, who keep the post office open and demand the construction of a bright, spanking-new fire station on main street (the only two buildings on main street). I have been to Centralia many times now, however, and I have never seen one of them. I suppose if I were that committed to my hometown, I would shutter myself in and avoid poking, curiosity-seeking intruders, too. I’m not sure whether to admire or fear them. I’m not really sure what decades of carbon-dioxide inhalation does to a person, or decades or living in an abandoned town, or, for that matter, what sort of person willfully demands to stay in that sort of environment after all their neighbors have left. They may be heroes, or horrifically mutated monsters, or, for all I know, dead on the cellar floor. How long would it take somebody to find out?
Early on, Centralia became a bizarre kind of port-of-call for Arthur, Edmund, and I. We first learned of it in a book of Edmund’s called Weird Pennsylvania!, and resolved to make a visit. This was back in our senior year of high school, after applying to college and in the heat of that tense, breathless time when the letters are coming in and it feels like your whole life is being decided by the contents of your mailbox. Arthur, I think, learned of his acceptance to Georgetown the morning we left. Anyway, we went, and had lunch in a diner in Ashland where we were amazed that you could still get vanilla coke made with real vanilla syrup, and drove into the smoking town. You can walk anywhere in Centralia; the only barriers are big signs on all the main entrances to the town reading something like “DANGER. Toxic fumes and ground prone to sudden collapse. Entering this area may result in serious injury or death.” Strong stuff, but that’s all. We took pictures under them and tromped around, smelling the sulphuric fumes and weirder smells, hoping one of us wouldn’t suddenly turn a color usually seen only in oil spills and drop dead. We went out on the abandoned high way, crawled over the big cracks, traced the warped median line over strange hills and valleys of asphalt. It felt like walking on the set of some post-apocalyptic film, except it was real, and it was a contained sort of apocalypse, relegated only to the bounds of a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In places, the highway was streaked with a graffiti – pictures of skulls, swastikas. “kill all niggers.” “WELCOME TO HELL.” We pulled our coats tighter against a cold wind that tore at the ashen sky and hurled the smoke about. It was the perfect day to visit Centralia. We returned later, together on fall break, with college friends in the winter. In some truly strange way, the town became some sort of symbol or beacon of our friendship.
Returning this time in the van, the weather is incongruently sunny. I decide to pass-up the $8.50 Ashland coalmine ride, instead resolving to have lunch in the town of fumes. I pull in to the familiarly empty streets, but the do-not-go-here-or-die sign is gone. Its posts remain, however; I assume it has been stolen, and wonder how many times it’s stolen each year. I drive on top of a hill and look around. No smoke today it seems, but I feel confident there’s still something burning beneath my tires. One mine fire authority was quoted in an issue of Newsweek as saying that if the rate of burning held steady, Centralia would roast for a thousand years. I open the side door to the van and sit in the threshold, eating tuna fish and watching two enormous dump trucks haul slate-gray gravel up a faraway mountain. They look tiny across the valley where Centralia lays down its empty grids, and the growl of their engines and the muted boom of their falling loads echoes listlessly between the hills, quieter than the soft rush of breeze and grasshoppers. They rise up, dump the stuff, and then glide back down, trailing a cloud of dust ten times bigger than themselves. Here in Centralia, the coal is burning, but across the way, they’re still digging for more. I pull out, eager to move on while there’s still light. The trucks, still revolving in their quiet, remote clockwork, are beautiful.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
first trip north (pt. 1)
Bidding farewell to Avdo and Steve and Will, to my parents and the turtles and the acorns, I started north. What a true joy to be on the road at last! I planned to go as far up as I wanted, and then loop back down and return to Hershey in about a week. There, I would resupply, install any gear I had overlooked, and pick up my first copilot! Anthony Cheng is my oldest friend. He was trying to figure out what to do with a free year between college and medical school, and agreed to come with me for the first few months. I welcomed his company, but wanted to first get the hang of things on my own.
I headed up 81 in beautiful sunlight, but soon ran into traffic in the mountains. I resolved to get off at the next exit before things got really hairy, and so found myself in the tiny town of Ravine. It’s just that; one street wedged by a creek in between high hills, its most distinguishing feature being a lot of school buses. I pulled off at a gas station to orient myself, and found a card my family had stowed away in the van. “They died so we might live,” the cover read, with a picture of chicken wings. Inside: “let us dance to their memory,” and the chicken dance came tinnily bouncing from a little battery-powered gizmo. We hope you find these EVERYWHERE! The inscription read. I have the best family in the world.
