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11/16/2016

Even if it seems that nature might have gotten her signals crossed winter is inevitable. The oil fuel truck backed up our driveway this morning and made a delivery. Yesterday the guys we hire to plow the driveway pounded in the wooden posts that will guide them if and when the snow arrives.
“If” is of course a wishful if but the fact is that it’s been warm enough this fall that I’ve heard people use the words “the new normal” a bunch. I have an elevation app that has determined that our house is less than 90 feet above sea level. Being a golfer I like to describe our location as the distance tee to green of a par four from the ocean. For those who don’t golf that’s about 400 yards to the Camden harbor.

I’ve thought of having a plaque made with the current elevation of 10 Kims Way and the date I’d commissioned it so that those who might inhabit our house after us have a marker and a means of comparison, especially if things change. According to a University of Maine study from 2015 the length of what’s called “the warm season” has increased in our state by two weeks in the past 100 years and is predicted to increase by two more weeks in less than 50 years from now. That’s good for golfers I guess but not so good probably for much else.

A few years ago I had dinner with Graham Shimmield who is the head of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences here in Maine. If anyone would have insight into how sea levels might change, I figured he would but I was also a bit puzzled. I had just attended a talk by Shimmield at our local library and he had shown pictures of the stunning new campus Bigelow Laboratory had recently built in East Boothbay.

The buildings were on a cliff and I’d guess maybe not that much lower than the elevation of my house above the ocean. So, I asked Shimmield if he felt confident about the future of the site Bigelow had chosen to do its research.

“I figure we have at least 100 years,” he said.

11/15/2016

I have walked the Rockland Breakwater at least a couple dozen times since moving to Maine six years ago. The Breakwater is just what its name connotes so sometimes there are whitecaps on its ocean facing side while the waters on the harbor side barely ripple.

The Rockland Breakwater took almost a decade to build and was completed in 1900. It extends over 4,000 feet and is about 40 feet wide. 700,000 tons of granite were used in its construction at a cost at the time of $750,000. Needless to say, adjusted for inflation over a century later, it was a big deal. 

11/9/2016

A reminder– It certainly doesn’t feel like it right now but those of us who oppose what Donald Trump has espoused and represents are still the actual majority in this country. Yes, it may not be by as much as we thought but it is still the case.

When I lived in California I learned about wildfires and something called a controlled burn which was exactly what it sounds like– a fire started intentionally to either fight a larger fire or to prevent a more catastrophic fire from happening at all by burning an area in advance with fire crews present to make sure things don’t get out of control.

I admit I see more movies than I read books. I’d like to change that and posting less on Facebook and getting rid of my Words with Friends app would be a good start. But hey, I enjoy both of those things and certainly, I’m not going to stop watching movies.

There was actually a night in my life that changed the world for me. It was during my freshman year at college. The Dartmouth Film Society screened what would today be called “art house” films and that particular evening they proved to be eye opening ones for me. The double feature was Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Federico Fellini’s 8½. There was even a short film before those two and in one night I was exposed to the Paris photographs of Eugene Atget and the music of composer Erik Satie for the first time as well.

In the dictionary “mind blowing” is defined as something having a hallucinogenic effect. Its etymology has Timothy Leary’s name stamped all over it but before I ever tried LSD it was Marcello Mastroianni’s portrayal of a movie director on the verge of a nervous breakdown that revealed something to me that I had never known film could do— actually take me inside of somebody’s head and in this case the head of someone’s that was imploding on the screen.

Movies changed for me from that moment on and when I lived in New York City for two years after college I went on an all out movie binge. From Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy to Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct I undertook my own sweeping retrospective of cinema history and one time foolishly, even tried to absorb five movies on the same day— I don’t remember which Ingmar Bergman film it was that put me over the edge and left me a zombie.

Three movie theaters in New York were where I spent many evenings because they were repertory movie houses showing old films of all kinds. The Elgin was in Chelsea and a subway ride from the upper Westside where I shared an apartment. It’s credited with being the movie theater that invented the midnight screening which began when it showed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1970. If you’ve seen this movie, then you probably agree with me that it makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show look like Ding Dong School.

I owe the Elgin for introducing me to Buster Keaton. As big a silent movie star as anyone back in his day, Keaton’s work had been virtually forgotten for decades and tied up in legal battles and even misplaced until his genius was rediscovered and films rereleased. The Elgin held a Buster Keaton festival and at the first movie I saw I was in stitches and awe simultaneously and came back for more night after night.

The New Yorker theater was on Broadway at West 88^th St. and it was there I marveled at Toshiro Mifune’s performance in Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samuarai. It was the uncut version that included an intermission that was projected on the screen as part of the film. And it also was on the way to the New Yorker one night that I ended up in the hospital. In a hurry to make the beginning of Zoo in Budapest with Loretta Young I ran across the street in front of a bus and got whacked by a Volkswagen that was running the red light. I landed on the hood of the car and fell off and to the driver’s everlasting credit he stopped, picked me up and rushed me to the hospital.

My left lower leg swelled grotesquely and turned as red as a salami as I lay on an emergency room gurney but no doctor came to examine me for about an hour. When one ultimately did he led a group of a half dozen others who I realized were interns. Why? Because the first thing the doctor said even before addressing me after he lifted up the sheet covering my injured leg was, “I want to show you a classic example of a massive hematoma.”

After that classic example of American medical bedside manner the hospital gave me a choice. I could be admitted or I could take copious amounts of codeine at home and stay in bed which I decided to do and believe it was for about a month but have no clear memory of that entire time. I still have never seen Zoo in Budapest by the way.

But the jewel in my crown of beloved movie theaters was the Thalia just off Broadway on 95^th St. I think of the three movie houses I surely spent the most time at the Thalia, which was the location for an exterior scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. The Thalia showed two movies a night and rotated one of the two out the next day and added a new one in its place. That gave me two chances to catch any single film. The Thalia showed pretty much everything from Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise to Chuck Jones’ Bugs Bunny cartoons.

One night waiting outside for a show I saw a beautiful girl also waiting by herself. I wanted to start a conversation but had no idea how. Of course “hello!” would have been a logical place to begin but it failed to register as an option. My opportunity vanished entirely when her date showed up. A few nights later outside the Thalia the identical situation arose. A different beautiful girl by herself. Another painfully shy inability to seize the moment by me. And then THE SAME GUY arrived and escorted her inside!!!

All three of these theaters have been demolished or repurposed. Today, the dream I used to have of being able to see great movies on my own screen at home has become a taken for granted reality. But I’m afraid the excitement of discovering cinema’s past isn’t the same watching a recording I’ve made from the Turner Classic Movie channel. It’s not about popcorn or candy. It’s all about being part of an audience in the dark watching together. Books, which I really do need to read, are a solitary endeavor. Movies can be of course but I prefer when they are not and am sad to think we may be withdrawing into our private cocoons more and more and in danger of losing the movie theater experience. But I’ll always have the Thalia…

Day 18

Monday, August 16

This morning we did our laundry at the Sleep In before pulling out. Jo remarked that I wouldn’t need to horde quarters anymore and indeed, after today I will no longer be making cashiers lives difficult. For the last seven years whenever I paid cash I have manipulated the change so that I could get as many quarters out of it as possible. I needed them for the washer and dryer in our apartment building. Now, I won’t but told Jo there’s probably a way to hook something up so we still could still use quarters in our house in Camden for old time’s sake. She didn’t laugh.

When Jo called the Alden B. Dow Home and Studio to make reservations for their tour, the guy she talked to figured out who she was immediately. “You must be Drew’s mother?” Jo’s son-in-law had indeed come to Midland to visit the Dow house after all, but his mother-in-law was still going to have to pay to see it. (Just giving you a hard time, Aaron.) The tour was at two so we had time on our hands and headed downtown. I wanted to get a haircut and asked two other pedestrians where I could find a barber shop. They directed me to “Irish’s” a few blocks away. Jo stayed on Main St. and I found the barber and one of those experiences that make life, or at least mine, all the richer.

I heard a joke that goes like this. “I’m losing my hair. Well, not actually. It’s in my brush.” These days I like to keep what’s left of my hair away from a brush so I have it short. My barber in LA needed about five minutes with my head and didn’t even have to use his scissors.

The door at Irish’s was open and a guy was inside. I just walked in and asked if I could get a haircut. “We’re actually closed Mondays but sure I’ll cut your hair,” he said. His name was Billy Hopkins and as I looked around I realized I’d stumbled into a time warp. I needed to pee and the toilet seat in the bathroom was up which is always a good sign. I’ve liked to listen to barbers talk since reading Ring Lardner’s “Haircut” when I was a teenager and Billy told me that the shop had been open since 1941. It had four barber’s chairs and a lot more regular ones for customers who were in line. He said that on Saturdays they were so busy that the parking lot at the funeral home next store didn’t mind the overflow of cars unless of course there was a funeral.

Billy’s father had bought the shop from its original owner decades ago. He still cut hair. Billy’s son was the third barber. “My grandson is five and we’ve already had him using the clippers,” Billy told me. The mechanical cash register had been in Midland’s old J.C. Penny and was still in service but we didn’t need it. The haircut was $13 and I was happy to make it $20 and as I left Billy said, “If you’re ever in Midland again, I’ll cut your hair and I’ll remember you.” As I went out the door I thought to myself that he actually might.

We had lunch at the Zinc Café which is part of the H Hotel where Aaron had stayed. The waitress talked us into ordering the soup de jour, and I had misgivings when it arrived and looked like the fare I dreaded in my grade school school cafeteria but it was good and the lesson here I guess is that cooks can be deceiving.

