composed of video I took both on the way into New York City on NJTransit and from Penn Station to Coney Island. again, quality is fucked from the web transfer, but you should get the idea. enjoy!
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2008
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.
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.
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