I continued on, driving deep into the coalmining region of Pennsylvania. This is a beautiful, grim place, strange and half-forgotten, filled with hard people and the husks of towns. It was victim to an inhumane industry that oppressed its workers and scored the land with strip mines and coal fires. Though it sat on one of the richest coal deposits in the world, northern Pennsylvania did not give of its treasures easily. The stuff was discovered 1790 by a hunter named Necho Allen. According to legend, Allen was woken from his slumber at the base of Broad Mountain – on the south end of present-day Pottsville – by a raging conflagration. He had inadvertently ignited an outcropping of coal with his campfire. This is a good story, but it’s probably not true; it would have been almost impossible for Allen to set fire to Pennsylvania’s most stubbornly adverse resource with a mere campfire. His contemporaries immediately realized that the land offered coal almost beyond imagination, but it was anthracite coal, hard, unforgiving stuff, difficult to light and immune to conventional mining tactics. They didn’t figure out how to access it until 1828, when an ingenious Scottish immigrant named James Neilson replaced cold air in the furnace with directly bellows-injecting heated, and at last found success. The process became known as blasting, and ravenous for the riches that had teased them for decades, the men took into the land with a vengeance, using scorched-earth tactics and producing some 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world combined.
Rural Pennsylvania enjoyed a colossal heyday for about a half a century, aided by the extraordinary additional discovery of oil in the region. The slash-and-burn approach of the big companies brought unimaginable wealth to a few entrepreneurs but wrecked the land and the poor immigrants who worked it. They paid their miners by the ton, which both upped production and encouraged a deadly rabid zeal as hundreds of hungry, dirt-poor men hacked at the coal veins with hammers and pickaxes without regard to safety or sustainability. Bill Bryson notes that “mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The miners saw little of the wealth that flowed from their work, and the 22,0000 who worked in Schuylkill County alone might have called the period something other than a “heyday.” Their words, however, would probably not be in English; they were mostly fresh immigrants, lured to America by promises of work and fortune. Their lack of familiarity with the local language and culture made them thoroughly exploitable, and exploited they were. They were herded onto freight trains and shoveled into dangerous mines where they struggled to learn the ropes of deadly job on-site. Differences in language often separated the workers from each other, and almost always made the English safety signs inscrutable. Deaths and serious injuries were measured by the hundreds each year. 5,500 of the workers were children between seven and sixteen years old. They worked the simplest jobs, mostly separating slate from coal. Although they might have been two young to see it, this grinding task gave them a good sense of their future: the task was shared by the “breakers,” the broken and the injured, whitebeards too old to work the trickier jobs, finishing their careers as they’d begun them as children. The mines themselves were dark, dank, claustrophobic affairs. Imagine yourself wedged into a dank rock tunnel barely as wide as your own body, surrounded by black mud and trickling water, blanketed by underground shadow far darker than any equivalent on the surface and pierced only by the dim light of your gas lamp, breathing coal dust and powder smoke, incapable of understanding the words of anyone around you, and separated from your family and world by tons of black, caving rock. It was not an easy life.
But these were tough, tough folk. Many of them were Irish, hated in America and hailing from a long, crushing history of small-scale potato farming. They had worked their plots for centuries, starving through the winters and fighting each other when land became scarce. They were accustomed to backbreaking labor and developed a wiry, barbed resilience. When pushed, they would destroy fences, plow cropland by night, kill livestock, and even kill people who oppressed them. To defend their interests, they formed secret societies like the Whiteboys and the Peep O’Day Boys, which were armed and quick to dispense retributive justice “to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes.” In the words of sociologist Kevin Kenny, they believed they were following “a just law of their own in opposition to the inequities of landlord law, the police and court system, and the transgressions of land-grabbers.”
This sort of thorny hardiness permitted them to survive Pennsylvania’s coalmines, but it’s unclear to what degree their militancy accompanied them over the Atlantic. The very rumor of secret societies, especially the notorious Molly Maguires, was sufficient to provoke harsh retribution from industrial overlords. To be sure, violence and crime among the mineworkers was common, but whether or not this unrest was organized in part by a secret society is still a fundamentally debated question. James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, writing sympathetically to the justice leveled against the Mollies, nevertheless admit, “the difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Molly Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization.” Regardless, the primary historical function of the secret society – whether it existed or not – was undoubtedly to provide an excuse for the coal industry to persecute its own workers, and especially to discourage the budding union that increasingly provided them with real organization.
