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.

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.

...

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….”

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.