The end of this story is the best place to begin: The NSTEMI not only did not kill me, I barely knew anything unusual was happening … until everything started becoming visible in the rear-view mirror.

For the non-cardiologists among you, an NSTEMI is a “non-ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction.” Apparently not as serious or life threatening as a STEMI, it is still no fun, especially when you are as risk-factor-rich as I am: family history of heart disease, overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, too much alcohol, and too little exercise. Holy crap! It must be a minor miracle that I am alive at all! In my case, the culprit happened to be the “left anterior descending artery,” with a high blockage that is affectionately called “The Widow Maker” because it can cause such quick and deadly heart attacks. Mine was 80% blocked. A stent and 48-hours in the hospital did the trick. It was all so painless and fast that I never realized anything serious was happening!

Here’s the story. Twelve years ago, my baby brother had emergency bypass surgery. He damn-near bought the farm. I argued for some cardiac testing and ended up getting a treadmill dye test. Everything looked good, so I kept taking a daily dose of 81-milligram aspirin along with blood pressure and cholesterol medication, and I stopped worrying … for a while at least. The prospect of coronary disease never really appealed to me, so I asked my doc what I needed to do to get a thorough cardiac work-up. “Show some symptoms,” she said. I did not know at the time that my older brother had needed some heart work done too. 100% of my brothers with cardiac disease may have convinced the insurance companies that testing was in order, but it might not have. Apparently, the tests are too expensive and the results are a bit too uncertain and unpredictive. Showing symptoms seemed like my best option … as long as they were not too severe or with too fast an onset. I turned out to be one lucky buckaroo.

In mid-February 2017, Rebecca and I were in Atlanta visiting my mother while avoiding the New England winter. I was supposed to travel to western Michigan for a few days of work in early March, followed by a week in Ann Arbor visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and new grandson. When the Michigan work got postponed until the fall, Rebecca and I found some cheap tickets from Atlanta to Detroit and flew north on February 17 to hang out with the grandboy for a few days.

The next part of the story is pretty irrelevant and stupid, so skip ahead if you want. Allie and Mike had bought a new gizmo to attach to their toilet for spraying the poop from Ronan’s cotton diapers before throwing them into the wash. (See what I mean. This part has little or nothing to do with a heart attack, but I am pathologically scatological, so I hate the idea of omitting it. Plus, it could have provided a good excuse for doing nothing on Monday morning, but it didn’t, and I did something anyway.)

On Sunday afternoon, while lying on the bathroom floor scooched uncomfortably around the toilet, I turned off the water supply and unbolted the water feed line. The shutoff valve was tight, so I muscled it shut before disconnecting the hardware. The line itself had become brittle and was about 2-inches too long. Instead of bending it and risking the prospect of a break and no toilet, I reassembled everything and planned a morning trip to the hardware store for a shorter, more flexible feed line.

Monday morning, I had the full shopping list in my head and sauntered off on my usual Ann Arbor morning walk: 1.5 miles to the local Ace Hardware and back again. But something wasn’t right. I felt a weird tightness in my chest. Not a serious tightness, but more like a tightness caused by muscling a stuck valve from a weird position behind a toilet. I ignored it successfully until I felt some radiating pain in my left arm above my elbow.

“Aha,” I thought. “These are the cardiac ‘symptoms’ I have been waiting for.” With that, I turned back toward Allie’s house and called Rebecca, who had also been walking in the neighborhood. (We rarely walk together since she walks so much faster than I do.) “I don’t feel quite right,” I told her on the phone, “and I want to have this tightness checked out at the hospital.” She walked around the corner and met up with me.

At almost the same instant, Allie called. She had just left a meeting and was driving near her house on her way back to work. I told her what was up. Without a lick of panic, she canceled her lunch meeting and met us at the house. By then, the tightness had all-but subsided, but the die was cast. I was going to get that cardiac work-up no matter what!

Within about 30 minutes of the initial tightness, we were in the emergency room of the University of Michigan Medical Center. Still no panic, but not a wasted second either. Emergency rooms don’t mess around with chest pains in old fat men. The EKG came back normal, and we all got pretty chill and relaxed. We weren’t going anywhere for at least 8 hours, while we waited for a second test of my troponin levels.

“Troponin” is another word I had never heard before and that is now an everyday part of my vocabulary. It is the enzyme that goes up when heart muscle is damaged by a heart attack … or myocardial infarction in hospital-speak. The emergency room measures a baseline level of troponin upon admission and then tests again 8 hours later; that is how long it takes for the enzymes to appear in the blood. No elevated troponin and a normal EKG: no heart attack. Elevated troponin: something’s wrong. Mine was up ever so slightly, but up nonetheless. It was a sure marker of a heart attack, albeit a small one that resulted in little or no tissue damage.