The union became popular as workers sought outlets for their unrest. A string of mining disasters – including an 1869 fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County that took the lives of 110 men – underlined the need for workers to organize in self-protection. The Avondale project resembled coalmines across the region: the company had refused to supply ventilation or pumping systems, sound scaffolding, or emergency exits. In fact, the mine was only a single, glorified tunnel with no secondary entrance, so when flames blocked the way to surface, the workers were trapped, impounded to a dark, fiery death. As charred bodies were dragged from the pit over the next few days, thousands of miners arrived in solidarity from surrounding communities. At some point, John Siney, the head of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, climbed onto a wagon and spoke to the crowd: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.” He urged his fellows to join the union, and thousands immediately did.
The smoldering malcontent was brought to a boil by the depression of the 1870s, when one-fifth of the nation’s workers lost their jobs to reckless speculation and stock watering. It was in this desperate climate that the union became most popular, swelling to 85 percent of Pennsylvania’s total anthracite miners. If they existed, this was also presumably when the Molly Maguires, who had already supposedly supplied fifty “inexplicable murders” between 1863 and 1867, struck out most fiercely against their oppressors. After coal operators announced a twenty percent pay cut in 1974, the union decided to strike, and on January 1, 1875, thousands of workers laid down their picks. Corporate leaders, unaccustomed to insolence and determined to crush resistance, quickly struck back. Franklin B. Gowen, president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Reading Coal and Iron Company – called “the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world” – hired Alan Pinkerton to address the problem.
Pinkerton’s detective agency was famed across the land. Their name had became commonplace after successfully foiling an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, and they were also employed to track western outlaws including Jesse James, the Reno brothers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Most of their expertise and livelihood, however, was in union breaking, where they often employing violence to crush the will of striking workers. A popular song in 1892 wailed, “hear the poor orphans tell their sad story / Father was killed by a Pinkerton man.” Although the coalminer’s union was adamantly opposed to violence, a continuing stream of killings attributed to the Mollies permitted the Pinkertons and even more shadowy groups thugs to intimidate miners more or less indiscriminately. A gang of armed vigilantes named the Modocs joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in ambushing and killing militant miners. The slash-and-burn tactics of the corporate response led to some detractors within the anti-Molly forces. James McParlan, the Pinkerton agent originally hired to infiltrate the Mollies, resigned after he realized that masked men were committing the “murder of women and children.” Nevertheless, the backlash continued, union leaders were imprisoned, and after six months, the strike collapsed and miners returned to work, accepting the pay cut.
Some especially ornery elements continued to resist, providing the coal companies with an opportunity to make further example. After a sensational trial, six “Mollies” were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four more at Mauch Chunk in Carbon County. A Carbon County judge later described the episode in the following terms:
“The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.”
An industrial spokesman at the time painted a different picture:
“Peace once more reigns in the anthracite coal regions. Mollie Maguireism is practically dead. The inhabitants of the anthracite coal regions are now enjoying the blessed peace which has recently come to them. God rules, justice must reign, and right must triumph.”
The union, as is often case, lost in attaining its goals in the short term and won in the long-term, sort of. Reforms were eventually introduced, but mining continued to be a dark, dangerous affair, left to men who could find work nowhere else. More generally, miners and the wider coalmining region were pretty much always losers. By the 1950s, the industry was in steep decline, and the Knox Mine Disaster of 1959 – where 10 billion gallons of water flooded a riverside dig, killing 12 people – essentially ended deep mining in Pennsylvania. The area suffered heavily from the decline of the industry, with “patch towns,” small communities of 500 people or less tied to a specific mine, left high and dry. Some opened mining museums like the Pioneer Tunnel and Steel Train in Ashland and others survived under the protection of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Most were less lucky, reduced to ghost towns or forced to suffer extreme rural poverty. Driving through them is a depressing affair. From the highway, miles of low, gray green mountains thickly filled with dense forests suddenly give way to ravaged holes or burnt-out timbers overgrown with scrappy, tan undergrowth, the quiet, ravaged testimony of strip mines and coal fires. The names of the towns make their history and purpose clear – Minersville, Carbondale, Slatedale, Ashland. Some of them hunker down, waving flags and crouching courageously on the black soil. Others are simply stacks of loosely shingled shacks crowding each other in little hamlets huddled between the oppressive hills. It’s hard for people to get out of these towns. Many young men join the army to escape, others take over small businesses from their fathers, but the region as a whole wallows in the hopelessness of its economic situation. Harvey’s Diner still serves vanilla coke with real vanilla syrup. The water in its bathroom is scalding. Here a ravaged old man stands vacantly, watering his driveway. He raises his thin, grizzled face to identify my roaring van with an unfocused gaze of hard-learned, tired terror. Our eyes meet, and I briefly feel myself gazing into an endless, icy, hole. Coalmining country.
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