Homecoming

I did the last steps of my road trip’s last leg in a sprint, making it from Colorado to Seattle in two long driving days.  There seemed no point to linger: the route lay entirely on Interstates, ones I’d driven before, and anyway the calendar had rolled over to December, my rented apartment was open, and my head was already full of the many tasks awaiting me at home.  My trip was over.  I spent one last night at a motel in Boise, a city I barely saw, arriving at night and departing at dawn, and my blur of highway memories combine the tawny hills of Eastern Oregon with the sense of a sore butt, of switching on the cruise control to stretch my aching accelerator leg, of fizzy Christian rock stations competing with the buzz of the overworked motor. 

The Pacific Northwest greeted me with rain, appropriately enough: the first downpour I’d driven through in six months.  The Columbia River Gorge met Portland in a blue twilight smear of wet road, sky, taillights, and upward glimpses of smoke-swaddled pine mountains.  As a premature night fell I had good news, however: peeking in on the town of Chehalis on I-5 I did a driveby of the (very cheap and possibly shady) auto storage yard where I’d left my other car for six months: there it was behind the fence, perfectly undisturbed!  Breathing easier on that front I splashed the last few miles up the highway, navigated inexplicably ridiculous Saturday traffic through Tacoma (oh wait, it’s always like that), entered Seattle in a five-lane 75-mph nighttime derby of cars changing lanes for no reason (oh wait, they’re always like that), found my exit, found my street, and pulled into my condo parkinglot some six months and three days after I’d left. 

And patted my ticking Pepin on the doorjamb.  We didn’t get to Tierra del Fuego, but my little yellow MX-5 Miata Sport made it to Oaxaca and back, a little banged up in the rear and with a new clutch up front, having managed to miss two earthquakes and three hurricanes, still running as smoothly as the day it left.  Now that’s a good car!

I then had another piece of good news when I let myself into my apartment: my tenants (and their cats) had left the place spotless and without a single scratch to my furniture.  And it was the oddest feeling in the world to go to sleep in my own bed.

My road trip is over.  When all is said and done I have no idea what it amounted to.  It wasn’t the trip I imagined, but that’s undoubtedly for the best, and just as undoubtedly it served its greater purpose of providing a needed break, a needed adventure, in my life.  In its first half it opened my eyes to a part of the world I’d never seen, and I’ll always remember the extraordinary sights, the deep cultural presence, and the warm-hearted people in the great, varied, troubled land of Mexico.  In its second half I reconnected with family and friends from whom I’ve lived too far apart, and renewed connections that I hope will stay strong for the rest of my life.

Yes, it was lonely, and I’m not sure I would recommend a long solo road trip as a means of travelling.  But the virtue of travelling alone is that you’re free to make mistakes, and by the same token you’re free to turn down unexpected paths of your choice and make incredible discoveries, from the tacky black light sculptures of Moqui Cave to the mountaintop Aztec temple of Tepozteco to the Corned Bison Reuben at the Living Farm restaurant in Paonia, Colorado. 

I confess that I wanted to return from this trip carrying more of a change in my life.  I had visions of parlaying the road trip into some sort of a new career in travel writing, or photography, or something else undefined.  I never crossed that barrier to publicity and a “travel career” -- but along the way I began to suspect that I wouldn’t want it.  Instead I carried the bizarre inward accompaniment of a novel in progress, something that mixes with a road trip like oil with water; I found myself, however, bending the trip to accommodate it, and the part of the trip most geared to my future may turn out to be the week I devoted to it at the Algonkian workshop in September. 

Meanwhile, I return with a small bevy of travel photographs, and a small blog’s worth of vaguely travel-oriented writing, and now that I have a chance to seive through it all, who knows? 

I might make something of it all yet.

Colorado: One Last Visit, One Last Canyon

My long detour into Colorado was for the sake of a spending a day with a very good friend whom I hadn’t seen in way too long: Hillery McCalister, who lives with her husband Bruce (and parrot Wallace) in the normally inaccessible-to-Miatas-in-December mountain town of Leadville.  Not only did Pepin and I luck out with weather (there was nary a flake of snow on the USA East of the Cascades, and I actually drove through Nebraska on a 75° day with the top down), but Hillery and Bruce weren’t even in Leadville, having relocated for the winter to the slightly lower-altitude town of Hotchkiss. 