With that information, I was admitted and became an official patient of the UofM hospital. Some of those experiences were right out of the hospital stay playbook; others were a little more unexpected or surreal. At about 1:00 A.M., Tony the night nurse subjected me to a long list of new-patient questions. “Have you ever been physically abused?” “Are you afraid to go home because of what someone there might do to you?” “Are you afraid of being hurt by a caretaker or someone in your family?”

“Wow,” I thought. What must Tony the night nurse’s shift be like when people answer in the affirmative? “Those must be hard questions to ask,” I commented. “No,” he said, “I’ve gotten used to them.”

“No,” I said, “I mean it must be hard when people answer them affirmatively.”

“That never happens,” he said. “People just lie.”

The whole conversation came as a bit of a shock: that hospitals must ask such sad and troubling questions, and that people feel compelled to lie rather than come clean about how miserable their lives might be. It was yet another in a long, long list of reasons to feel like one of the luckiest people in the world. Never in my life would such questions have ever entered my head, yet they are commonplace upon admission to the hospital. Yikes.

Another surreal moment came on Tuesday morning, well before my gurney trip to the cath lab. A team of practitioners, all of whom happened to be female, trooped into the room, and instructed me to get out of bed and drop my trousers. They were the skin-care team making their twice-weekly rounds to check every patient in the hospital for bedsores and skin maladies. Always the cooperative patient, I did exactly as asked. “Beautiful” the team leader gushed; “it’s perfect.”

“Did you hear that?” I cried gleefully to Rebecca and Allie! And to the team of ladies, I said, “Please repeat to them what you just said to me.” They complied. “Wow,” I said excitedly. “No one has ever looked at my ass and said “Beautiful. It’s perfect.” It is a moment I will relish forever, for I never expect a repeat in my lifetime.

Yet a third came as I was being prepped for the catheterization. When the nurse started to remove my outerwear (since I was in the hospital, I was already wearing no underwear), she asked in a not-very-matter-of-fact way, “what’s all these wires doin’ in your stuff?” Apparently the endless tubes and wires associated with IV drips and EKGs had managed to wrap themselves around places where they had no business being. At that moment, I was genuinely concerned that the cardiologist might find enough arterial damage to warrant full-blown bypass surgery, and that, like my brother before me, I might wake up in a surgical recovery room with my chest having been split open. Those fears notwithstanding, we all laughed until we cried. Just like the old Reader’s Digests used to say, laughter really is great medicine!

I have no clue what the staff is like at most hospitals. Thankfully, the University of Michigan Medical Center is my only real point of reference, and its staff is incredible … and I mean everyone! The nursing staff, the technical staff, the housekeeping staff, the dietary staff, the medical staff: it was remarkable what kind, friendly, compassionate, and professional people I met. I wish I remembered every one of them by name. Even the food was delicious. Amazing.

The two who stand out the most were the recovery room aides who stood over my groin pressing on my femoral artery for over an hour after the catheterization. Here’s why: the cardiologist sticks the catheter – a flexible tube the diameter of a ballpoint pen refill – into your chest cavity through a hole in your groin. (Like I said, a lot of this experience was totally surreal.) Before poking that large hole in your femoral artery, however, these sadists spend about 18-hours filling you with heparin, a strong blood thinner. Yep. They turn your blood into something with about the same clotting ability as alcohol, and then pop open one of your arterial interstate highways. Cute. Once the procedure is complete, they work hard at sealing you back up, which requires two distinctly different efforts: you lie perfectly motionless for 4 hours while a couple of aides apply really, really hard direct pressure to the wound for the first hour or two. My wound decided to form a golf-ball-size “hematoma” almost instantly, which gave me no pause whatsoever because I had no idea what it meant, but it scared the crap out of the recovery room staff. They never let up: two bodies and four hands of non-stop pressure for well over an hour. Those ladies were monsters, and 100% professional. I guess when I think about it, without them, I might have bled to death. The pain subsided after about a week; the bruising took almost 2 weeks to heal. It was my only physical reminder of the ordeal/adventure.

The acute part of the experience is now history. I never felt bad or lethargic. Other than the bruising on my groin, I never felt any pain. (Oh wait. Yes I did! They kept sticking EKG leads onto my unshaven chest. Pulling those things off killed!)