The tour at the Dow house was amazing. Too bad we weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside to reveal how interesting an interior it has but those were the rules. Alden Dow was the son of the founder of Dow chemical and a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright but as our guide pointed out he was on a parallel path with Wright and not a disciple. In fact he once beat out Wright for a project which infuriated the little guy who never spoke to him again.

The similarities between the work of the two men are indisputable and the Dow house has a pond that feels almost like it comes inside the house, which reminded me of Wright’s “Falling Water” near Pittsburgh where a stream actually does. The living room and dining room in Dow’s home are spectacular and there are whimsical touches throughout the house that lead me to believe dinner in the Dow House with its architect would have been great fun. Jo and I had never heard of Alden Dow before and wondered why he isn’t more widely known and admired. Turns out it might be because he did so much of his work in his hometown. Midland, MI has 132 of his projects, most of them homes. And it also was surprising to learn that Midland has apparently the highest ratio of PhDs per capita in the nation due to the Dow Chemical presence no doubt.

Before we left Michigan and crossed into Canada we stopped at a Cracker Barrel hoping to get ice cream. I’d never been in one of these and although they advertise themselves as an old-fashioned country store, they didn’t have ice cream cones nor any crackers or barrels that I could find. In fact what the hell is a cracker barrel? After that disappointment it was time to leave the country. At the border we were asked a few questions and must have had the right answers to be allowed into Canada without delay. The speed limit and distances were now in kilometers and I smugly explained to Jo how to convert them to American. Our destination for the night was London, Ontario and as we got to the city limits a sign said that London’s population was 337,000. I said, “That’s a lot bigger than I’d have ever guessed.” Jo said, “Yeah, but is that in kilomapeople?”

Best line of the trip and it isn’t mine.

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Day 19

Tuesday, August 17

Tonight in front of our chicken Parmesan in Buffalo Jo and I admitted we might be starting to burn out. The signs? Our stop at Niagara on the Lake ended when we decided it was a “been there done that” kind of place for us. Then further down the river at Niagara Falls, which Jo had never seen, we felt like we’d been soaked before even coming close to the water. Parking was $20, not VIP parking but “Walk a kilometer from here” parking.

We were on the more scenic Canadian side where a Who’s Who bank of chain hotels with windows facing the falls screams “Screw with a View”. Jo asked me earlier why Niagara Falls became America’s primo honeymoon destination and Googling tells me that it started over two hundred years ago with Aaron Burr’s daughter followed by Napoleon’s brother coming here to shed their britches after their hitches. Walking to the falls from the parking lot required going through a building and down an escalator and a gauntlet of souvenir shops . It felt like we were negotiating a crowded airport. When we got outside, looking down at the boats ferrying tourists through the mist to the front of the Falls appeared to be an awesome adventure into a vortex best dressed for with Gor-Tex but we skipped it.

We stood, we gaped, we left without really feeling very inspired. The crass man made surroundings seemed to negate the awe of nature’s creation. But full disclosure. On our way out we bought four souvenir shot glasses and now, knowing more of the Fall’s history, I wish I’d have found something with “I’d rather be here than Elbe” written on it. Family legend has it that Jo’s grandmother from Ohio saw Niagara Falls and was even less barreled over than we were. Her testimonial: “Take away the water and what have you got?” which in the original Yiddish was, “Shpritz?” (accompanied by a shrug) “Schwitz?” (then a bigger shrug) Feh!” (punctuated with her own spritz)

Our trip has probably been more of a voyage of gluttony than discovery (at least on my part) and it was at lunch much earlier that we had our surreal moment of the day.  But let me go back first to London. Our GPS (Get Places without having to ask Strangers) took us through a boring part of the city and then put us on what it called the Q and we call a freeway. A sign advertising the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame was tempting but to possibly see a statue of Ferguson Jenkins (Can you think of any other Canadians in the American Baseball Hall of Fame?) also indicated it was 57 kilometers x 2 out of our way. An exit for the Wayne Gretsky Parkway a short time later didn’t get us to reroute either. Sorry, if that’s a slap shot in the face, Wayne.

But when we did get off the Q to P we decided to dine at the Egg and I Family Restaurant in Ancaster. Yes, that’s the name, the L must have fled to Lost Vegas. Wendy’s and the ubiquitous Tim Horton’s were options but we have diligently avoided restaurant chains of any nationality. The first thing that hit me after we sat down were the chandeliers, there must have been a dozen of them, but then I noticed the art. Hanging on almost every available millimeter of wall space were paintings with eggs embedded in them in some way, shape or form.

But there was even more going on than that with the egg art. One was done in the style of a Mondrian, another a Magritte. There was a Warhol and a Lichtenstein and a Green Eggs and Ham and, my favorite, a triptych of a moored egg dirigible splitting apart at the yoke. I’d have maybe shelled out for the sunny side down Hindenburg but Jo had her own favorite and an idea for our kitchen in Camden. We asked our waitress about the artist. “He works here,” she said. “What does he do?” I wanted to know. “Other than paint these?” she asked and then told us she didn’t really think he did anything except create the pictures for the restaurant. When we asked his name nobody in the place was sure. It was either Cullen or Collins, that’s the best they could do, but by the time we left we had a cell phone number for the Egg and I’s artist in residence and Jo is seriously thinking we should commission him. Maybe he’d do an omelette to Van Gogh?

This evening I have complained to the desk here at the Comfort Inn in Cheektowaga that their Wi-Fi sucks. They reached down and pulled out an Ethernet cable for me. Back in the room it didn’t bring the ether any closer. After so many easy days getting on the Internet the last two places we’ve stayed have been unfilled information potholes on the information super highway. In the parking lot I saw an SUV with a Washington State license plate and then the couple it belonged to. I learned they were crossing the country like us but not because they chose to. The guy told me he couldn’t find a job at home but had landed one in Ottawa and was taking it. It made me think of The Grapes of Wrath.

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Day 20

Wednesday, August 18

Calvin Trillin is my favorite food writer. I once got him and Julia Child to agree to be part of a Nightline program idea I wanted to produce for the 4th of July to celebrate apple pie, fried chicken, hot dogs, corn dogs and all the things that make this country burp but Nightline wouldn’t bite. I think they missed out on what could have been a great show. Because of Trillin it was imperative for me to eat barbeque in Kansas City and chili in Cincinnati when I had the chance. Today, we left Buffalo without sampling its contribution to American obesity — chicken wings in hot sauce. But before you cry fowl, I want to tell you about Buffalo’s other bones. (Some days the pun engine works better than others and after almost 5,000 miles it feels tonight like it just had an oil change. You may have hoped I had let the engine seize.)

This city is proud of its architecture so before leaving it Jo and I did a cursory tour. Our first stop the Darwin Martin House Complex and, even though we didn’t get to go inside, from the outside it is a stunner and considered a Frank Lloyd Wright masterwork. When you realize that it was built in 1905 this wasn’t just “There goes the neighborhood” this was there go neighborhoods forever. It is like Jules Verne if he’d imagined the Nautilus as a practicing Zen Buddhist and, as Jo said, this is where the ranch house comes from as well as the craftsman and the bungalow. And let’s give credit to Darwin Martin, the client, who footed the costs of the overruns.

Next, we headed down Delaware Ave. or “Millionaires Row”. Buffalo once had more of them per capita than any place in the country. Downtown we stopped so I could get coffee and I was standing in line behind a policeman when I noticed that his badge read “Chief”. He was one indeed and explained to me that Buffalo has five of them who each handle a portion of the city. This was his turf. When he heard me order black and no sugar he said, “That’s a real man’s coffee.” Nicest thing a cop has ever said to me.

Onto the New York Thruway, destination Saratoga Springs. We’ve rounded the backstretch and are heading for the finish line of our journey now. We’re not in a hurry but we passed on the Jell-O Gallery, the Boxing Hall of Fame and the Women’s Rights National Park in Seneca Falls, which I’m sure we would have considered checking out three weeks ago. We stopped near Syracuse for lunch at Wegmans and if you’ve never heard of it think Gelson’s in Socal and multiply by ten. Yes, it’s a super sized, super stocked high-end supermarket. My mother introduced me to Wegmans. She’d travel 45 minutes to shop at the one nearest to her home in Reading, PA and she actually wrote letters to the company pleading with them to open a store nearer to her. Hasn’t happened although Jo and I think it would be a slam-dunk for the company.

People in Reading may not be that high-end but from their rear ends you can tell they have no trouble supporting a supermarket. It’s a city that runs on pretzels and potato chips and where the VA stands for voracious appetite and the local airport needs a runway almost as wide as it is long.

Anyway, you can buy lunch and sit down and eat it at Wegmans. And yes, I have contradicted myself after writing yesterday that we don’t do chains… In the end we’re all hypocrites. Jo got pot stickers and a piece of pizza and pointed out that I had amassed selections from four different Asian cuisines. My Chinese and Indian were good. My Japanese and Thai less so.

Back on the road I called ahead for a place to stay and we ruled out Saratoga Springs as too expensive. Instead, we would do Amsterdam, not the one with the canals and the Van Gogh’s of course but the one with the Mohawk as in River and canal as in Erie. Our ice cream break this afternoon was in Herkimer, NY and as we were searching for soft serve we passed a diner with a banner that made me pull over. If you ever see a bumper sticker that reads, “I Brake for Weirdness” buy it for me and I’ll reimburse you. The banner read “World’s Largest Omelet Pool Table”. As I was bounding through the door I rethought things and concluded I’d misled myself. Surely, what this really meant was the diner made huge breakfasts and had a room to shoot billiards in after you ingested one.

