#32--Heading Back to Portland via These United States

So I’m heading back after a blissful and eventful year away. It occurred to me, oh, somewhere in the tenth month, that I would have been smart to collect those locale bumper stickers (oh, you know, like “Boise, Idaho!” or “Atchafalaya, LA”) to put all over the Thule Cargo box. They would have been a good representation of the many places I’ve seen. But also, they would have covered up the gaffer’s tape which isn’t looking so hot, though it is miraculously still doing its job--namely keeping the elements out of my too-much-stuff. For those of you who have been keeping up with this very infrequent blog from the beginning: No, it has not escaped me that my dealings with vanity have not yet been settled.

Somewhere along the way (in Detroit, go figure) someone stole a bag that contained my most favorite summer clothing. That sucked. I had a U Michigan tee shirt in there, a “Detroit Soul” tee shirt in there, these fabulous bell legged work out pants that are irreplaceable. People are so mean. Sigh. Also along the way I battled and battled illness for nearly four months and am still not sure I’m done with that battle. But all in all it’s been a magnificent year. I finished a manuscript titled, “Walking the Cemetery: Detroit Poems” (yay!), met loads of terrific people (this photo is of me and Nayef Homsi who I met at MacDowell), saw places I’d not seen in a long time or ever (like CT, for example, or Atchafalaya, LA), and lost weight, gained weight, figured out my back problems, and on and on.

I’ll be forty in another month or so and I can’t imagine a better way to have exited this decade, which has been trying. My thirties started (literately), with my mom’s death. I think it’s fitting that my forties begin with a journey—physical, emotional, and spiritual—in which my life seems full of (oh, how hokey can you get, Crystal Williams?!) potential and the world full extraordinary places and adventures.


In the past month, here’s where I’ve been:

Hamden, CT:

Where I was house and dog sitting for some new friends. I’ve got nothing quippy to write about Hamden. It was sweet. I was in Hamden for the month of July, finishing up the manuscript and chilling out. Hamden is the town closest to New Haven. And the neighborhood I was in, Spring Glenn, is so sweet. Everyone I met there was fantastic. Really. It was a little frightening, actually. The only complaint I have is that it was miserably hot. So I saw a LOT of really awful movies. (To the right: Eddie (l) and Sadie, the little white dogs. I lived with Eddie for nearly a month. Sadie came and stayed over for a long weekend. They had a thing. And Sadie was such a snuggle muffin. Made me think hard about a little dog. For real.)



East Hampton, NY:

After leaving Hamden, I took three ferries (!!) to Long Island Sound where I stayed with my good friend (and old boss), Jo Ann McGreevy, in her sweet farm house. It was the first time I’d ever been to The Hamptons. What can I say? Um: Wealth. And lots of skinny women with pony tails. Oh, and eight baristas behind the counter at Starbucks on a Saturday morning. I think that says it all.


Charlotte, NC:

I drove on down to Charlotte because A) I keep hearing good things about it and wanted to see it but it’s not the kind of place that I’d ever just find myself in or passing through so this seemed my one good chance, B) it’s close to Asheville, NC, another place about which I’d heard many good things, and C) I’d decided to go the Southern Route back to Portland so I-5 South seemed like the thing to do from NY. Anyway, Charlotte was cool. A sort of newish, modern city. I admit that I didn’t have much of a chance to really look around because the 12 hour drive down turned into a 15 hour ordeal. Let me just say here: Virginia sucks. Virginia traffic sucks. Why folks slow down for NO REASON just bewilders me. I was so hot under the collar that I called my friend Daryl who just kept saying, in her Alabama twang, “Crystal-girl, you’ve just gotta get okay with it.” Please. She’s known me for too long. I don’t even know why she tried. We crawled for about 2 hours straight (and, again, for no discernible reason). This, of course, made me curse, yes, but more importantly, reconsider whether or not I like people at all.