The latter village is still in the Rockies, and a quick shout-out to the road that gets you there: Colorado Route 92, a swooping two-lane roller coaster through deserted chasmic canyonland and a Miata delight.  Without betraying my speedometer’s secrets I admit to taking corners with abandon, to enjoying the echo of my climbing accelerations off the mountain walls, and of course to driving with the top down on a 40° December day.  I brushed cold tears from my cheeks as I flashed through slanted stands of mountain birch under a white chromium sun.

I didn’t get any photos, as that road required both hands on the wheel and preferred momentum over viewpoint turnouts, but I took plenty the next day when Hillery and Bruce took me to their local attraction: the amazing Black Canyon.

Before we got there, however, and during, and afterwards, I had a wonderful renunion with the two of them.  They were superb hosts, treating me to meals and offering me a cozy guest room in their house that’s still partly under renovation, and we filled every spare minute with talk, catching up on each others’ lives. 

Hillery and Bruce's house

Their experience oddly mirrored my 6-month road-trip one: after a death in the family and the sudden closing of their long-standing antique business, they’ve come to their half-finished Hotchkiss house for 6 months in a sort of free fall to figure out their lives.  They were oddly sympathetic to my mad plan of trying to drive a Miata to Tierra del Fuego following my layoff.

Hillery with Bruce and with me

Oh, you noticed the background.  Yes, that's Black Canyon.

Black Canyon is a National Park, but after seeing it I wondered why it isn’t better known.  Of all the canyons I’ve enjoyed on this trip it’s the most dramatic, if not the deepest certainly the steepest, carved by a river that descends as it flows and thus moves faster, sawing the canyon so quickly (in geologic terms) that the sides haven’t had time to erode apart.  One walks practically to the edge without even seeing it, at which point an adze-hack halfway to Hell opens up beneath your feet and you’re staring at sheer walls of the Earth’s crust plunging downward, laced with eon-buried veins of quartz as if lacerated open the instant before they bleed.  Over half a mile below, and seemingly directly under the vertiginous railing in your fists, snakes the river with a steady soft roar.  The mighty crags, slabs, towers and terraces buttressing the two canyon sides are so close together that it feels sort of like an avenue of skyscrapers viewed from above, except you realize that THIS is the real emotion after which our puny cities strive.

The park (one can access it on either side, but on our side for free) consists of a a dirt road that follows the canyon, offering regular viewpoints where they’ve built balconies over the abyss, each one offering a completely different view thanks to the canyon's slow curve.  We were there on a day of cold, strong sunshine, with almost no one else around, and at each viewpoint we walked through scratch pine woods breathing the pure mountain air tinted with resin and stone. 

I very much missed my dearly departed Canon T6i, as my iPad camera struggled with the contrasts in the bright sun, and only a few of my photos were salvageable in later software rescue work.  I was very jealous of the Swede we met who carried a massive zoom lens on a three-day photo shoot in the canyon.

Afterwards, tired from the fresh air and the grandeur, we had lunch at a wonderful farm-to-table restaurant called The Living Farm in the tiny but surprisingly sophisticated town of Paonia.  The town has a magnificent movie theater, and we considered returning for an evening show of the newest “Thor” movie.  Once back at the house, however, we realized our foolishness: we needed every moment we had to talk!

On the Road Again: Three Days Across the Heartland

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago as the guest of Robb, Deni, Layne and friends, at their annual family feast that has survived divorce with both good will and cooking expertise intact.  The board groaned with steaming autumnal beauty; a little later the diners did likewise with bloated pleasure; Robb and I waddled the ten blocks back to his place carrying leftovers, through dark North Chicago neighborhoods eerily silent, staring down moonlit perspectives of deserted streets changing trafficlights for nobody. 

Nine days or so into my course of antibiotics, my ankle infection is well on the mend, and my rash all cleared up.  And on Sunday morning it was finally time for me to pack up my backpack, squeeze it once more into my Miata’s trunk, say a fond goodbye to Robb, and hit the road.

Pulling out of Robb’s alley in Chicago

photo courtesy of Robb

Back on the road again, for the last leg of my road trip, the run from Chicago back to Seattle where it all began.  I timed my drive slowly, with a week to do it, and the plan is to arrive back home on December 2 (giving my rental manager time to clean the carpets after my tenants leave).  In the meantime I decided to make a spur-of-the-moment detour into Colorado to visit another old friend, and so for the last three days I’ve been aiming at a slightly Southern angle across the Great Plains: through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Eastern Colorado.  Tonight I’m finally at the foot of the mountains in the town of Colorado Springs.