I was wrong. I mean, I was right the first time. The owner, Scott Tranter has huevos big time and was more than happy to show me his pictures of the 41,040 egg finished project which was hatched outside the diner just last month. It didn’t even qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, he said, “Because the Europeans think the way we raise our chickens is cruel.” Jo thought I might be cracking up because I was asking so many questions and as soon as we left I assured her my egg encounters on this trip were over.

Tonight I played what I consider Jo’s golf— we went to the movies. Jo grew up at the movies in Rockland and one of our perks moving to Maine will be a lifetime free pass at the Strand Theater that her grandparents built. Jo loves the movies. All kinds of movies. We went to see Inception and walked out after an hour and a half when Jo turned to me and said, “This is awful.” I already had my review ready or at least a theory about Inception’s conception. If you had Timothy Leary tripping and had him playing Grand Theft Auto and then put that inside the snowy shaky from the last episode of St. Elsewhere… It was that weird. I felt bad about our fleeing this disaster of a movie because I had picked it. Jo wanted to see Eat Pray Love but I had her check the website Rotten Tomatoes and it had gotten a dreaded green splat from the critics, whereas Inception was rated red and therefore the obvious choice to me. Again, I have to admit I’m a film snob and won’t do green. Now, that’s wouldn’t do green. Rotten Tomatoes is no longer going to rule my life and ruin my wife’s evening again. At dinner my face was red with apology and had egg all over it.

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Day 21

Thursday, August 19

There is no reason to ever go out of your way to visit Amsterdam, NY, but there is no denying that there is something powerful you can take away from seeing it. As we drove out of town we passed a half dozen big old factory buildings, rotting shells of American industry. Some were dead and empty, others appeared to be still breathing but barely. Less than a century ago hundreds of towns like Amsterdam were no doubt like hundreds in China today, roaring with the noise of production and alluring with the availability of jobs. Getting to Amsterdam we had passed the homes of Remington, the gun maker and Beech Nut, the baby food. Both looked as they probably have for decades, still alive but not outwardly modernized and so appearing majestically worn out. Opportunities here are now probably greatest at hospitals and Indian casinos, taking care of the damaged or taking advantage of the dreamers.

And then it was on to the racetrack in Saratoga Springs. I’d come to the town once before for a date with a girl from Skidmore about 40 years ago. My memory of it does not serve me well and ends sometime about halfway through happy hour. The town is bigger than I thought. Jo stopped to look in the window of a store called Lilly Pulitzer. I know the Pulitzer Prize but had never heard of the dress designer and Jo couldn’t believe it. She said this Pulitzer’s work in prints was popular when I was in college. I thought, but didn’t say, that in college I never noticed the skirt, only what was inside it.

While she went inside to browse at the clothes she used to wear (I would have noticed Jo back then.) I found a store that turned out to have what has to be one of the largest collections of books about horse racing anywhere. I think I’ve only ever read two books having to do with the Sport of Kings. One was Sea Biscuit and the other was many years earlier entitled Laughing in the Hills. It was non-fiction and terrific and about a racetrack and its characters near San Francisco called Golden Gate Fields. The author was Bill Barich. I discovered on a shelf that he’d written a follow up after moving to Ireland and purchased it.

After lunch where we both had Rachel sandwiches— that’s a Reuben with turkey (Who knew?), we headed for the track. I had taken Jo to Santa Anita last year where we sat in the clubhouse and saw Mel Brooks and the headmaster of Harvard-Westlake among those parked in handicapping spaces. Saratoga Springs track is quaint (in operation since 1864) and well maintained but Santa Anita is a lot prettier. I was determined to win a race and accomplished that easily by betting on all seven horses in the 2nd race to finish first. That cost me $14 dollars and I’m sure is pretty stupid but the winner paid $12 so I considered that a reasonable return on my investment, especially when I compare it with my ex-broker’s work before I got out of individual stocks and went all mutual funds on my own this sping.

Jo sat down out of the sun and I roamed a bit underneath the grandstand looking for something interesting to photograph or somebody interesting to talk to. For the former I found the IRS camera window. It’s where, I was informed, you have to go to be photographed if you win more than $600 on a bet or if your winning ticket was on a long shot of 300 to 1 or more.

For the latter I found myself in a dilemma. It happened when I saw a man in a wheelchair with a respirator and other people tending to him. I thought I knew what I was looking at— an ALS patient. When one of the men with him went to the water fountain and sat down I sat down beside him. I introduced myself and asked some questions. Yes, his father had been diagnosed with ALS over a year ago and now could no longer speak or move. He communicated only by blinking his eyes. He wanted to come to the races and his family had made the trip from Massachusetts. The son said it has been really hard to deal with his illness.

I told him about the friend I had who died from ALS two years ago. I only really got to know him just before he was diagnosed and during the last year of his life spent a lot of time with him. I told him about how the progression of the disease had played out with my friend and how incredibly brave he was. I told him what a horrible disease ALS is since the victim’s mind is totally unaffected but gets isolated by a body that locks itself up and throws away the key. We sort of compared notes and when we finished he thanked me for the talk. My dilemma was my motivation for wanting to have the conversation in the first place. Did I really want to see if I could help the guy or did I just want another story to write about? I still don’t know how to answer that but do know that I don’t miss asking people who have lost their homes in a fire or loved ones in a plane crash to give me a soundbite.

We left after the 4th race and headed for Manchester, VT. At 4:01 p.m. we crossed into New England. For a while finding a place for dinner was a bit of a drama. Yelp was no help and, despite all the shi-shi shopping, Manchester hasn’t apparently yet made the rounds with the ChowHounds. So, we looked in the windows. The first place under glass we checked was the fanciest and called Bistro Henry. It had chicken Parmesan for $25. The second spot had a party going on and we departy-ed quickly. The next was like a homey hunting lodge and had chicken Parmesan for $25. Finally, we settled on the “neighborhood” Italian that had chicken Parmesan for $25. So, as far as restaurants go here it’s laissez-faire home economics or let’s just call it Manchester united. I thought of complaining to the local restaurant association but I know what they’ll say, do you?

Here goes: “How you gonna keep em down on the Parm after they’ve seen Bistro Henry?” (Remember, you can stop reading any time.)

We have now completed three weeks on the road and we’re going to make it home tomorrow night. So far, we’ve traveled 5,014 miles. We’re tired but happy.

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Day 22

Friday, August, 20

The motel we stayed at outside Manchester last night is owned and operated by a Polish couple. They bought it after living in NYC for a number of years. For the husband Vermont was love at first sight, for his wife it’s still a work in progress. Jo and I know that there is a risk we might not cozy up to Camden as much as we hope to. It’s small, the winter is cold and long. I haven’t lived through real winter since 1972. Jo hasn’t since 1986. We’ll give it our best shot. New England days like today though make you glad you came, mid 70s, nice breeze, biscuit clouds. I played my third and last round of golf of the trip at Equinox Golf Course. It sits between two gorgeous green mountain ranges and once again golf has expropriated an exceptional landscape just so people like me can self-flagellate themselves on a beautiful day.

Although Vermont is over a hundred miles from the ocean I managed to hit into seven sand traps on the first eleven holes. Might as well have been at the beach. For a number of shots my direction marker was the tallest steeple in the village. I was playing alone and couldn’t tell anyone until now that it made me imagine I was a rebel priest, reveling in taking aim at the church. Do you think mixing puns with putts might rile the steeliest nerved competitor? I might try it when I sign up for senior tournaments at my new home course in Rockland. The strategy might also land me a DQ, which in golf doesn’t stand for Dairy Queen.

Jo didn’t walk with me today because she wanted to explore Manchester and now, after casting about she wants to learn how to fly fish. There’s a school for that here, she discovered, and it has the ultimate pedigree. Manchester is the home of the Orvis Company, founded by Charles Orvis in 1856. Orvis claims to be the oldest manufacturer of fishing rods and America’s first mail order company. I’m all for us learning, fly fishing has devotees as obsessed as golfers. It’s done in beautiful places and, I assume, has highs that keep you hooked and lows that leave you reeling.

We rolled out of Manchester without enrolling on our way to Hanover, NH for the evening. Jo’s close college friend Judy Colla lives there and her husband Stan is a Dartmouth alum who was at the college both before and after I was. He took time out to serve in Vietnam. Vermont’s mountains and trees had rendered our GPS almost useless or maybe because there were so many back road options it was paralyzed with indecision.  So, the moment for the rarely used old veteran to come off the bench and enter the game had arrived.  I opened a map. It showed a reasonably straightforward route to Hanover that I decided we’d take and then at the last instant I changed my mind and picked what I thought might be the more scenic ride. What happened next was truly serendipitous.

Outside Weston, VT we saw something that startled us— a whale. Not just any whale, but a whale we knew. A magnificent whale we had encountered for the first time several years ago in South Thomaston, ME and had remained in our consciousness ever since. The Art of the Sea Gallery in South Thomaston has mostly miniature models of ships and paintings and photographs with nautical themes. It also has carvings of whales and we almost bought one the first time we went in but then decided to wait until we finally moved to Maine. Now, an example of our whale was hanging on a signpost with an arrow pointing down a dirt road to “Whales of Vermont”, the workshop of Wick Ahrens. Two Australian sheep dogs greeted us at the door. Inside Wick was seated at his desk and hooked up to oxygen for his emphysema. We had a nice visit and learned that Wick had lived in California for a good part of his life after growing up in Vermont. He told us he learned to carve whales from a neighbor when he was young.

