Day 13
Wednesday, August 11
“90% of life is just showing up.”— Woody Allen
We got a late start this morning and I was feeling tired. Have motel air conditioners given me this cough? But we had ambitious plans for the day and so I rallied and we set out and got lucky right away. Although we were taking a break from roadside America to explore the artistic side of a big city, we had a couple nods to pop culture to make and the first one was to find the house where Mary, Rhoda and Phyllis lived.
There it was at 2104 Kenwood Parkway and the added bonus was driving through the neighborhood, which is upper upscale. Being that Minneapolis is the home of Betty Crocker and the Pillsbury Dough Boy I’d say these digs were built with flour power. The lakeside that Mary is seen walking along at the beginning of every show is nearby and Jo observed that the reason she was always broke was no doubt because she was renting in the poshest part of town.
From Mary’s hood we went to the much heralded Walker Museum and it was here that my cough and fatigue just disappeared. The building is deservedly an architectural landmark. Excuse me for sounding crass but even the bathrooms are worth checking out, which for aging baby boomers isn’t going to be going out of your way.
“In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.”— Andy Warhol
I’m not a big conceptual art fan. I like art to be more simple and direct so I can pronounce judgment on the spot. I vote with my feet and so I usually move through many museums pretty fast. But the Walker’s exhibit called Talent Show blew me away. It really had everything to do with Warhol’s quote, which he amended presciently before he died to, “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.”
Two pieces in Talent Show in particular made me linger. Both were related to the Internet. One was created by an artist named Adrian Piper in 1970 before cyber space replaced outer space or open space or any other kind of space in becoming a place where we live. She had people write anything they wanted on a blank piece of paper. They could see what others wrote and respond to it or not. What she had strangers create 40 years ago we now know as message boards and chat rooms and the blogosphere.
A couple of my favorites: “Finally, legal graffiti.” “This makes me feel important.” “Thanks for giving me the opportunity to remain anonymous.”
The other project by Amie Siegel was one you or I could do at home if we wanted to take the time but I’m thankful that she thought of doing it for us. My Way is a video compilation from off of YouTube of men singing the song Paul Anka wrote about and for Frank Sinatra.
What grabbed me was the intimacy of most of the performances. Men of all ages alone in their offices or basements singing their hearts out into cyberspace. Some sang really nicely, too. One version that wasn’t sung well at all but was haunting was from a guy with an M-16 hanging on the wall behind him and colored lights flashing all around it and the bottles on the wall of his bar. It was sort of Rambo meets Lawrence Welk and not funny nor sad, but like watching a little kid with no talent who you feel sorry for.
But the best thing that we happened upon in the Walker was a total surprise after we thought we were done. Some months ago the museum hung about 50 paintings from its permanent collection on two walls in one room. The paintings are displayed from floor to ceiling. I didn’t know this was called salon style even though I’ve been to the Barnes in Philadelphia where the eccentric collector who did it this way with his collection even put in his will that his paintings never be rearranged or moved. You may have heard about the documentary “The Art of the Steal” so you know how that worked out.
Anyway, Barnes collected mostly French impressionists. The Walker’s room is full of a lot of the New York School artists and works of other Americans. There’s a wonderful Georgia O’Keefe, and an Edward Hopper that Jo wanted to take home— we bought the kitchen magnet version instead. My favorite was of a guy holding a flower that was painted by Marsden Hartley.
Our only meal out today was a late lunch at a Pizza place called Punch and again the food was outstanding.
After a quick cruise past F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house on the most scenic street in St. Paul we decided the Twin Cities are not identical twins. Think about it. LA has Long Beach, New York has Newark, Philadelphia has Camden, NJ… It’s not a stellar lineup. They’re more like shadows on an X-Ray but St. Paul at least has the distinction of being recognized as Minneapolis-St. Paul, making it seem at least a blood relation to its more highfalutin neighbor.
Back to Minneapolis and our trek to the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown seemed more like we were fulfilling an obligation. I’m sure MTM will be tossing her hat forever in front of Macy’s but if you ask me, and you shouldn’t, it’s a statue of limitations– doesn’t look like Mary.