I meant to start regular blog posts up again, being back on the road, but in typical road-trip fashion my course carried me straight out of the range of good Internet connections (even in motels).  With the mountain backdrop of Colorado Springs has come the equally welcome advent of a nice coffeehouse (Switchback Roasters) with reliable wi-fi.  But you haven’t missed much.  The last three days through the heartland were like one long, endless drive, through endless miles of flat farmland, golden-stubbled out to the November horizons under the enormous blue sky painted with territorial variations of cirrus.  The first day took me to Des Moines, IA, the second to a tiny farming town called Norton, KS, the third across the vast tableland of Eastern Colorado.  In between were the fields, the fields, the fields, ever the same color, ever the same flatness.  Getting off the Interstate for the back roads made no difference.  At a steady 65-70 mph the only clue to movement was the slow advance of the dotted white lines emerging from their pinpoint ahead to slip hypnotically under my yellow hood.

It was actually an interesting, even educational view of the country.  These fields aren’t exactly the “great plains” anymore; they aren’t exactly “grasslands.”  What they are is a million square miles of industrial agriculture: a whole quarter of the continent remade into a machine of food production.  For all that I was out in nature I felt like I was driving through a factory, the road paralleled by railroad tracks, the horizons punctuated by rocket-pad clusters of towering silos, the mathematically-regular towns each just a scraped lot of metal-sided warehouses and parked fleets of mobile farming equipment, glimpse of a bar, gone.  The land itself at this time of year was an exhausted, shorn litter of dirt, floating dust, and spiky leftover husks that blew in yellow scraps across the road in the cold wind.  The whole thing is the absolute concomitant of our mega-cities, and perhaps a more vivid measure of the scale of our appetites.

It was somehow one of the strangest places my Miata has ventured.

A Medical Downturn in Chicago

Hello again!

It’s been another long gap between blog posts.  I’ve been in Chicago the whole time, still hanging out with my friend Robb, and I wish I could report that I’ve spent the last few weeks roundly enjoying myself.  Unfortunately, that isn’t quite what happened.

To be sure, I did start out having a wonderful time.  During the days, while Robb was at work, I would shoulder my pack and walk in the wintry air through the neighborhood of old brick buildings to one of my favorite local coffehouses (shoutouts to CC Ferns and Star Lounge), where I'd open my laptop alongside my coffeecup in the hip urban crowd and get some hopefully hip urban writing done on my novel.

CC Ferns   

In the evenings I made my reacquaintances with Robb’s family after many years.  His daughter Layne, now a college graduate and drama teacher, joined us for dinner at a great pizza place called Peqoud’s, and on another night Robb and his ex-wife Deni treated me to a delicious birthday dinner at local Indian restaurant called Cumin.

    Robb strikes a successful pose with Layne and me

The pizza at Pequod's was great!

However, my real birthday present started a few days early with a strange itch on the back of my ankle.  Within a few days it developed into a full-blown case of cellulitis, in which my whole ankle steadily swelled up and turned purple, and within a few more I went into the hospital.  Which is where I spent the last three days.

As of Nov 8

As of Nov 17

The sequence actually went like this: (1) Thinking to be proactive, I went to an Urgent Care center and got an antibiotic.  This had no effect.  (2) I went back to the Urgent Care center and got a second antibiotic.  This one caused me to break out in red spots all over my body--the eruption occurring within a matter of minutes as I sat at CC Ferns working on my book.  (3) Thoroughly polka-dotted, and with the cellulitis still spreading, I checked myself into the hospital.  I was admitted immediately, and sent Robb a text to let him know his houseguest’s new address.  He came by after work as quickly as he could.

I went to Cook County Hospital, for the dismaying reason that I’m travelling with no health insurance.  The hospital is known for taking anyone regardless, and is thus a magnet for the indigent, and I did share my room with a nice black man who was a heroin addict and moaned with withdrawal aches all night long, but it was a clean, organized facility and I was handled with smooth professionalism there.  Basically all they did was take me off the offending antibiotic (Keflex), put me on a stronger one (Doxycycline) and wait to see what would happen.  For some fortunate reason the allergy rash didn’t itch, hurt, cause fever or bother me at all, so day by day I lay in bed in a thin hospital robe feeling completely not sick, watching my body change colors.  Periodically I was visited by doctors who did the same.  It was remorselessly boring, but I’d come straight from the coffeeehouse with my pack so I had my Kindle, and the hospital had wi-fi, so I downloaded a Spenser novel and a collection of Henry James short stories and sat there trying to ignore the IV stent in my arm and the moans from the next bed.