He’s been doing it a long time and one thing he said about that really made an impression on me. “You’d think I’d get tired of doing it but I don’t because it isn’t crap!” I thought about my taking a buyout to be rid of my job at ABC News and realized that for too many years I had no longer found it fun or fulfilling. What I was being asked to do was mostly crap. Add to it that I was often working for people I didn’t respect much and you have the end of what had been a lovely love affair. We had to decide on which whale we wanted to take home and after a tough deliberation we chose the white one Jo is holding in the picture. We drew out the checkbook and harpooned our Moby Dick.

While we were with Wick he asked me to get him another tank of oxygen from outside where he had them stacked like firewood. Years of smoking and inhaling sawdust have left him as dependent on supplemental air as an astronaut on the moon. He took us into his workshop before we left and although I know very little about woodworking it appeared to be a place used by somebody who was very good at what he does.

We got to Hanover and told Judy Colla as many stories from our trip as we deemed sufferable for her. After so many that were exhilarating Judy asked me what has been the low point of the trip? I looked at her and said, ”There hasn’t been one yet.”

—

Day 23

Saturday, August 21

Tom Rush was a folksinger I liked and listened to in the 60s. I don’t know if he’s still performing or even alive. My favorite song of his is called Urge for Going and it starts “I woke up today and found snow perched on the town. It hovered in a frozen sky and gobbled summer down.” Joni Mitchell composed it but when Rush sings it, he owns it. Last night at the Colla’s in Hanover I put on my fleece. This morning by the time we hit the road I didn’t need it and there certainly wasn’t any snow on Dartmouth’s green but Jo and I had had our first welcome back to the seasons as we both used to know them. Summer is winding down and if it decides to grant an encore it will come back on stage as Indian summer.

Indian summer… I know what it means but did you know how we came to adopt the expression? Best guesses are it was the time of year when Indians harvested their crops, or, like the term Indian giver, it was meant to be denigrating as in false summer. This is a bit of an awkward way to make a point, but for days I’ve wanted to and haven’t. As we’ve traveled across the country the only Native Americans I’m aware I’ve encountered were those working at the visitor’s center in the Badlands of South Dakota. We may have lassoed their lands and cow punched out their culture, but every day on every highway I’ve noticed we haven’t bothered to take down their signs. From Coos Bay to Chippewa Falls, from Spokane to Seneca, Walla Walla to Winnebago so many things in so much of the country are named for Indians. They gave us the Mohawk haircut and the Shasta soft drink. We gave them measles and smallpox. Do I feel guilt over this? Do you? But what it does make me realize is how short our (as in since Columbus, the colonies and wagon trains) country’s history really is.

Before leaving New Hampshire we stopped for booze near Concord. The state liquor store was mobbed with out of staters like us taking advantage of New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” no sales or income tax tradition. Their license plates should perhaps be revised to read, “Tax Free so Buy”.

Now, it was time for one of the bigger moments of our journey. We were going to cross into Maine over the Piscataqua River Bridge on I-95. The deal would become official and at the border we would hand in our designer cupcakes and precious sushi in exchange for whoopi pies and lobster rolls. Soon my rigueur le drive would be history, too. The only time I’ve worn shoes in three weeks has been to play golf. I love my Rainbow flip-flops. And the only time I haven’t been in shorts is when we went out for dinner to Café Sport in San Francisco and when I ran out of clothes in Midland. But not so fast!  Wait a second. What’s this? Where are we? Our trip had begun with a terrible traffic jam on the way out of Los Angeles and now we were in one just as horrendous within a mile of the Promised Land. Worse, we had to pee. As Ms. GPS squawked orders we disobeyed them. We desperately sought relief before refuge.

Minutes later and feeling much better we proceeded through Portsmouth and Jo learned that there is a second lesser bridge to Kittery that we took across state lines. And there it was, the sign stating we had arrived— “Welcome To Maine— The Way Life Should Be”. Jo was pumping her fist and uttering yeses exponentially. It reminded me of Meg Ryan at the deli with Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. I was excited, too but thinking to myself, how does Maine back up this claim? And could I see the language in the warranty? Not to worry. I know what Caveat Emptor means and what happens if the natives don’t like ME? That could make me Persona Au Gratin like I hear the French Canadians are hereabouts and then I’d be fried. We passed the smaller but equally user-friendly other Portland and headed down the coast. Yes, DOWN the coast to the northeast. Get used to it. I have.

We passed Freeport, home of L.L. Bean and Brunswick, home of Bowdoin College. Next was Bath where they build Navy ships, then Wiscasset where Red’s, a little hot dog/lobster roll stand had a line longer than Pink’s in Hollywood. Waldoboro, Damariscotta, Thomaston then Rockland and a required stop at Jo’s parents’ house— not just to see them but to get a key to our house. I had stupidly packed ours and it got here before us and was locked in our house. Jo’s daughter Drew and her husband Aaron were there as well as Jo’s sister Lynn. It was great to see them all and I got a beer from the fridge and toasted myself. The last seven miles and our best view of the Atlantic Ocean after we left Rockland to go down to Camden. For natural beauty the Penobscot Bay can hold its own with any in the world and although our house doesn’t have an ocean view we can walk to one in five minutes.

It was after six when we arrived at 10 Kim’s Way and the house we bought last fall. The woman who built it named it after her daughter. She took the street sign with her when she left. When the town replaced it without our even having to ask, another apostrophe made a clean getaway. Jo and Peter’s Drive to Maine was over after 23 days, 14 states and one province. Final mileage: 5,365. In front of our door was a box that had been sent from the Red Lion in Richland, WA. Our wayward pillows had made it, too. We have seen a great deal of America but not nearly all there is to see. Some day soon we want to do another road trip. Maybe the entire length of U.S. Route 1 should be next from Fort Kent at the top of Maine to the last note in the Key of West. Route 1 is just a couple blocks from us and is Camden’s main street.

But right now we have to unpack. I’ve got to call on Monday to have our propane service restored so we can use our stove and have the cable company come out to wire us for the Internet and TV. Contrary to what some people believe, Maine is not off the grid, it merely has to stretch a little to reach it. I’m going to have to make a run to the town dump, join the Y, the public library, Rockland’s golf club of course and its little local synagogue in due time, get an oil change, new drivers licenses, change some light bulbs, buy a lawnmower and an ironing board. One of our neighbors has invited us to a pizza party next weekend. There’s an Italian movie we want to see tomorrow night at the Strand…

I guess you can say Jo and Peter now live in Maine. Come see us.

Postscript

I had great fun writing about our trip and maybe one day I’ll pen something as immortal as this. But until then it qualifies as the epitaph…

Get your motor runnin’

Head out on the highway

Lookin’ for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin’ go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

— Mars Bonfire

 

 

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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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Day 8

Friday, August 6

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do — especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

–William Least Heat Moon in Blue Highways

“Blue Highways” was written in the 70s by a guy who, after leaving his wife and losing his job, set out on a trip across America traveling by back roads and avoiding Interstates and cities. It’s one of my favorite books, although Jo might tell you that’s not much of a claim since I read so few. Although Interstates might make it easy to think you’re seeing the country, much of what’s wonderful to discover isn’t near them. Today we were fortunate because we got off I-90 to take the road less traveled. We stopped in Philipsburg, which we thought was just another tiny Montana mining town that had seen better days, and while drinking my coffee I learned that Philipsburg has been making a comeback because of a candy store.

I met the owner of the Sweet Palace who had come to town with her husband about a decade ago. They started a candy store figuring people on vacation eat stuff they wouldn’t at home and, point taken, Jo and I walked away with nearly $20 worth of chocolate. Apparently, candy lovers from around the world make pilgrimages to this place which does over a half million dollars of business a year in sort of the middle of nowhere.

As we were making the walk to the car with our chocolate motherlode something happened that we had both bet never would on this journey, we bumped into people we knew. A friend of Jo’s of many years from Rockland, ME was on a fishing trip with three other guys. One of them turned out to be a college classmate of mine at Dartmouth who now lives in Camden which I hadn’t known. There was a moment of mutual shock among all of us and as we drove away and saw some lightening we decided we’d better not get out of the car and risk getting hit twice.

We made two other stops later in the afternoon at Superfund sites. Yes, call me the environmental accident(al) tourist. One was in Anaconda to see a golf course that Jack Nicklaus designed on the scarred remains of a mineral smelter. The sand traps don’t have sand, they contain finely ground black slag. Our federal government paid for the construction of the course and then gave it to the city. I happen to think this is a pretty cool way to put an exclamation point on man cleaning up after man’s harm to his environment. Golf isn’t usually associated with that but at least here it is.

The other place isn’t cool at all and you actually pay $2 to look down on an unquestioned and un-remediated environmental disaster. The Berkeley Pit was an open pit copper mine right beside downtown Butte. It was productive to say the least. A billion tons of copper and other minerals were extracted from it before it was closed in 1982. At that point the water pumps that kept ground water from seeping into it were turned off and the pit started to fill up. Some years later a flock of migrating geese were found dead in the pit’s water and the consequences of its mining became clear. Heavy metals and dangerous chemicals had turned it into a toxic waste can.   The pit is a mile long, a half a mile wide, 900 feet deep and so toxic that the life forms that survive in it are thought to possibly provide clues to cures for cancers– the theory being that the bad can be destroyed by the even worse. I’d seen the Pit before when I did a story about this place. It never aired on World News Tonight. I don’t think it was because the story wasn’t worthy. What I suspect was the reason was ageism. The correspondent with me had simply fallen out of favor and was in his 50s. At the time I realized my own age had also become a liability in my workplace.