Our final event pushed our day here off the charts. After standing in line for an hour for Rush Tickets we got to see a great performance of A Street Car Named Desire at the Guthrie Theater. What a wonderful place and, as we were in Rush limbo we noticed a lot of young people were waiting with us. Neat! A common denominator among them and us was none of us had tattoos, at least visibly.
“I’m not going to be hypocritical, I’m going to be honestly critical.”— Blanche DuBois
I’d only seen Elia Kazan’s film of Streetcar with Brando. Tonight, Jo and I agreed Blanche’s performance was a knockout and Stanley’s took a back seat but the revelation of the evening for me was how much Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners cribbed from Tennessee Williams– “One of these days Alice–pow! Straight to the moon.”
So it was another fabulous day, a Frank Stella Kowalski day you could say and I just did. So give me a W please Vanna and it’s on Wisconsin.
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Day 14
Thursday, August 12
A day of crossings for us. This morning it was over the Mississippi River, this afternoon we reached the Eastern Time Zone and in between we crossed off Wisconsin, perhaps unfairly, as a state we would devote enough time in to only hustle across its belly.
There were stretches of the Dairy State where Jo felt we could have been in Maine and there were others where it looked like the part of Pennsylvania where I grew up. I was checking the countryside for cows and surprisingly, saw very few. I have a soft spot for cows since I milked them for years on the kibbutz where I lived in the 1970s and got to know many personally.
Cows are woefully, no make that udderly in need of union representation since theirs is indeed a life of indentured servitude. Other than providing the basic ingredient that made Ben and Jerry rich, they get to do three things— eat, shit and sleep. If you are searching for evidence that there is a God, I believe cows may be a place to start. The almighty lobotomized the species so they can get through the day. Cows are dumb. Not as dumb as poultry, which is nothing to crow about, but cows are like the guy who worked his entire life in an unappreciated menial job, retired with his gold watch and dropped dead the next week. Fortunately, we don’t recycle ourselves as hot dogs.
We did have a dandy dairy experience in Wausau, WI though when we stopped for lunch at a restaurant where I noticed that Jo was the only woman in the place who didn’t have white hair. Our hamburgers, we were told, could come with cheese curds. Neither Jo nor I had ever heard of cheese curds and although the cheese part was enticing, the curds part made me think of Iraq. We both opted for them although Jo had hers on the side.
So, what’s a cheese curd? Seems to me it’s like a piece of unfinished business down at the processing plant. You know those orange cheese twists? Cheese curds look like that on the outside but when you bite into one the melted cheese inside stays attached like a kite string from your mouth back to your plate. Jo offered me her curds but I said, “If I ate your curds, I’d have to weigh myself immediately.” (Jo is a good sport to put up with such constant punishment, wouldn’t you say?)
We got to Escanaba (rhymes with ass-ya-fa-the) at dusk and walked around its lighthouse on the shore of Lake Michigan before dinner. I asked some teenagers to go jump in the lake for a picture. Had them do it twice actually. It’s great to stage shots now for pleasure instead of work.
The place we chose for dinner tonight was because an Internet reviewer claimed Barons served the only good food on the upper peninsula. We both had fish and I got linguini with clams as a side. Never had that option before. The meal was fine but nothing to Yelp about and the place was from a different era. Waitresses in uniforms serving in the dark, cloth tablecloths and napkins and music from the past. The Four Tops may rule in Detroit but the Four Freshmen own Escanaba.
We have now completed two weeks on the road and Jo and I agree we have not tired of traveling nor each other. Our Volvo has taken us 3,737 miles into ten states. We are still over a thousand miles from Camden.
You know the scene in Trains, Planes and Automobiles where Steve Martin and Edie McClurg have it out at the rental car counter? Edie’s upper Midwestern accent is as grating as a day’s worth of Mozzarella at Domino’s. Well, I’ve heard some people talk like that in the past few days but only a few. And maybe it’s because everybody appreciates our profligate spending that people have been extremely nice everywhere we’ve been. Unlike Edie’s final words to Steve, nobody has told us we’re fucked yet.