Now chapter 2 sets in. A few days after the event, I drank my first — and last — scotch. For those of you who do not know me too well, I have, for all practical purposes, been drinking scotch every day for the past 51 years. I entered Tulane as a freshman at the ripe age of 17 in 1966; New Orleans being New Orleans, I was never once asked for an ID. I started my regular scotch drinking then; I fear it may have ended on February 26, 2017. By the Sunday after the event – a full week since my heart attack, for God’s sake – I had my first drink. On Monday, my entire body went on vacation. I couldn’t budge. Every part of me was exhausted, and I felt utterly hung over. I stayed in bed until 11:00, took 2 naps during the afternoon, went to bed about 8:00, and slept soundly for 11 hours. By Tuesday morning, I was almost back to normal, but I have not had a hankering for a scotch since. I wonder if my drinking days are over. I certainly hope not! Only time will tell.

Not drinking might be a very good thing for now. Through temperance alone, I have reduced my caloric intake by about 200 per day. I have also become much more mindful of salt (less than 2 grams per day), fat, and exercise. It’s been a month now. How come I am not losing weight? This being fat crap is for the birds. I always figured that fewer calories in and more calories out would do the trick. I guess it’s more complicated than that. For those of you with chronic bellies, I’ll keep you posted on what I learn. I weighed 165 in high school. Today, the scale tips at 205. I wonder what size pants I will wear at 160. I wonder if my blood pressure and cholesterol will actually go down. I also wonder if the girls will swoon over me or if I’ll feel like wearing speedos. (Insert smiley face here.)

This week, I met my new cardiologist. I expect we will get to know each other way too well. With his help, I have a whole new list of activities: a treadmill stress test, an echocardiogram, more medications.  It’s a good thing that I get excited about making new friends. Every time this adventure opens a door, I appreciate it in a brand new way: Cool. I get to experience it. I don’t think any of this would be nearly as fresh or exciting if I were dead or infirm. Not dying is up there with having kids as one of the greatest experiences of my life.

I spoke with my lifelong best friend Dan Wolbe the other day. He called to wish me a belated happy birthday. We met in nursery school and have been best friends since. He still lives in Atlanta.

“I saw your mother the other day,” he said. “She and I agreed that the trip you are on is meshuganah.” (For those of you who know even less Yiddish than I do, “meshuganah” means crazy or idiotic.)

I have three responses to the comment: 1) I know that Wolbe is BS’ing me. He’s wanted to take this trip for the past 40 years or so. 2) I know that a trip like this would make my mother insane, so she does indeed think it is meshuganah. 3) If I had not done a great many things in my life that my mother thought were meshuganah, I cannot imagine where I would be today. Thank goodness I have learned to ignore some of her opinions.

We have now been on the road for 108 days. At the moment of writing the first draft of this blog, we were in Davenport, Iowa and had just crossed the Mississippi River for the second time, this time from west to east. We are now in Evanston, Illinois with Aaron and Lisa, Rebecca’s son and our daughter-in-law.

Since the last blog entry, I worked a few days in Portland, then we drove and hiked through the Columbia River Gorge (assuredly one of the most beautiful spots on the planet); spent time with good friends in Bend, Oregon (a little paradise of a city); drove near the Malheur Wildlife Refuge where we saw Ammon Bundy supporters demonstrating for “Justice for Lavoy Finnicum” (Google the names if the references make no sense); ate at a wonderful restaurant in Boise where we were served by an entire team of ardent Bernie supporters (Yes, in Boise); spent a fantastic afternoon/evening hanging out around the Great Salt Lake with Rebecca’s nephew Julian and his girlfriend Jenifer (who presented Barney with a mirror ornament that reads “Life is a journey, so enjoy the ride”); discovered Fossil Butte National Monument in western Wyoming, (home to the most mind-bogglingly perfect fossils I have ever imagined); drove through miles upon miles of Dick Cheney country (where gas and oil mining and references to guns and “Make America Great Again” flourish); got snowed in for a while just west of the Continental Divide (and almost slid off the road to stop for a driver change); watched about a half-million Sand Hill Cranes on their annual migration (for the past 10 or 12 million years) on the Platte River with some of Rebecca’s closest old friends; spent a few days with R’s daughter and our son-in-law and grandkids in Omaha (a FABULOUS time); and are now in Evanston. From here to Ann Arbor for a few days with my daughter Allie and her husband Mike, then to the Finger Lakes of New York for an evening with Rebecca’s niece, and home before the first day of spring.