We got to Bozeman and walked from our motel to the rodeo that was the main attraction tonight  and only several hundred yards away. It featured calf roping and bull riding and barrel racing accompanied by a 20 mile an hour wind. Jo noticed that nearly all the kids were blond and as I looked around in the stands I couldn’t find a single Black, Latino or Asian. Jo and I looked at each other and she said what I was thinking that we were likely the only Jews there as well. I added that it was also Friday night and Shabbat. We certainly didn’t feel unwelcome, just aware that we had left behind the diversity of the big city here in the Big Sky.

I saw two kids in cowboy outfits and got permission from their parents to take their picture. Afterward I said to Jo that I thought I’d taken the best picture I’d have from the entire trip.

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Day 9

Saturday, August 7

We went to Walmart in Bozeman this morning and got a science lesson. The ice in the cooler we have in the backseat melts by the end and water has been leaking all over the stuff we’re trying to keep cold. An employee in the store told us that double zip freezer bags were the solution– we’ve been using ordinary plastic bags –and then suggested that we should add a little water and salt to the ice and make sure the freezer bags were on the top of the cooler.  He talked about the physics and chemistry behind all this and when I said he sounded like a teacher he told me he had been— driver’s ed.  But he also explained before that he had worked at Caltech as an astronomy technician.

We hit the road and other riddles popped up throughout the day that I could have used his help with. Why were so many horses standing in pairs by the Interstate as we passed them? Why in this one field were there both rectangular and round bales of hay and not just one or the other? At lunch in a park in Billings why did my hardboiled egg when I cut it up look so much larger than one scrambled egg? And why did I buy the bag of kosher dill flavored potato chips at the gas station? As I was beating myself up over this last one I ate most of them.

We stopped at the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument in the afternoon. Until 1991 the site had been called the Custer Battlefield National Monument but the first George Bush signed a law to change it. I have to add that after watching the orientation film in the Visitor Center political correctness may have played in a role in this and sometimes that seems to me to be changing what’s right to doing what’s stupid.

The finale of the film went out of its way to call those involved on both sides heroes who did what they believed in for their respective nations. It reminded me of youth sports where there are no losers and everybody gets a trophy. What kind of lesson is that? Hey, I know the winner gets to write history but I guess with Custer and Sitting Bull when we write about losing, things can get confusing.

We went through Sheridan, Wyoming and I spotted a bunch of different kinds of chiefs. I bought a bandana in a Western clothing store. I use bandanas as handkerchiefs as opposed to kerchiefs but if I wanted to do that now that I’ve left Los Angeles I won’t have to avoid red or blue ones.

Tonight we’re in Gillette and had dinner at a place that has electric yellow palm trees out front with phony coconuts. Maybe this would have looked nice if it had been neon but it wasn’t and didn’t. We didn’t find any better choices. For a town of about 30,000 it sure has a lot of fast food outlets. According to its Wikipedia page there are: 2 McDonald’s, 2 Burger Kings, 5 Subways, 2 Pizza Huts, 2 Papa John’s, 2 Domino’s, 1 KFC and 1 A&W. Maybe this is normal. We’ve had good luck with motels so far but tonight’s was a bit shabby. I’m afraid this Gillette unlike the shaving company didn’t look or feel sharp.

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Day 10

Sunday, August 9

We knew this day was coming from the moment I talked to a couple outside our motel room in Eureka. They were about our age and traveling by motorcycle to Sturgis, SD. It’s the 70th anniversary of the world’s largest motorcycle rally and as we sped along today it felt like we were being strafed by Messerschmitts on the highway and swarmed by locusts when we got out of the car. A local told us that 800,000 bikers (I checked this stat and it’s accurate.) are expected to show up and as she put it, “We won’t have to have a personal income tax in South Dakota for at least another year.”

The bikers we’ve seen are almost exclusively middle aged and older and attired to the hilt with tattoos, sleeveless tee shirts, leather chaps with lots of gray hair sticking out of their bandanas. The women dress the part, too and if they have cleavage, it’s as prominently on display as the Harleys, although this week you’re probably going to be more in demand here if you can turn a wrench than turn a trick.  They all may think they have the hearts of outlaws but are more likely to have the hands of orthodontists and all of them we’ve met are as pleasant as can be— think Ted Danson playing Charles Manson.

Our first stop out of Gillette was at Devils Tower (There’s no apostrophe because it was misspelled the first time.) and that was when we realized that because of the Sturgis rally we were going to be gridlocked throughout our time in the Black Hills. My picture does not come anywhere close to conveying the number of motorcycles everywhere we’ve been.

Devils Tower was famously the geologic oddity that Richard Dreyfus replicated with his mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Some climbers were scaling it today and if they were also bikers I’d say they’re automatically uninsurable.

Our next destination was Blackwood, which is South Dakota’s gambling capital and now so lucrative that the once dilapidated little town has a four story parking garage. We felt like we were back at Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks. The noise of the bikes drove us inside for lunch where thankfully the windows were closed. An Israeli couple with four young kids sat down beside us and we talked about how big America is. In Israel there’s a joke that goes when you travel over 20 miles you take your pajamas with you.

Mt. Rushmore’s viewing area has been completely revamped since I was last here, no doubt to accommodate more visitors but I’m afraid it has tarnished the majesty of the Presidents’ chiseled in the cliff. The new parking garage costs $10 (That’s $2.50 a head… Get it!) and once you leave your car you walk up a flag lined entry way that looks like something Ferdinand Marcos would have built to honor himself. And compared to the understated former visitor center that’s in a famous scene of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest where Eva Marie Saint shoots Carey Grant, the new one someone said (not me) looks like it belong at Big Schlock Candy Mountain.

In any event bike noise serenaded us as we paid homage to the sculptees and the sculptor who created such a powerful tribute. It was then that Jo told me she’d read a book about him and that he was a rabid anti-Semite. My reverie was ruptured. Now, I know why there aren’t any Jewish presidents included with George, Thomas, Theodore and Abraham but then again when we walked to where we got close enough to look up their noses, Jefferson’s made me think there’s possibly more to his story.

Dinner tonight was the best meal since the Kingdom of Dumpling in San Francisco and a surprise at an Italian restaurant on Main St. in Rapid City. We watched Madmen in our room and I need to amend my claim that we haven’t had the TV on before. This was the second time. I think Don Draper needs to make a road trip to get his head together.

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Day 11

Monday, August 9

Before pulling out of Rapid City we made our second purchase of the trip. Jo had seen a platter in a store window and we went back to buy it. It’s got pictures of buffalo baked on it around the border that were taken in the 19th century by a white man who documented the Indian way of life. Looks better than my description.

On our way out of town I grabbed some daylight pictures of neat neon I either had missed or it just wasn’t turned on the night before. After the last shot as I backed the car out of the parking space I had a little accident. Insignificant damage to our car, enough to the other vehicle to make me think the lower auto insurance rate I was counting on in Maine could now be history.  Did you know that “Shit happens” has a Wikipedia page?

Onward we drove almost without a care, which is a hell of a lot better than almost without a car. The signs had started on Sunday but now they seemed like they were appearing every half-mile. “Veterans Get Free Coffee and a Donut”, “Honeymooners Get Free Coffee and Donuts”, “Coffee 5 Cents”… did they miss anyone? Yes, it’s the signage for Wall Drugs, which was possibly the country’s first tourist trap, but how it happened is actually a good story.

A pharmacist and his wife moved to Wall, SD to open their own business. They picked Wall because it had a Catholic congregation and the couple went to church every day. Business was awful and they were ready to make a mass exodus so to speak when one hot summer day the pharmacist’s wife had an idea.  She put up a sign on the highway with three prophetic words— Free Ice Water. The rest as they say is history. All I can add is you know all those believers who ask the Lord for a sign? She got one.

Into the Badlands we headed. We’ve had exceptional weather so far but now the sky on the horizon looked scary. In fact I made a  joke about Pennsylvania Dutch funnel cake and what appeared like funnel clouds both being able to kill you that didn’t get a laugh. As we stopped at viewpoints I tried to get a decent shot of the lightening we were seeing. Luckily the weather kept its distance and we sped away and crossed into the Central Time while still in South Dakota. It’s one of those states that has two different time zones within it.

At the point on the road where we saw the sign marking this I checked my cell phone and the time had already adjusted. Felt like we had been hit by a silent Cruise missile or could have been.

I don’t know when this started but tonight at dinner I heard it again so it must be everywhere. When our waitress brought the bill she said, “I’ll be your cashier tonight when you’re ready.” Another job outsourced.

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Day 12

Tuesday, August 12

I can think of only four reasons to stop in Mitchell, SD… You need medical care, you need auto repair, you’re falling asleep at the wheel, or you want to see the corn murals at the Corn Palace.  When I asked at the motel desk if it was worth a visit, the question got such a dour response I thought I should report the woman to the Mitchell Chamber of Commerce but of course when you’re in Rome you’re going to go Latin and the Corn Palace is the ultimate lend me your ears experience.

The original Corn Palace was built in the 1890s to brag about the area’s fertile soil. It was a wooden structure and only after the entirely corn made murals were affixed to it did the locals realize they had erected a colossal fire trap that even Orville Redenbacher would not have approached without an extinguisher. Actually, Mitchell, SD might have become America’s original “pop” art shrine if the city hadn’t torn it down and started over with a metal frame that supports the present building.

Mitchell changes the murals every year– an all volunteer effort –and even though they’re stuck with an amber waves of grain color pallet we were impressed, especially by one of a locomotive that looked like it was moving. By the way the high school basketball team plays its games in the gym inside and yes, their nickname is the Kernels.

