Category: Road trips

Eight hours of driving today, with an hour for breaks and lunch: we were on the road from 9 in the morning until 6 in the evening. Both of us have driven this stretch of Interstate 90 too many times, and it is no longer exciting. Not the Mohawk River winding through the foothills of the Adirondacks, not the vineyards of western New York State, not aged and mysterious industrial buildings, not even crossing and re-crossing the Erie Canal: none of it captured our attention.

Instead, we read to each other from the New York Times and the Boston Globe. The stories of the Republican National Convention were the most fun to read out loud. Today’s New York Times reported that “a 65 year old coauthor of several books with Donald Trump,” who “is considered part of the extended Trump family” took the blame for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech before the Democratic National Convention while writing Melania Trump’s 2016 speech before the Republican National Convention. We speculated that the Trump campaign needed someone to take the blame, found Meredith McIver who was getting ready to retire anyway, promised to take care of her financially…. Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham made a public apology to Mitt Romney, saying she was sorry that she was so hard on him, and wishing for the days when he was the Republican presidential nominee: “Lord, how I long for stage-managed and boring now.”

The current presidential campaign is so surreal, I wish Hunter S. Thompson were still alive so he could report on this year’s campaign the way he reported on Richard Nixon and his political opponents in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. What Thompson could have done with Trump, Clinton, Cruz, Sanders, Carson, and company! In 2016 we lack a literary genius of that magnitude with a serious interest in, and knowledge of, politics — so much the worse for us.

The hours sped by as we read aloud to each other. When we tired of politics, we switched to one of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels: Maigret, with his unblinking ability to look into the heart of base human motivations. If Maigret had been a writer instead of a fictional character, he might have been an appropriate political reporter for 2016.

When my voice finally tired out, we drove in silence for a time through the rolling land along Lake Ontario. I thought about how different the landscape is from eastern Massachusetts where I lived for more than forty years, and which I still take to be the norm. I thought, too, about how nice it has been to be able to speak Eastern New England Dialect, even though there aren’t as many people who speak in dialect any more, and fewer still who speak the West-of-Boston accent which I grew up with.

Carol made fun of me a few days ago because I don’t always talk in dialect; I tried to explain to her that speaking in dialect is dependent on context, especially now when there are so many outsiders who speak in other dialects. She just pooh-poohed me. I had a long conversation a few days ago with someone who speaks the same accent of Eastern New England Dialect that I do, and he kept me entertained for half an hour with his anecdotes of people he had known. I realized that all his anecdotes revealed a precise understanding of the exact class status of the people in the anecdotes; nor have I seen that level of attunement to class status in the other parts of the United States where I have lived (the Chicago area, the San Francisco Bay area).

I noticed that most of the native speakers of dialect with whom I spoke in the past few weeks felt some sense of bitterness or resentment towards people to whom they consistently referred to as “entitled”; I understood this resentment more broadly as resentment towards members of an economic elite who are not rooted in a place, the elite who are part of a globalized economy and who might live anywhere, anywhere in the world. The people in this elite — globalized, college-educated, well-traveled, in the upper five percent economically — are mostly unaware of how they treat others, how they assume that all the world is theirs for the enjoying thereof. This helps explain some of Donald Trump’s appeal, at least to me: he comes from Queens, he’s a brash New Yorker, he eats fast food; he may be filthy rich, but he knows where he’s from and he still talks like where he’s from — just as many people forgave Bill Clinton for some of his brashness and narcissism because he always knew he was from Hope, Arkansas, and talked that way.

We arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania, in time for dinner. Carol seems to have an instinct for finding the local food co-op, and before long we found ourselves in the parking lot of Whole Foods Co-op on West 26th St. It was clean, well-lighted, staffed by hip-looking young people with tattoos and black clothing, and patronized by cultural creatives (some of whom were too cool for school). The Co-op had free wifi, which was nice and fast. I hate to admit it, but we spent the whole evening there.

Carol had some business that kept her out until almost midnight, so we got a late start this morning. It was a perfect New England morning: warm but not hot, a pleasant breeze, blue skies. We decided to take a walk at Walden Pond before we took care of a few last things at Dad’s condo. So we drove to Walden Pond.

The parking lot was almost full when we arrived. Everyone else was headed towards Walden Pond, but I convinced Carol to walk towards Goose Pond first. We went down the bluff to where the pond should be, but instead of water we found a grassy plain; Goose Pond was completely dry. Dying water lilies, still touched with green here and there, in the two low points of the pond bed showed that there had been water not too long ago. Killdeer called from the grass in the pond bed, and a Red-tailed Hawk screamed overhead. We picked a few huckleberries, but they were seedy and dry. “They haven’t had enough rain,” Carol said.