My big travel tip to this point: Don’t put your motel room card key in the same pocket with your cell phone.
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Day 15
Friday, August 13
We had some unfinished business to attend to before leaving Escanaba. Both Jo and I had spotted neon signs we wanted to get pictures of this morning, old neon on Escanaba’s old main street that hadn’t been turned on after dark last night and probably no longer works anyway.
As I was taking my first shot of the Stardust a guy dressed in camouflage started yelling at me. “What are you taking a picture of that place for? That’s a whore bar!” I explained to him I wasn’t looking for hookers but was hooked on pictures of neon signs and he seemed disappointed. Jo got a great shot of the “Michigan” theater marquee, but as we walked around, old main street smelled like a wet sleeping bag.
So many places we’ve been through have been like Escanaba, although usually less depressing, the old downtowns replaced by “The Strip”, a commercial gauntlet of chain stores and characterless architecture that I can’t begin to imagine anybody feeling nostalgic about 50 years from now.
We drove away up the western side of Lake Michigan and picnicked at a rest area, splitting ham and cheese and cream cheese and olive sandwiches and opening a bag of South Dakota style potato chips that had come on board in Rapid City.
We drove on, and as Jo remarked later, we sort of lost our Mojo for a bit. First, we realized that if we had waited just a few more minutes we could have had our meal lakeside instead of on the other side of the road in the woods. No biggie but the scenery we were seeing barely warranted the little dots depicting the scenic route advertised in our atlas so an opportunity lost to cull the best from it was a misfortune being that luck has shined on us so brightly so far.
Then I started to see signs for pasties. Of course they couldn’t be the pasties I was familiar with and they weren’t. A pastie is an upper Michigan meat pie brought here by miners from the UK and is pronounced past-tee. We stopped at a place that had some and they looked lumpy and ugly, like knishes in need of cosmetic surgery or burritos after getting roughed up at a Tea Party rally. I still wanted to have one but I’d just eaten lunch… usually doesn’t stop me but I kept thinking of Sweeney Todd.
As we passed a long stretch of beach, we thought about stopping for a swim but didn’t. A little further along we walked a breakwater toward a lighthouse and I got my answer as to whether the water in the Great Lakes ever gets rough. We would have had our swim or worse if we had tried to actually reach the lighthouse door.
We crossed the Mackinac Bridge, which straddles Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and for the first time the entire trip paid a toll. Our plan was to take a ferry out to Mackinac Island. It’s like a glitzier Monhegan Island in Maine, but its gateway, Mackinaw City, was crowded and motel rooms were pricey so we decided to pass through and as luck would have it we made the right decision.
I did a fair amount of research for our trip but I missed some things and Bay View and Petoskey, MI were two of them. In an instant the search party for our missing Mojo was called off. As soon as we saw Bay View we knew we were finished floundering about where to stop for the evening. Bay View was founded in the late 19th century as a Methodist retreat and families have passed down its Victorian cottages for generations. It’s definitely a gem just to drive around.
After finding a motel, we drove a little further to Petoskey for dinner and got our second surprise. The name is actually a mangled tribute to an Indian chief and the town is as chic as Mackinaw City appeared touristy. Jo sometimes calls me a reverse snob, by which she means in a nutshell that I get rhapsodic about a cheese steak but look down on filet mignon. She’s right and I’m trying to mend my ways. Yes, I’ll take Petoskey. You can have Escanaba. I’ll drink to that and we did.
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Day 16
Saturday, August 14
I now know that I measure time differently than when I was younger. This morning my pillbox was empty and I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe the week went by that fast!” and now that I’m retired the weekend really isn’t different from weekdays. Truth be told it wasn’t much different during my career with ABC either. Much of the news doesn’t matter what day it is.
We cruised Bay View to see the retreat cottages one last time. Most are modest, one with columns looked to me like a miniature fraternity house, but there were some large homes, too. Undoubtedly, among the Methodists there are both holy and high rollers.