As we got back on I-90 East, Jo asked me the difference between a plains and a prairie.  Anybody, know? The only Plains I’ve moseyed in is called White and contains half of my relatives and the only prairies I’m familiar with are the ones with the Little House and a Home Companion both of which I avoid. Garrison Keillor should have Larry David as a guest sometime. Curb Your Enthusiasm visits Lake Woebegone would certainly be a show I’d listen to. To me Keillor’s brand is bland and I’d like to see it kicked to the Curb.

Anyway out on the plains/prairie, I noticed some signs by the road that sort of sum up Middle America for me. Some serious anti-abortion messages alternated with others from Olivia and Annabelle who appear to have dueling “Adult Supercenters”. Also saw one on a silo claiming it was made by the Sukup Silo Company. I’ve checked this out and they are legit. “Hey, got some excess grain? We’ll, Sukup all of it for ya!”

We diverted briefly to Sioux Falls and as I was refueling the car I scored free ZZ Top tickets or could have from a nice guy on his way to the Sioux Falls Fair. He told me he’s a vendor who travels with his son from fair to fair around the country selling cell phone accessories. The economy in the Midwest he thinks is better than elsewhere in America because people still have jobs here due to farming and he added, “Everybody has cell phones so business is good.” I’m always impressed by the niches people find for themselves to make a living.

We caught up to the rain for the first of  what would be several times today at a rest area. I got soaked before I could get the umbrella deployed. I’ve never seen a sky so dark. We had crossed from South Dakota into Minnesota and immediately ranches had turned into farms. As we were standing inside the place watching the deluge I asked a guy in a park ranger uniform how the corn crop was doing this summer. He told me it’s going to be a record yield and I wondered if it was too late to call a commodities pit in Chicago–from corn spectator to corn speculator all in one morning.

By the time we got to the next rest area for lunch we had sun again. It was a beautiful spot for a picnic called Clear Lake. The quick drying shirt I’d bought at REI lived up to its billing. We’d spread it above the dashboard and as I drove topless, Jo remarked that if she’d done that she’d have been arrested. I told her that me with my shirt off was exactly the opposite, I couldn’t get arrested.

Our next stop was in Blue Earth, MN and it was short but planned. When traveling lengthy stretches on the Interstate you’ve got to find reasons to get off and I wanted to see the world’s largest statue of the Jolly Green Giant.  It’s about 60 feet high and the Green Giant company had nothing to do with it. It was built by a Blue Earth radio station owner who was upset that Interstate 90 had bypassed the town. Yes, he wanted to lure tourists to visit Blue Earth but the guy also had his own radio show on which he interviewed travelers and gave them Green Giant vegetables as a gift. Many apparently asked him if in fact there was a Green Giant. So, I don’t know if the statue has helped Blue Earth any but nobody need ask about the existence of the Green Giant. However, I’m afraid the Giant needs to relocate. He stands behind an abandoned gas station and the neighborhood just doesn’t look like a place where he should be vegging out at this point. Blue Earth had him draped in a tee shirt promoting cancer awareness this day, and I hope he was doused with sunblock.

Austin, MN is the home of Hormel and something I was looking forward to visiting even more than the Jolly Green Giant. By now you know what appeals to me and Austin had something that was a four star attraction. Its Spam Museum wasn’t a disappointment but it wasn’t a grand slam home-run either which just proves that there is only so much you can do with Spam. We truly loved the door that leads into the movie theater.

The film was fun and when a guy came by with a silver tray handing out pieces of Spam on the ends of pretzel sticks, I was obviously in hog heaven.

In the gift shop I bought a can of Spam spread– I didn’t know there are a dozen different kinds of Spam and could have chosen bacon cheese or Jalapeño– but what was really startling to learn was that making all the Spam in the world, which is all the Spam produced here in Austin, takes only a dozen people. That’s so few jobs for such an iconic item that no matter what you might think of Spam as nourishment, it certainly doesn’t seem to be nourishing the local economy much anymore.

But Spam and Hormel’s history was well worth hearing about. There was an interactive exhibit featuring Hormel’s big celebrity pitch people back in the golden age of radio. Music by Artie Shaw and jokes by Burns and Allen. In one bit George asked Gracie, “What would you say if another man asked you out for dinner?” To which Gracie replied, “SPAM!” But before I leave you with the impression Hormel has been just another company interested in trimming its costs for a fatter bottomline take a look at the video below… America and Americana at its best!

We made it to Minneapolis tonight and had the best dinner of the trip at a place called the Modern Café, everything was really wonderful. At the end of the meal Jo asked me what I was going to do now with my can of Spam spread. I told her, “Buy a really good piece of bread.”

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Day 2

Saturday, July 31

“To be where little cable cars
Climb halfway to the stars!”

San Francisco and Tony Bennett are inseparable now but did you know that the song was written in Brooklyn in the 1950s and before Bennett was offered it Tennessee Ernie Ford turned it down?

“Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt!”

It’s hard to make the case that there’s a prettier city in America than San Francisco and why would you try? During my career with ABC News I loved getting to do stories here whenever I could. Spent a day once on the Golden Gate Bridge with a man who after 9/11 walked across it daily for months waving an American flag. Another time followed a guy as he made the rounds of ethnic restaurants collecting their used cooking oil to fuel his car. Spent an evening in the San Francisco Bay floating in “McCovey Cove” with the flotilla of souvenir hunters hoping to retrieve a Barry Bonds home-run ball. And yes, on another night was on hand to actually see Bonds break Hank Aaron’s record and then be sternly reprimanded for not observing press box etiquette– I jumped up and clapped when he hit it and as I learned there’s no rooting allowed in the press box.

We had a great day and a typical SF one– cool and overcast. Drew’s husband and Jo’s son-in-law Aaron is an urban explorer of the highest rank. From a bacon donut to a synagogue with an exterior that looked like a half pipe from the X Games he led us on a wonderfully eclectic urban safari during which we filled our senses to the hilt. Two other highlights were Paul’s Hat Works, a tiny store that dates back to 1918 and the Kingdom of Dumpling, a hole in the wall that’s to Chinese dumplings what Langer’s in LA is to deli pastrami. Did I mention I have always loved eating here? I’ll miss my mostaccioli and shrimp fix at Caffe Sport in North Beach and the incomparable meat pies at Hunan in the Embarcadero. And on an earlier visit Jo introduced me to the cannoli at Stella. I think I could have been a food writer. Only problem my book would have been titled “Weight, Weight Don’t Tell Me!”

One of our last stops was by the ocean and a place I knew nothing about. Aaron ushered us into a restaurant called the Beach Chalet where there are murals painted during the Great Depression. Stunning murals painted by artists commissioned by the W.P.A. Go there if you get the chance! And if you like them thank FDR and his generation for all they have provided us.

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Day 3

Sunday, August 1

Had a tough time starting the car when we left San Fran. I figure our Volvo wasn’t used to the cold weather. In LA the only time it got near anything resembling Sweden was the Ikea parking lot. We headed north up the 101 and then turned west toward Mendocino on the 128, a wonderful road. The town sits back from a bluff above the ocean and we hiked along it and marveled at the beauty.

Before we left Mendocino I took a photo through a store window. It’s the “wood stock” edition of Jerry Garcia on sale no less to mark his birthday. This one was cherry Garcia, but he also comes in mahogany or teak– and if you believe that, then you don’t know me very well. Jerry would have turned 68 on August 1. I have to confess I never got what the fuss was all about. I didn’t need a particular band as a reason to get stoned.

Driving north on the 1 afterward required a lot of concentration. Endless sharp turns on a narrow road. I don’t remember ever turning a steering wheel so much and this was an unexpected challenge that I don’t recommend if you have any history at all of vertigo or carsickness. Overnighted in Eureka which is another place I got to with ABC News several times, often enough in fact to look forward to breakfast tomorrow at the nearby Samoa Cookhouse serving flapjacks to lumberjacks for over a hundred years.

By the way if Archimedes ever really said “Eureka, I’ve found it!” it’s ironically apropos when uttered here, especially by airline pilots. Flying to Eureka can present a navigational challenge. When the Navy built a runway at this location just before WWII it soon discovered that the area had the third foggiest weather in the world. Flights into the tiny airport here get cancelled frequently.  I’m not big on instrument landings.

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Day 4

Monday, August 2

Today we continued up the coast to Bandon, Oregon. It’s a stop I chose for a reason and a friend of ours suggested we stay at the little motel we’re in tonight. It has as stunning a view of the ocean out the window as I think you’ll ever find for under $100. In fact the Oregon coastline we just traveled to get here is for my money just as majestic as Big Sur.

By the way there is a b in Bandon but no brie in Bandon. We wanted to buy some to go with bread and wine while we enjoyed our ocean front vista at the motel but the supermarket didn’t have any, plenty of Tillamook cheddar though.

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Day 5

Tuesday, August 3

My friend Brian Rooney used to think I worked people too hard when we were in the field doing our pieces for ABC. He called my shoots “Imber Death Marches”. Well, I finally wised up and found a story about an uniquely fabulous restaurant in the Oregon wine country, booked us into an exquisite B & B and got us two  dinners and a lunch gratis from the subject of our story the master mushroom and truffle hunter, chef and owner of the Joel Palmer House. I never heard another complaint from Rooney.

Well, today I introduced my wife to my old way of doing business and it was only fitting that we are back in Oregon. I didn’t mention previously that Bandon, Oregon has in the space of only a decade become a premier golf destination in the United States. A guy who made a fortune in greeting cards has now built four golf courses in the dunes by the Pacific and every year hundreds of private jets bring golfers from around the world to Bandon. Golf has also meant plenty of new jobs for this area which badly needed them. And yes, I did manage to sell this story to ABC News and produce it. Click below if you want to watch it:

I helped the local economy myself today and played the newest of the golf courses, getting Jo up at 6 to make my tee time. She had never walked 18 holes before and at Bandon everybody walks, no golf carts are allowed so that the experience resembles Scottish golf where nobody rides around the links. Jo agrees that even if this weren’t a place with little holes with flags in them, it would still be a most worthwhile hike.

