Category Archives: Road trips

Liveblogging from the highway

Sitting here at a highway rest area outside Buffalo, New York, I have a few observations about highway rest areas:

  1. All the rest areas on the New York State Thruway have free wifi. This is good.
  2. Some rest areas no longer have water fountains (it’s as if they’re trying to force you to buy bottled water). This is bad.
  3. The rest area on the Mass Turnpike between I-290 and I-84 has a farmers market on Saturday mornings in season. This is good.
  4. None of the rest areas I have stopped at today have picnic tables — if you bring your own food (as I did), you wind up sitting in your car to eat. This is bad.
  5. My ’93 Toyota Camry got 34.4 miles per gallon. This is good.
  6. At the rest area where I bought gas today, there was a TV over the gas pump, playing some stupid daytime TV show. This is bad.

July Twitter

July 01
Dining car: supper with a sculptor, breakfast with retired military, lunch with a homeschooling mom. | 12:24 PM

July 02
In front of the Air & Space museum: a boy flies a paper airplane. His dad isn’t interested. They go into the museum. | 12:12 PM
On the Mall: plump tourists wearing pastels and big sun hats dragging bored, hot children. | 12:13 PM

July 03
Anxious young woman on a cell phone. Then she relaxes, smiles, waves. A young man walks up. They go to get lunch. | 12:19 PM

July 04
Driving north from New Bedford: fireworks over the trees on the right and left, and straight ahead. | 08:20 PM

July 06
Fog rolling in off the Atlantic. I hear other people, but all I see is sand, waves, a few gulls. | 06:08 PM
Now the fog has lifted… … …now it has come in again… | 06:52 PM

July 14
Moon through clouds and the whine of mosqitos. | 11:23 PM

July 19: Podcamp Boston 3
So far, lots more Macs than any other laptop. | 08:01 AM
“Enable your superpowers,” says Chris Penn. I.e., learn how to use new media. | 08:42 AM
David Tames: “Part of filmmaking art is figuring out when the ego needs to be put on hold and collaboate with other people.” | 10:54 AM

July 20: Podcamp Boston 3
Looks like Podcamp has already clogged up the wifi in the conference center. | 01:09 PM
They’re comparing Seesmic to CB radio… huh. | 12:18 PM
Podcamp was like drinking from a firehose. Overloaded. | 07:54 PM

July 23
A guy changing clothes in the middle of the rest area men’s room. He kinda laughs, says “Sorry…” | 08:50 PM

July 24
Suddenly half a dozen smoke detectors in the neighborhood start going BeepBeepBeep BeepBeepBeep… | 01:18 AM
I take the battery out of our smoke detector. It’s the only way it’ll stop. Humidity? Eerie. | 01:22 AM

July 30
Neon sign: “SHE ATON COMMANDER” – A female monotheistic Pharaoh who’s in charge? 9:12 PM

Rest area

I was getting my coffee, waiting for my fries to come up, and listening to what the woman behind the counter was saying to to the woman wearing the headset.

“Power’s out in my part of Bridgewater,” she said. “My kids called when I was on break, they can’t get the stove working.”

The tall man in the Teamsters t-shirt said, “Power’s out in the prison.”

“What?” said the woman wearing the headset.

“Power’s out in Bridgewater State Prison,” came the reply. “That’s a place you don’t want the power to go out.”

My fries came. I ate them, drank the coffee, went down to the men’s room to wash my hands. Some guy was standing in the middle of the rest room putting on his pants. He looked up at me and laughed, a little bit embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. I resisted telling him that next time he should change in one of the stalls.

I walked out of the building. It was still raining, there was still a lot of lightning. I sat in the car, hoping it would taper off. A bunch of teenagers came out of the building, hesitated, then ran for the minivan next to my car. Suddenly all the lights in the rest area went out.

Time to get back on the road.

This happened this morning

 Right in the middle of church
 outdoors in the pine woods chapel
 the preacher gets stopped
 by a loud caw. The preacher
 pauses, smiles, and says,
“He was outside my house
 early this morning,” and we laugh.
 The crow caws again and grows
 more raucous. The crows always
 have the last word. They’ll be
 cawing here long after
 preacher and people have died and
 gone to dust and dirt.
 After church ends, as I
 sit and write this down
 three crows come close and watch me,
 hoping for food, impatient.

Summer evening

1
Out on the bay, wind
blows whitecaps. Here, one small bird
sings the twilight in.

2
This one bush covered
with ripe blueberries, while still
the rest are unripe.

3
A secretive bird
calls from treetops. Suddenly,
there it is! and gone.

Saco, Maine

Microblogging 2008-07-06

  • Fog rolling in off the Atlantic. I hear other people, but all I see is sand, waves, a few gulls. #
  • When in fog, you have a circle of visibility that depends on the density of the fog. Right now in that circle swim about 80 eider ducks and chicks. #

Story

The train from DC to Boston was an hour late. After we passed New Haven, the car I was sitting in was two thirds empty. We hit Providence well after midnight, where a few people got on. I was sitting up trying to stay awake. A young man sat two seats in front of me. My attention wandered, and I realized that he was talking to the young woman in front of me.

“You think one of the hostels will be open?’ he asked her.

She wasn’t sure, so I said, “They’ll most likely be closed up at this hour.”

“Will they let me stay in the train station?” he said.

The young woman and I went back and forth on that question, trading opinions as two people will who both know a city pretty well, but who don’t know the exact answer to a specific question. We finally said we thought he’d be better off not trying to stay in the train station. So then he wanted to know, could he stay in the bus station? The young woman and I went back and forth a little bit, and said that would be more likely.

Then it turned out that he wanted to take the train to Maine, but that train doesn’t leave from South Station, so we had to explain to him the difference between North Station and South Station, and how you get from one to the other. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around the fact that one city could have two train stations. Then he went back to whether or not he could spend the night in South Station.

I leaned forward. “Have you ever spent the night in a train station?” I said.

“No,” he said, seemingly surprised that I would even ask.

“Well, take it from me, if you spend the night in a train station, don’t lie down and go to sleep,” I said, “because if you do, a cop will come around and think you’re some homeless guy and tap you on the feet and tell you to move on.”

He thought about that for a moment. Fortunately, just then the young woman remembered there’s an all-night diner around the corner from South Station. Neither of us could remember just where it was, but we told him that he could ask someone in the station for directions. At that point I realized that if we didn’t warn him, he was going to go around downtown Boston asking questions all night, because he wouldn’t realize that asking innocent questions could get him in trouble.

“I could be wrong,” I said, “but you don’t seem like a city kid to me.” He smiled, and acknowledged that he was not a city kid. “So when you get into the city,” I said, “don’t go asking questions like you’re asking us. Just make up your mind where you’re going, and go there, and try to look like you know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Oh God yeah,” said the young woman. We were pulling in to back Bay Station, and she was standing up to get her luggage. “Don’t trust anyone except us. And maybe you shouldn’t trust us,” she added, grinning at him.

We pulled into South Station at about one o’clock. I walked with him over to some security guards. He asked them where the all-night diner was. He was confident, as if he knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. They told him. I walked him down to Atlantic Avenue, and showed him the bus station on the right, and where he’d find Kneeland Street and the all-night diner on the left.

I left him, and caught a cab for myself, because the subway stops running at 12:30. I still don’t know quite why he got stuck in downtown Boston at one in the morning. But by now, I’m sure he’s safely in Maine, telling everyone about his adventures in the all-night diner.