After heading south for at least a half hour I realized I’d gotten us on the wrong road. I haven’t been using our GPS much the last few days because the drives have been straight forward. There was no need to backtrack, we just turned west for the better part of an hour and headed for a town called Charlevoix, pronounced locally shar-le-voy. I don’t know French but I wonder if that would illicit a grunt in Paris.
I’m sort of ambivalent about our car gadgets. The GPS was great for getting around in Minneapolis but my mistake today because we weren’t using it actually allowed us to see some beautiful rolling countryside. This side of Lake Michigan has curves which is, I’m sure, a reason it’s preferred. In addition to water sports, fishing and hunting, this is a big golf destination and there’s skiing, too. It’s a year round playground and we’ve passed several airports with private jets lined up like cars in a parking lot.
But back to the GPS. It’s useful when you’re looking for lodging and restaurants and you have no Internet access through your phone. We don’t and are at the mercy of the kindness of hostelries with free WiFi. It’s hard to remember travel when you used paper maps that unfolded to the size of a kite or when you stopped at gas stations or other businesses to ask for directions. First came the telephone answering machines and pagers and then the cell phones and email– a tether that is also a noose. We’re instantly available and impatient when we can’t get things instantly ourselves. Convenience has turned into addiction.
I feel somewhat similar about our iPod. It’s great to have two years worth of music in a cigarette case, but part of traveling for me used to be the radio stations I listened to along the way. I enjoyed catching some ag news from stations in Montana and South Dakota earlier on this trip, but the syndicated talk show screamers can sour a sunny day for me. Where did you go Bob and Ray?
We had lunch in Charlevoix as soon as we got there. Jo knows how to bring an Imber Death March to a halt without even screeching. It was a fish and chips place and after the first bite we agreed the best we ever tasted. They used whitefish exclusively and if I’d known that whitefish could be this good, my whole Bar Mitzvah would have ended differently. The cole slaw was incredible, too. We guessed the secret there— sugar.
Charlevoix was cute and crowded. There was a big arts and crafts fair taking place and frankly, we didn’t want to be around so many people but before we left Jo bought a tee-shirt inscribed with “Lake Michigan/Unsalted” and I got two etchings of baseball parks past (Connie Mack Stadium) and present (Dodger Stadium) from the guy who had created them.
On we drove toward Traverse City where we thought we might do our laundry and I might have my last chance to pick up a pastie to go. But as I called around for a motel it was quickly apparent that rooms were about as hard to get at the last minute on a Saturday night here in 2010 as dates at the then all male Dartmouth College were for me on any given Saturday night in the 1960s. (I wish I were exaggerating.)
Goodbye, Traverse City! We had been juggling two options for the evening that would have required driving out of town anyway. One, was to go to the Cherry Bowl Drive-In which is still in business after 56 years; the other, to attend a recital at the Interlochen Center for the Arts.
But we still needed a place for the night and I had no idea it would end of being a first for us. Tonight, we have our own private log cabin. It doesn’t have air conditioning and I don’t want to sound like a wimp but it was about 90 today and muggy. The plumbing and electrical are funky but the polka party that was going on nearby just ended and the traffic on the highway outside our door is dying down. Hey, who said we couldn’t rough it?
Oh, and we chose the recital at Interlochen over the movies. It was by participants in an adult band camp who had come for a week from all over the country. We were hoping we’d hear performances by people who were this close to Carnegie Hall but what I came away with was a better appreciation for professional musicians and just how good they are. I think my watching these performers was just like them watching me play golf. I put my heart and soul into it but I’m just not that accomplished nor gifted. I can appreciate their passion and their effort though.
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Day 17
Sunday, August 15
Under the heading everything old is new again we travel with a night-light. It’s totally age appropriate. However, in the middle of the night in our log cabin it was still so dark that I wasn’t prepared for the discovery that the way to the bathroom was like walking up a ramp in a parking garage.
As I returned on the down ramp Jo was pushing buttons on the fan. The humidity was still bothersome but it had cooled off. She asked me how to stop the thing. I told her to just pull the plug out of the wall and we went back to sleep. I like when I think I’m a genius.