Having starved Jo until after we finished playing at noon we picnicked in the parking lot of an Indian casino in North Bend and then drove several more hours up the coast before heading east for the first time on our journey to a town named McMinnville. I’d been here before, too (I’ve been a lot of places.) and wanted Jo to see its incredibly well preserved main street. When I was here the first time I thought Jimmy Stewart was going to run out in front of my car and kiss the hood. Didn’t happen but this time I did indeed have my own Donna Reed (Wasn’t she the hottest sitcom mom ever?) with me today.

After dinner we finally got to our lodging for the night at 10 p.m. just over the Columbia River in Vancouver, WA. That’s about 16 hours door to door for the day– a certifiable Imber Death March experience. We’ll head back in to Portland to explore in the morning.

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Day 6

Wednesday, August 4

“We had a great many horses, of which we gave Lewis and Clark what they needed, and they gave us guns and tobacco in return.”– Chief Joseph

“Such a deal!”– Me

We started our day in Portland’s Japanese Garden on a hill above downtown. It’s lovely and we bought our first art of the trip at the garden’s gallery. It’s a print of a Japanese family in kimonos having a picnic in front of Mount Fuji. But there’s more. The family is looking up at the sky at a squadron of fighter planes. I don’t know the artist’s intent but now I have the rest of my life to guess.

We drove past Portland’s renowned Powell’s Books, a city block of books, but didn’t stop, figuring shelves of books look the same everywhere. Lunch was special though. Jo found a Thai restaurant that a couple runs out of their house. When we entered we said hello to the wife in the kitchen as if we were coming over for dinner. The food was great.

We drove away and to the east on the Lewis and Clark Trail, which is highway 14 and runs on the Washington State side of the Columbia River as opposed to the faster Interstate that hugs the river’s southern bank. Jo asked me if I knew the first names of Lewis and Clark and since I didn’t have a clue I said Jerry and Dick, which got a chuckle but gave me no chance of returning tomorrow to defend my title on Jeopardy. Then I thought about it and realized that if Jerry Lewis and Dick Clark had really made first contact with the Indians instead of Meriwether and William American history probably would not have been all that different. Instead of alcohol and smallpoxed blankets, our Native Americans would have been introduced to dumb movies and boring awards shows. With such a mind numbing media barrage I feel sure we could have still robbed them of their spirit and stolen their land.

Our first stop along the Columbia was at Cape Hope and this is definitely a must see. One of my top ten vistas in the U.S. when I come up with the other nine. Our second stop was the Bonneville Dam. You know those fish ladders that are supposed to provide safe passage around the dam for the fish? Well, turns out they don’t work for all our fine finned friends. We learned that 30% of the “juvenile spawners” don’t find their spillway exit and end up passing through the blades of the power station turbines. Some make it out alive but a bunch of them end up as ceviche or sashimi– a sort of existential bait and switch.

We ended up tonight in Richland, WA. The mural on the wall of Richland High School here tells this town’s story. Ever heard of the Hanford Project? No, it’s not a low budget horror movie, for horror it’s the real deal, it was the site nearby where plutonium was produced for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Richland H.S. sports teams are called the “Bombers”. The center of the school’s basketball court has a drawing of a mushroom cloud. Needless to say, over the years there’s been fallout over this but one resident put it this way. “It’s like the Civil War — we killed a lot of our own brothers, but it ended slavery.”

So tonight we had dinner in town at the Atomic Brewery Pub and Eatery. Jo asked me if it was safe to drink the water. I told her it was, figuring by the time any possible radioactivity we were being exposed to here could affect us we’d already be very decayed material.

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Day 7

Thursday, August 5

Up until now I could say there has not been a dull moment during our trip but the drive this morning from Richland to Spokane put that observation to rest– straight, flat and empty. But after picnicking for lunch we had some drama. Outside of Cour d’Alene, Idaho Jo realized we had left our pillows at the Red Lion in Richland. Yes, our pillows, not theirs because we had brought ours from home. We like them that much. But not to worry we won’t have to bury our heads in sorrow for long, the hotel found them and they will now get to Maine before we do. Thank you, Red Lion Richland! We’ve brought way too much stuff in the car for sure but are getting our unloading, loading routine down. I haul, Jo packs.

Today was pretty much a driving day. In Spokane we had stopped downtown briefly to check out the over the top lobby of the Hotel Davenport, a real period piece circa World War I. We got off I-90 to cruise the two main streets of Wallace, Idaho, an old silver mining town that could still serve as the set for Gunsmoke.  By the way even as a kid I knew Gunsmoke wasn’t shot in Kansas. Occasionally, you’s see there were mountains in the background. I had to move to California to learn that the Simi Valley set was actually an appropriate stand-in for Dodge City with so many of Simi’s residents lawmen commuting to jobs as cops in LA.

We crossed into Montana which is one of the states Jo has never been and wanted to see. The business about this being Big Sky Country is not hype. The sky seems bigger here. Why? Maybe because Montana has the least number of people per square mile of any state in the lower 48 with the exception of Wyoming.

This evening we’re staying in Missoula, MT, home of the University of Montana Grizzlies and a pretty gentrified little city. Jo pointed out that having the option to actually choose steamed vegetables with our dinner was an indicator. When I got the bill that was another.

In addition to having been here before for work I was here for the first time in the summer of 1968 with a college friend. We’d hopped in my parents’ car after watching the televised police riot outside the Democratic Convention in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Just took off and drove from Pennsylvania across all of Canada stopping to see a Canadian Football League game, Joni Mitchell’s hometown of Saskatoon, Banff and Lake Louise and to flag down a kindly truck driver who towed my parents’ car out of a ditch we had landed in near Kamloops, British Columbia. On the way back through the U.S. we detoured to Missoula to watch Evel Knievel jump his motorcycle over 13 parked cars. I’m no stranger to “make it up as you go” road adventures.

We have now completed our first week of travel and the odometer says we’ve driven 1,798 miles. We’ve been in five states and today crossed our first time zone. Tonight we did our first laundry and we have still not turned on the TV anywhere we’ve stayed. We have gone by four serious accidents and seen way too much animal road kill.

The first few days we listened to All Things Considered but now we just keep the iPod on most of the time. The driver gets to choose the tunes and we’ve pretty much split the driving 50/50.

Tonight also is the first time we have decided to alter our planned itinerary. We were going to go to Yellowstone but have decided that we want to avoid the traffic and crowds and if we hike, it will be better to do so off the beaten path.

We haven’t been booking motels ahead more than a day but tonight I had trouble finding a room for Friday night in Bozeman. A quick Google search showed me why. It’s a big weekend there and tomorrow Jo will be going to her first rodeo. Hey, there must be a name for using cliches when they’re not actually being used as cliches. Don’t you think?

I like to shoot pictures of neon signs and Missoula has some nice ones.

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I guess a Forward is what comes before a Prologue but I don’t know nor really care. So let me explain the journey I am about to describe and you may elect or not to take. First, it’s already happened. Jo and I drove across the United States using a northern route during the summer of 2010 when we left Studio City, California and moved to Camden, Maine. It was a great trip and we both recommend that everyone do a coast to coast drive at least once to have your own experience and make your own discoveries crossing our truly magnificent country. I kept a running diary that I emailed to friends as we traveled and what I’ll post here are the observations and commentary I saved from six years ago that I’m sure I’ll tweak a bit… I hope you’ll want to travel along.

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Prologue

It’s 3,201 miles from Studio City, CA to Camden, ME and according to my favorite directions giver website (http://drivingtimebetweencities.com/) the trip could have taken us just two days and four hours by car if we had worn adult diapers and did that other type of speeding. Instead, my wife Jo and I took three weeks and used bathrooms in 14 American states and one Canadian province and slept normally.

It was a journey home for Jo who was born and grew up in Maine and had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years, feeling for most of that time like she was in exile. I had been in California even longer and after a career that had been mutually dissolved by my employer and me in the spring of 2010 was ready and able to get back closer to where I once belonged myself which is Pennsylvania.

Jo and I had dreamed of making our cross-country trip for a while. We’d bought our Maine house in the fall of 2009 and had moved most of our things there right away with the intention of moving ourselves there permanently in 2011 at the end of my contract with ABC News. My buyout from Disney/ABC moved up our timetable. The plan for our route was simple. Jo had never been to Oregon nor Montana and had never seen Mt. Rushmore nor Niagara Falls. We both wanted to explore Michigan’s two peninsulas. The dots were not going to be difficult to connect and I had a list of golf courses I hoped to play and some offbeat attractions I wanted us to visit along the way.

A good friend of ours threw us a wonderful going away party and since there was a substantial gap between it and our actual departure date we kept saying goodbye to the same people who had been there until we felt embarrassed we were still around.

In the meantime I had our 2004 Volvo S40 serviced, printed out maps for daily driving plans and addresses and phone numbers for cheap motels and local non-chain restaurants. We began packing clothes into suitcases and tote bags that would go in the trunk along with my golf clubs that already lived there. We made lists and then gathered or bought the supplies we thought we’d need. Our picnic basket filled up quickly with things for lunches by the side of the road and we made a trip to REI for a serious cooler. There were low-tech no brainers like a first aid kit, flashlights, and a Swiss army knife and hi-tech necessities like our cameras, laptop, GPS and iPod. We even took our two foam pillows we cannot sleep without. The back seat began to disappear. It would prove a challenge to make it all fit but hey, that’s why cars have rear view mirrors.