So that’s how I’ve spent my time in Chicago.  Not how I imagined!  I was released this morning, to my relief and Robb’s, with both the ankle infection and the rash in slow remission: the ankle now looks merely like I’m recovering from having stepped in a bear trap, and the rash has gone from red to a mild brown color rather like leopard spots.  The literature sent home with me says the latter might take two weeks to go away, but it’s not on my face or hands so I’ll be able to go out in public.

No one ever discovered for sure the source of the cellulitis infection. 

The next medical blow, of course, will be the bill.  I was so hoping to get through the USA part of this road trip safely until I got home and got a job with benefits again!  So much for that.  Merely going to the Urgent Care center twice and getting their antibiotics cost me $400, and that was before being admitted to the main show.  Cook County Hospital has a financial aid office and I was told on entry that I might qualify for relief, but today being Sunday it was closed.  I’ll go back tomorrow.

I’ll stay in Chicago through Thanksgiving (which I’ll share with Robb, Deni and Layne), and then it will be time for the last leg home.  I’m starting to plot my route and keep an eye on winter weather.  Already here in Chicago we’ve had a few flings with snow, and I see that my Cascades are currently getting clobbered with a projected five-day blizzard.  Should be fun!

 Chicago in snow 

A Stroll Through Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park

It’s been a strange visit with my friend Robb, as he’s been extra busy with his classes and class prep (he warned me this would be the case), leaving me for the most part on my own during the days, other than the company of his large-eyed cat Squid, who finally seems to be letting me walk around the apartment without hissing at me.  My first several days in Chicago were grey, cold, and either threatening or pouring rain, keeping me within range of some roof and coffee cup (fortunately there are several such in the neighborhood), but at length on Monday the tenement bricks glowed yellow in the sunshine, and I set out to do something I’d never done when I lived here: walk the Frank Lloyd Wright region of Oak Park.

It was a long drive straight West in the Miata, through Chicago and more Chicago, each urban ring outward from the city center growing more impoverished, until pop! I was in Oak Park, a separate town, and immediately surrounded by quiet, tree-shaded lanes and immaculate, magnificent homes.

In addition to his home and studio—a black, forbidding structure mingling witchy peaked roofs, weathered shingles, octagon bays and cement pediments—which was the architect’s headquarters in his early career and which has been restored and opened for tours, the Oak Park neighborhood boasts over a dozen of Wright's houses, a sort of collected 3D portfolio showing his growing mastery of the “Prairie Style.”  You can pay for audio-guided tours, but I was equipped with an online guide (https://chicago.curbed.com/maps/oak-park-frank-lloyd-wright-walking-tour), which displayed a little buggily on my smartphone, and I decided to guide myself.  It was a clear, very cold October morning, the sun low, the autumn trees still full and alight like colored stained glass, the quiet streets almost deserted, and after parking my Miata for free at the curb I strolled happily around a roughly 20-square-block area, hunting out the Wright houses.  It was a pleasure just to be out in the Fall air.

 I believe that’s the Edward G. Cheney House in the background.

I did try to take photos of the houses, more or less discreetly (they're private homes, but surely the occupants are used to living in a kind of photographic zoo); unfortunately I was forever pointing my iPad camera into the low sun, and really the website linked above contains better images than any I was able to get.  Still, here’s a sampling of some I encountered that came out okay:

The William E. Martin House

The Edward R. Hills House

The Nathan G. Moore House

 The Arthur B. Heurtley House

The Frank W. Thomas House

When I was last in Chicago, in my mid-20s, I was wont to roll Frank Lloyd Wright into an ideological whole with Ayn Rand, of whose fictional philosophy I was then enamored, and attach an invisible quality to his work that was something like a battle cry.  A vague sort of connection lingers in real life, mostly due to The Fountainhead, but it was interesting to revisit his architecture 27 years on and see it stripped bare, as it were, of those discredited politics, and evaluated for its own sake.  I took the $18 tour of his home and studio, in which the guide made several references to Wright’s legendary “arrogance,” and I felt the script fumbling still for the Howard Roark button in the audience’s heads, but I just smiled, for the truth I now see in his houses is a profound humility, at least alone in the privacy of his workroom, the humility of the artist before geometry, proportion, and rules of harmony and balance.  His homes still broadcast a decisive individuality that commands the eye, but the only battle I see them fighting now is the age-old battle of the artist to touch the human spirit. 

On the theme of arrogant artists who produced delicate work, I discovered to my surprise that the Oak Park neighborhood also featured the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, a simple Queen Anne cottage that has been preserved as a museum.  Unfortunately it was closed, but I was able to peek inside--for what that's worth.

Hemingway Slept Here (and woke up crying in the middle of the night)