The real treat in Charlotte was the Alan Michael Parker (who lives in a fantastic little hamlet outside of Charlotte) had me over for dinner (he's a spectacular cook!). What a lovely, lovely dinner. He and his wife Felicia have two dogs, Bella and Isa (probably misspelling that). The latter is incredibly shy. But we managed to strike up an understanding such that she popped me with her snout a couple of times to tell me to keep petting her. Joy!

Also, an old acquaintance drove in from outside of Columbia, SC and we had an early lunch. She’s an artist and an arts administrator and she managed to, when none of my other photog friends have, get some shots of me. She was so smooth about taking out that damned camera. Sigh. I hate photos of myself. Really, really. I always look like a pumpkin head. Anyway, we had a nice lunch and chatted with this fantastic and exuberant waitress named Mozelle. Mozelle. I want to write a novel just to be able to say/see/read that over and over, “Mozelle watched the woman with the white-stitched pants work her way across the room...”, “Mozelle yawned, her mouth bigger and darker than...”, “Mozelle said, ‘...”


Atlanta, GA

I didn’t like Atlanta much (actually, at all) because the humidity was outrageous and none of my very dearest friends who have spent any time there like it. I went in with bad ideas which just grew and grew and grew. By the time I left, I would have argued anyone down about the faults of a city I barely saw. Doh! It didn’t help that I found myself at some mall that was full of badly dressed folks primping and walking around like they were the be-all-end-all. Yuck. But I did hook back up with a dear friend of mine who I’d not seen since at least 1999. We had a fun dinner.



On my way out of Atlanta I stopped at the Tuskegee Airman National Historic Site, primarily because my dear friend Mary James' dad is an Airman and he's super cool and I wanted to see A) history, but more locally, B) where he'd been. Besides crying some, I kept thinking, "How'd they survive this heat?!!"


I want to take this moment to lodge a public complaint about the damned Stern-Road Food people. On this trip and up to this point I’d been going around to places they suggested on their site (www.roadfood.com) in an attempt to get some good BBQ and soul food before returning to the BBQ wasteland which is Portland, Oregon. On the morning I left Atlanta I stopped at The Silver Skillet for some biscuits and ham. Well, when I walked in I was the only brown person in the joint, which, normally, especially when I’m in Portland, isn’t a problem, it’s just sorta the way things are, but in Atlanta made me a tad suspicious. Just sayin’. It didn’t help that everyone in there but the waitresses (with their eyeliner applied such that the line--if you could call it a line since it was inconsistent and looked oddly like those “country road” lines in the Atlas’ legend--wasn’t really related to the eye, but rather the upper cheek, if you can visualize what I mean) was some version of Wally Cleaver’s dad. Anyway, I soldiered up and ordered my food. The waitress was sweet after all and we got to chatting about New Orleans, which I planned to go through later that day. She said, “Honey, stay away from there, it’ll only make you sad,” which sounded about right and which I obeyed. As I was leaving, and here’s the rub, I look at the signage and stick-em-ups above and around the register. Besides one that was about OJ (which I take to be about race only tangentially in that I don’t know that anyone would have been particularly interested in the case were he a white guy ala Specter or even Polanski, the bastard), was the following: Hillary Clinton’s face on the body of a cow with the caption, “New York State’s first case of mad cow disease,” which, of course, made me nauseous--and not because I’m any Hillary fan. My beef is this: all of those things combined told me that this probably wasn’t the kind of place just anybody goes to. Brown folks have to be careful, especially in the south. And I know folks think that isn’t real. Folks will argue that we Northerners are just overly sensitive. And that might be true. But shit still happens. People are still dying in this country around race and racism. And these days, especially these days when everyone is so scared, I was scared a bit. I wish the Sterns would have said something about the stick-em-ups, even if they can’t legally say, “Well, we’re not sure about whether this place is friendly to all people.” I wish they had because if I had been in some back woods-off-the-grid kind of joint and been caught unawares (me there on my road-trip by myself), the results could have been traumatic. That’s my beef with them. I’m going to write a letter. Anyway, it was a fitting thing to happen in a town that already made me feel a little at odds.