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The Day before Day 1

Thursday, July 29, 2010

We still had a lot of things left in our apartment to ship to Maine and were worried about the whereabouts of our mover. A friend had recommended him to us and our departure date had already been pushed back because he told us his pet cat had gotten sick. He was actually coming from Maine, delivering art objects on the way and it had been tough getting a hold of him for updates about his progress. It was mid afternoon on the day he said he’d arrive and we were waiting with our packed boxes and getting nervous.

I’ve never been very good about getting rid of stuff and so I had clothes I’d packed that I’ll admittedly never manage to wedge into again and Jo had plenty of her own that did still fit her. Along with other boxes filled with books, kitchen items, office supplies, our desktop computer, widescreen TV and memorabilia such as my ashtray collection from imploded Las Vegas casinos there wasn’t much room to move around in the front of our apartment.

We’d lived in this apartment for seven years and called it an Ikea showroom since nearly all of our furniture was purchased there in flat boxes with their wordless but surprisingly adequate assembly instructions. All of it had served its purpose admirably but we weren’t taking any of our “popup” furnishings to Maine. I had placed ads on Craigslist but nibblers hadn’t taken the bait and when I called the National Council of Jewish Women and asked them to come take everything away for free they scheduled a pick up but didn’t show up. My son had wanted the bureaus, a lamp and one of the chairs that required our unscrewing each of them to fit it all in his car. With reassembly on the other end Gil and I spent a nice day together and also learned that stuff from Ikea is not really made to be taken apart and put back together a second time.

So now I made a last minute deal with the two Latino guys who were fixing up a vacated apartment in the building. They could have the rest of our Swedish interior collection (dining room and coffee tables, futon, sofa chair, bookcases plus the refrigerator) in exchange for helping me load everything else with the mover if and when he showed up.

When he finally did and I saw his panel truck towing its small trailer outside on our street I had a panic attack. There was no way in hell we were going to get all our things in there. I had damn near lost faith in this guy’s sense of time and now I enlarged that continuum to include both time and space. Fortunately, spatial relations have never been one of my stronger abilities. In fact in 10th grade biology I screwed up the dissection of a fish so badly that my teacher told me to take out some other homework and forget about medical school. After I calmed down and the mover assured me he could make everything fit I shifted from crisis mode to blind faith.

Almost four hours later his truck and trailer looked like the sides of a Rubick’s cube. The man was a master packer if there is such a designation. That evening we had the final of our multiple farewell dinners with a good humored good friend and then went back to our empty apartment to spend our last night in Los Angeles.

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Day 1

Friday, July 30, 2010

Everything fit in the car this morning and although there would be no room for passengers or even small reptiles in the back seat, at least it was still possible to see around our gear through the rear view mirror. Jo and I met my son at Mel’s Diner in Sherman Oaks for a farewell breakfast. Neither of Jo’s kids still lived in L.A. but Gil does and leaving him was obviously the most bittersweet aspect of our move to Maine for me.

After breakfast we had one final stop to make on our way out of the San Fernando Valley. I thought it would be a simple drop off but when I walked in the door at the cable company in Van Nuys it was take a number like a bagel store on a Sunday morning. You can do a lot of things at home through the Internet that you used to have to show up at places to do just a few years ago but returning your modem and DVR when you’re leaving town isn’t one of them apparently. I waited nearly an hour to do it.

We headed for the freeway, the 405, which is one of Los Angeles’s coronary arteries in need of a quadruple bypass, and after it rejoined the I-5 heading north near Magic Mountain we slowed to a halt. In LA it’s easy to find a traffic report on the radio and as soon as we did we heard the dreaded words “Sig Alert”. In LA this means a bad accident and/or a serious traffic jam and we were stuck in one. And since we’re not moving forward so quickly in our narrative, I’ll take a moment to tell you what most Angelinos don’t know. The “Sig Alert” is actually named after a man named Loyd Sigmon who came up with the way to automatically transmit a radio signal from the police department to Los Angeles radio stations whenever there was a need to. Now, he’s immortalized and unrecognized at the same time.

Another hour went by before we passed the scene of a nasty accident involving two semitrailers and twice as many passenger cars. But our escape from Los Angeles was still not complete. After getting around the highway wreckage we saw a huge smoke plume in the direction of Palmdale before turning west to go up the coast— “Sig Alert” and wildfire in the rearview mirror we had completed our escape from LA.

Lunch was at La Super-Rica in Santa Barbra (pictured here), Julia Child’s and our favorite taco stand, and then another 300+ miles on the 101 to San Francisco to visit Jo’s daughter Drew and her husband Aaron. Our GPS mysteriously lost its voice just when it came time to really want to rely on it as we hit the city and then just as mysteriously regained it as we parked the car. What’s that about? Drew made an incredible dinner. Aaron introduced me to some new music and it’s about 50 degrees in San Francisco in July.

So, we’re off. After thirty-one years in Los Angeles it will take a while for it to sink in.

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Hard to believe that over 50 years have gone by since Bob Dylan composed “The Times They Are A Changin’.” Many of us might disagree on many things but I’m guessing there is an ever growing consensus that unfortunately, there are a lot of ways the times —our times since those times— have not changed completely for the better.

Talk radio is one of those developments that I’m pretty certain I could live without. My father used to have his car radio tuned permanently it seemed to Rush Limbaugh and so when I visited and borrowed the car I sometimes got a quick earful. When I was in the car with him and Limbaugh was on I got a serious earful. About the only thing I learned from Rush and his cohorts was that there’s no issue too complex that it can’t be reduced to fear and loathing. And if you’ll excuse my own rant, I’ll contend that the majority of talk show hosts are egomaniacs and most of their callers either stridently xenophobic on the right or blindly naïve on the left.

The late former sane governor of Texas Ann Richards was once asked why she didn’t have a talk show. Her answer: “The people who have time during the day to listen to me on the radio are not the people I want to be talking to.”

But I remember a kinder gentler time when talk radio was in its infancy and I was not much older. There was a program on WHUM in the city where I grew up in Pennsylvania on weeknights that I’d often go to sleep listening to. Its theme music, big band clarinetist Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare”, would play and Reading’s Night Mayor was on the air.

It might not have been the first radio talk show in the country but I’ll bet it was close. Paul Barclay was the host, a high school school teacher by day and back then, I’m guessing, his radio gig was barely making him vacation money. I don’t think he was even much of a local celebrity and he certainly wasn’t into spouting his own opinions to his audience. No diatribes, no insults, no spin but something else was missing from Barclay’s show that, despite his objectivity and neutrality, made him a very singular voice back in his day. His was in fact the ONLY voice.

In that pre cell phone and Internet era of long ago either the technology didn’t exist or his radio station couldn’t afford it. So listeners only heard one side of the conversation— the Night Mayor’s. Because of this much patience was required from its devotees. Calls all started the same way: “Hello, Night Mayor!” followed by a long silence as the caller made his point and the listener waited to hear Barclay repeat, and no doubt condense, what that point was. Each call was literally translated from English into English and even then, listening to the program plod along, it was awkward to the point of painful.

The theme music kind of scared me, too but I couldn’t resist tuning into the Night Mayor when I was growing up. My transistor radio back then brought me the world, although St. Louis was actually about as far as it could reach out into it on a good night. It was rock and roll from Buffalo, basketball from Boston and talk of the stench of Reading politics or on one occasion I recall the real thing– complaints about tardy garbage collection –from the callers to the Night Mayor.

And then one night I decided to call the Night Mayor myself. I had to. Something incredible had occurred on live television that afternoon and the Night Mayor was asking for a witness. I had just gotten home from school and seen it myself on a kitsch variety show hosted by Bert Parks.

It was a stunt gone amazingly wrong. A woman from the audience blindfolded and spun around while a lit fuse running on the floor was racing toward her husband. The studio audience implored to scream directions to help her find it so she could stamp it out with her shoes. Her husband sitting in a chair below a sack of flour hanging from the ceiling. The fuse attached to a firecracker and the firecracker next to the sack of flour and well… she didn’t find it. And when the firecracker exploded the flour ignited and the man instantly became a human torch. Aflame he rose from his seat as Bert Parks ran to him and probably saved his life by quickly covering him with his green master of ceremonies blazer. Yes, this actually happened!

I could barely believe I had seen it but I had and I was obligated to report it to the Night Mayor. I felt it my duty… Well partly, but mostly I just wanted to be the first one to call in. I dialed WHUM from the phone in my parents’ kitchen and as it rang and I waited my nerves started to get the better of me. Stage freight hit and I thought of hanging up. I was a kid, not even a teenager. What was I doing? Only adults called the Night Mayor.

With the suddenness of a car crash it was too late. “Hello, Night Mayor.” His voice sounded different on the phone.  I surprised myself and didn’t hang up and as best I could began my account. The Night Mayor didn’t ask me my age. He had a show to do and now I was part of it and I was relieved that nobody was hearing me but him. He helped me along with tactical “ah huhs” and “um hums” honed from experience. I rambled around them and listened to the Night Mayor edit me as I went along. I reported what I had seen and The Night Mayor was relaying what I told him to possibly thousands of others. Was I articulate? Did I make sense? Who knows? But together we made it work and then it was over. I was alone in the kitchen and shaking a little but not embarrassed or scared. I was now officially a Night Mayor caller. Until writing this I’ve never told anyone.

Years later I became a journalist. I produced accounts of events for many others– millions in fact– to watch on the news for a living. But to this day I have never called another talk show.

Want to listen to Artie Shaw and His Orchestra play the Night Mayor theme? … Click below to get taken there…