Above: A trail around Goose Pond; you can see the open grass in the bright sunlight beyond the trees.

After an hour or so, we headed to Walden Pond. Carol stopped to talk to a J., a park employee with a Ph.D. in biology who had studied the invertebrates of Massachusetts beaches. Now she’s a park interpreter who not only knows a lot about biology, but also is well-read in the secondary literature of Thoreau. Carol wanted to know how the wastewater from the new visitor’s center, currently under construction, would be handled. J. told us that it would be pumped over to the site of the former trailer park, because a study found that groundwater from the trailer park site did not flow into Walden Pond. I found the research online: John A. Coman and Paul J. Friesz, “Geohydrology and Limnology of Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts” (U.S. Geodetic Survey, c. 1999). Skimming over this paper, I learned that:

“…Walden Pond is a flow-through lake. Ground water flows into Walden Pond along the eastern perimeter and lake water flows into the aquifer along the western perimeter. The Walden Pond contributing area includes Goose Pond, also a flow-through pond, and its ground-water contributing area. Approximately 6 percent of the inflow [into Walden Pond] from ground water is derived from Goose Pond. Lake-derived ground water from Walden Pond discharges into the Sudbury and Concord Rivers or to wetlands and streams draining into these rivers.” (p. 55)

Given the state of Goose Pond, it was not surprising that when we got down to Walden Pond, the water level there was quite low. Last time I was at the pond, the water was high enough that there were places where it was difficult to walk along the water’s edge, because the water came right up to the bushes. Today there were sandy beaches at least twenty feet wide all around the pond.

Walden Pond is not an isolated place, and there were swimmers and sunbathers dotted all around the perimeter of the pond. I used to walk around Walden in the fall and spring, so it seemed to me as though there were lots of people at the pond today, but Carol thought it seemed empty. From a historical perspective, Carol was closer to the truth than I: “The Concord Herald newspaper reported on September 5, 1935, that summer Sunday afternoon crowds reached 25,000 at Walden Pond and that total summer attendance was 485,000” (Colman and Friesz, p. 52). And really, all I had to do was think back to when I was a child, when the town of Concord offered swimming lessons at Walden; I remember hordes of children walking down the bluff from the school buses. By the standards of the past, there weren’t many people at Walden Pond this morning.

We walked around the pond. Once we got away from the sandy shores of the pond, we saw far fewer people: a woman showing two children the site of Henry Thoreau’s cabin; a runner who was too obviously pleased with the condition of his body; an man with wild gray hair, a wide-eyed expression, and a walking stick (I thought to myself, perhaps unfairly: he must be a Thoreau fan); and two women off in the distance wearing brightly-colored knee-length dresses. The rest of the people were in or within thirty feet of the water.

We left Walden Pond, took care of one or two things at the condo, and drove to Westborough, the first leg of our drive home.

My sisters and I, and Carol too, have gotten tired of cleaning out Dad’s condo. We’re almost done, but this morning there were still a few things that needed to be done. My younger sister has the flu, and Carol had to drive down to visit her storeroom on Cape Cod. My older sister and I worked for a while, and then we decided to rent a canoe and spend an hour or so on the river.

It was a picture-perfect day, with blue skies and puffy white clouds, and everything looking fresh and green after yesterday’s rain. Both of us had our cameras along, and we stopped every now and then to take photographs. “This is just what Dad would have done,” we said to each other; Dad loved cameras, and he photographed everything.

I brought along Dad’s favorite fishing rod, and the one of his tackle boxes that I kept. My older sister taunted me, saying I was a fish torturer, until I reminded her that the last time she and I went canoeing on the river, which was probably ten years ago, she caught more fish than I did. And I found out why this was Dad’s favorite rod; it was easy to cast with, a pleasure to use.

But it was the middle of the day, the worst time of the day to go fishing. Once, when we were gliding under a bridge, a little sunfish tugged at the line, but I helped it throw the hook and it quickly swam away. My sister and I agreed that this was something Dad would have approved of; sometimes he went fishing to catch fish, and sometimes he went fishing just to go fishing.

After an hour, we ended the Dad Memorial Fishing and Photography Expedition, wishing our younger sister could have been with us. We went back to work on the condo, and before we knew it we had done everything that we could do.

The condo will go on the market this week.