Baton Rouge, LA (and the Gulf Coast)

Baton Rouge is sort of a pit. Sorry. The buildings seemed like an incoherent Savannah, without the beauty, which is logical in that Savannah is one of the only southern towns (I think I remember this correctly) that wasn’t burned or damaged in the war. Or, if you’ve not been to Savannah, The French Quarter works as an equivalent comparison.


Mobile is also sort of a pit. Sorry. But there is a BBQ place there that is worth a 100 mile drive, for sure: the Brick Pit is gooooooooood. I mean, those ribs were goo-ooh-o0h-ooh-ooh-oooood. (The photo to the left is of their BBQ ribs, coleslaw and beans. Oh, good, good Lord.)

The drive through the Gulf Coast was super interesting. I detoured from 10-W and drove along the water for some time, through Baton Rouge, and along through Gulfport, etc. What’s amazing is the beaches are absolutely empty. I saw four bodies sort of sitting on the sand in about twenty miles. But what’s equally amazing is that all of the beach front property I could see is vacant. The entire coast is just sign after sign after sign reading: “Land for Sale.” Every now and again you’ll find someone who has rebuilt their house, but 98% of the land is empty. Folk can’t afford to rebuild. This devastation is all from “The Storm,” as it’s called down there. (I learned this from a man in a post office in San Antonio; he also told me about an online book-swap sight where people trade paperbacks via the United States Post Office; see: paperbackswap.com.)

I found the landscape of the area particularly compelling. So much water, many bayous. In one area you could see where The Storm had savaged so many trees that the swamp seemed to be a graveyard, the remaining trunks headstones. Highway 10 is, in many places, an elevated four lane deal (divided by water, so two lanes in each direction). This gives the effect of not being on a highway at all but on a prolonged bridge (and often these elevated sections would actually turn into proper bridges where larger bodies of water intersected smaller bodies of water over which we’d been traveling). Being there, driving there, allows one to quickly and easily realize how much the water informs the life of the residents of the region. It’s a different sort of knowing than one gets from the creepy movies about the bayou wherein there’s some obvious Bayou expert taking around some idiots at night on a boat with a single light or some such. It hit me suddenly and sharply. In the movies it’s easy to think that the water is important but not integral. Not so.

San Antonio, TX
This was my first and not my last trip to San Antonio. What a beautiful little town. Here is a picture of the River Walk. Wow. I’m coming back in October. It’s a fact!!! Also, the photo of the Rosa Parks bus seat is from San Antonio. How cool is that. There's a sign above it that describes Parks' efforts.

El Paso, TX
Another pit. Ugh. As if there was no city planner ever in the history of humanity and certainly never ever one in this “town.” Blech. Maybe I missed something? Though, it was sort of cool to be driving up on a hill going west and to look south and think, “Hunh, those houses built into the rock like that, the way they’re all sort of jammed up like that, that reminds me of a third world situation,” and then to look down and see the wall and then to realize: Damn, that’s Mexico. The difference is just that stark and close. All the way from El Paso to Las Cruces, which is where I am tonight, I was thinking about the Immigration debate and how close we actually are. So sad.

Las Cruces, NM
I’m not sure I have much to say about Las Cruces. I didn’t find the center of town. The folks on Chowhound appropriately dog the city, claim it’s a culinary wasteland. I had a good taco salad. Taco salads, I suspect, are not Mexican food, Tex-Mexican food, or any other type of “authentic.” But it was good anyway. There seems to be a lot of sprawl. What I can say is that as soon as I got far enough into west Texas, the weather started to dry up and get appreciably better. By the time I got out of my car today in Las Cruces where the temperature was 102, I was quite happy to walk around. It’s dry here. And the mountains are so gorgeous. And the light, the light is outstanding. I walked a bit in San Antonio and the guy from the restaurant took one look at my sweaty self and said, “Oh, we need to put you inside, inside definitely.” No lie.

Tomorrow I’m off to drive up the 101 on California’s coast to Portland. It’s going to take me another 3 nights and four days. But I’m heading on home. Indeed. More from somewhere in Cali.


My Love,
C