This morning we got up early and left without showering. The one in the bathroom in our log cabin looked like an MRI chamber turned upright so no shower was no problem and anyway, we were headed to get some exercise at a golf course called Arcadia Bluffs. It’s one I’ve always wanted to play and I assured Jo it would be a great walk.
On the way we passed the Cherry Bowl Drive-In we’d chosen to pass on last night and stopped to take pictures. It looked like a diorama from the 50s. Not a sad one but so low tech with the little speakers you attach to your car window and so innocent with the swings and playground stuff under the big screen.
At Arcadia Bluffs the wind was blowing hard and I expected to be humbled but not quite the way it happened. I don’t like golf carts and I opted not to take one. The three other guys I was paired with had them. Two had their wives riding with them. Jo walked with me and after a few holes I realized we were the only two walkers on the entire golf course. If there had been any mountain goats, they would have had golf carts. We got one for ourselves after nine holes.
Arcadia Bluffs is one of the most fantastic natural settings golf has ever intruded upon. It sits above Lake Michigan and its holes simply follow the terrain and winds through the dunes. Michigan, at least what we’ve seen the past couple days, has surprised us. I sure didn’t know about it. Maybe the people here don’t want the rest of us to show up and spoil it.
At one point I heard one of my playing partners telling Jo that if Michigan had mountains, it would be the most beautiful state in the country. She wasn’t buying it. A little later he tried the line on me and I was ready. “If Marilyn Monroe hadn’t had boobs, would we have ever heard of her?” My new friend was ready, too. “If the queen had balls, she’d be king.”… I hit my next shoot.
There was one other thing about this golf course— the clubhouse. Remember the house in the wheat field in Days of Heaven? (Its director Terrance Malick is the J.D. Salinger of Hollywood.) This one sits atop the dunes like a giant gun turret and fortunately can’t fire back at all of us golfers taking shots toward it. Someday, I bet we’ll see it in a movie. I just hope it isn’t Halloween XXII.
We had lunch on the clubhouse patio so we could take in the view a little longer. I’ve rarely seen a blue as beautiful as the water in Lake Michigan appeared today. Even the clouds above it had a blue tint like my clothes have after I’ve put darks in with the whites in the washing machine.
Most afternoons we take an ice cream break and today when we stopped Jo pointed out that while we’d seen lots of little ice cream places, we hadn’t seen a single frozen yogurt store for days. We really aren’t in California anymore.
Our destination this evening was Midland, MI and our mission was to solve a mystery. Jo’s son in law had been here earlier in the week. Aaron’s a writer/editor for Dwell magazine and we hadn’t been able to reach him to find out the purpose of his visit to Midland.
Googling around we thought it might be to research an article about an architect named Alden Dow whose residence and studio are in Midland and whose father was the founder of Dow Chemical, which is also headquartered here. As we drove downtown for dinner we realized that this whole town is Dow-town, the library, the gardens, the baseball field… Yes you can say the Dows endowed the place but I won’t.
We had a hybrid pizza on Main Street (by that I mean Jo gets her half and I get mine and the difference is that one half probably gets a thumbs up from the American Heart Association and the other spam email from a mortuary) and realized that right across from us was more likely the reason Aaron was here. The H hotel looked very hip and the kind of place Dwell likes to showcase. So, afterward we went over there to ask some questions.
I was virtually out of clothes and all I had left to wear tonight was my Sturgis tee shirt with the biker babe high on the hog. That’s probably why I got the strange looks and no help when I asked at the desk if an Aaron Brit from Dwell magazine had been a guest recently. In fact they probably thought Jo and I were husband and wife bounty hunters. And yes, he’d been there and was doing an article about the hotel. Mystery solved!
We drove back to our motel—The Sleep In—where the desk person was busy texting and didn’t even look up as we walked by–and my Sturgis tee shirt felt totally in keeping with the ambiance. After watching the latest episode of Madmen I took the first Pepsid of the trip before going to bed. The heartburn topping was only on my half of the pizza.
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