After driving through the wide open spaces of the West, and the back roads of the South, Asheville felt like a big city. What felt like hordes of people strolled the sidewalks of the downtown this morning: young white guys with blonde dreadlocks, young white women in tank tops with elaborate tattoos on their muscular arms, trim gray-haired men (both white and black) in pastel-colored polyester-cotton blend polo shirts, three generations of a South Asian family with two little boys running around and getting into mischief, a young white guy with a long beard wearing schlubby shorts talking to a nattily dressed young black man with a guitar over his shoulder, two aging white hippies solemnly singing protest songs outside a bookstore, two young people sitting on the curb singing ecstatically at the tops of their lungs while one of them whanged at a guitar, a white mom talking with adult respect to her teenaged mixed-race daughters, a man who looked like he lived on the street sitting on a low wall and staring intently at something across the street, a small group of slightly overweight white guys in plaid shirts, two well-dressed attractive young women, one white and one black, laughing and talking to each other and ignoring young men, a family sitting in a restaurant all of whom shared the same face: blank and almost sullen in repose but as soon as they started talking animated and lit from within with humor and warmth. I heard plenty of Southern drawls, but also New York accents, midwestern accents, Appalachian twang, and more. I think I encountered more diversity of race and socio-economic status in one hour than we’ve encountered since we left the Bay Area. It left me feeling a little breathless.

Carol went off to Weaverville to meet with her co-author. I walked over to see the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: a wood framed clapboarded house, immaculately maintained with bright yellow paint and tasteful signage, on a tiny lot, surrounded by high rise apartment buildings on two sides, and a modern interpretation center behind it: the epitome of Asheville, I thought, the museumification of the past and the gentrification and corporatization of the present. At least in Asheville they museumify the past; in Silicon Valley, they forget the past in the hunger for the ideal future that everyone is betting is just around the corner. I took several photos of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, but it was closed so I didn’t go in.

I walked a little further and there was the Buncombe County Court House, an imposing building some fifteen or more stories high. Judging by the size of the courthouse, Buncombe County must be a county of some importance.

I wanted to do some writing and research today, so I kept walking until I found a cafe with wifi. There are lots of cafes in Asheville; the city is full of Cultural Creatives, and Cultural Creatives like their cafes. I walked past a number cafes in the busy downtown, but some of them didn’t have wifi, two were devoted to chocolate and so could not be taken seriously, and some of them didn’t have any open tables. Finally I cam to the Pennycup Cafe, which had open tables, fast free wifi, and really good coffee. I spent three blissful hours writing until it was time for Carol to pick me up.

We drove north towards Marion, Virginia. Carol pulled over into a rest area to use the bathroom. I put on my shoes and stumbled out of the car, tired and a little cranky, following her towards the bathrooms. Right in front of the bathrooms, she was engaged in animated conversation with a talkative woman in a bright blue shirt. The woman asked me if I were a college professor, and I said no, just a youth pastor. She walked around me, noticed the ponytail, nodded (doesn’t every male youth pastor have either a pony tail or a beard?), then told us all about how she was excited because God had led her to a house up in West Virginia which she and her husband had just bought, after thinking they would stay living where they were now forever. Then she dived into a discussion of religion. Her nephew was a youth pastor, and did I know so-and-so on something-or-other radio? And when I said I did not, she said, How could I be a youth pastor and not know about so-and-so? (I didn’t tell her that after twenty years in the business I don’t waste time on high-profile self-proclaimed experts on youth ministry, unless they are actually directly engaged in face-to-face youth ministry themselves right now, which none of the high-profile ones are.) Carol had to explain that I was a Unitarian Universalist; no, not a Moonie, a Unitarian; then I had to explain what that was; she seemed to approve of the idea of universal salvation.

I really did have to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, she was still talking to Carol, in her sweet Southern mountains accent. She and Carol were talking politics. Carol wanted to know who she was going to vote for; she said Ben Carson. Carol asked, What about Hillary Clinton? She said, in more politely colorful terms than I can put it here, that Hillary Clinton should be in jail. She went further and said — and in this I think she is accurate — that Donald Trump isn’t running for president. Well, he isn’t, is he? He is just putting on a big show, and we’re all enjoying it. “Ben Carson is still on the ballot in West Virginia,” she said, adamant that she will vote for him.

There was much more in the conversation than I can report here. We got in the car, and she was still talking, her husband quietly trying to get her to get back into their car so they could continue driving. As we drove off, Carol remarked that talking to her was refreshing: she had a unique way of seeing things, and of expressing herself. I agreed with Carol; but the women an the bright blue shirt left me feeling a little breathless, just as downtown Asheville had done.