The adventure has entered its pensive stage. It has been fun beyond the imagination. The very notion of it ending … in only a week … is both incomprehensible and sad. In fact, we are already planning the next one: The Great River Road: a 3,000-mile mosey along the full length of the Mississippi River, from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. We are aiming for early November, before the snows blow in.

Thus far, we have successfully avoided Interstates and night driving, eaten great food at local establishments, stayed in really comfy and clean local motels, tanked up with (cheap) gas only once per day, gotten along astoundingly well (all things considered since, like astronauts, we have been in a tiny compartment with each other for almost 4 months), seen phenomenal sights, and hung out/stayed with folks who make us truly proud to be part of this species (as opposed to every Trump supporter I can imagine.)

And on the subject of Donald Trump, I must deliver my opinion, especially to those of you who do not believe he can be elected. He can!!!!!!!! I have witnessed political lightweights and nincompoops elected to office. (Check out the election of 1980, an election that planted the seeds for the insanity we are currently experiencing.) Reagan was an anti-government ideologue who loved people and conversation. Cruz is an anti-government ideologue who loves debate … meaning he loves to win while others lose, regardless of the consequences. Trump is a very big bully who has … and never has had … any ability to make this world a better place. The scariest part is that any one of them could win … not because of them, but because of the electorate.

OOPS. Sorry about that digression. I really did not mean to get political, but I couldn’t help it. In the most articulate and thoughtful form I can muster, there is some scary shit going on!

That said, the sights and sounds and people of America are glorious. I will miss seeing the old restored trucks; the rusting junkyards; the folk humor that dots every highway; the smiles of hoteliers and folks everywhere who love meeting strangers; the factories, freight trains, and grain elevators that shed light on the concept of “the economy”; the bizarrely and frighteningly political billboards (if you don’t accept Jesus right now, you are going to hell – period, or if you exercise your legal right to choose what is best for you and your body, you are a murderer – period); the astounding public art in murals and occasional moments of glory in boxcar graffiti; the totally absurd (a Jesus-inspired vacuum cleaner store, a racecar sporting the name of U.S. Male); the number of mothballed aircraft ­– mostly helicopters and old jet trainers ­– suspended from platforms in the most unexpected of places; the amazingly good times we have had with family and friends; the conversations about such things as what “Let’s Make America Great Again” really means (unambiguous racism); the inspiration that comes with living on such an amazing continent … and the fear and embarrassment that comes with realizing how vulnerable it is and how many of us feel that it is ours to abuse and ruin; the memories of past lives lived that appear around the most unexpected corners; the random herds of bison, camels, llamas, and zebras (as well as the llama on a leash); the stench of feedlots and overcrowded dairy herds … and the wonder of how all those cattle get to the slaughterhouse to become stock in a Safeway beef counter (we are yet to see a single cow being transported anywhere); the excitement of crossing a big river; the fun of plotting a route that minimizes distance while avoiding Interstates … and the occasional happiness that stems from living in an age of GPS; the crashing of waves against rocks; the gratefulness I feel for the US Park Service and Forest Service, and the fact that I can visit all of them for a one-time $10 fee (thanks to being old); the amazing engineering feats that enable us to traverse the continent so effortlessly … and the empathy that emerges for the wagon trains and their scouts who had to negotiate the mountains, bluffs, and rivers without the aid of civil engineers or AAA maps; the magnificence of a waterfall; the fun of seeing a caboose; random hilarity (such as the sign reading “Caution! Urinal randomly back sprays,” table legs adorned with jeans and cowboy boots, the canoe sculpture in the middle of the desert, or the entire western town that is for rent) and random art (Chihuly glass at a Thai takeout joint or Rembrandt etchings on display in a south Texas bank); fiberglass dinosaurs; the Saturday morning Cajun fais-do-do at Fred’s Lounge in Mamou; catching and eating Dungeness crabs; the redwoods; walking across the Golden Gate; farmer’s markets; hippie chicks on the beach in Big Sur; a remarkable number of functional Volkswagen vans; road sculptures and modern art; bathroom art (such as Queen Elizabeth, Vladimir Putin, and Bibi Netanyahu taking dumps); the satisfaction that comes with seeing the occasional signs of the arc of history actually bending toward justice; beautiful homes and architecture everywhere; laughing with my wife and my brother; hugging our children and grandchildren; eating local cuisines. The list goes on.

Meshuganah maybe, but I can’t wait to do it again!

 

 

After weeks of driving and getting places, we just spent almost a month laying low in Southern California and the Bay Area. Combining work with friends and cool places has been totally chill and glorious, but we have been so busy that I have had practically no writing time (and what little time I did have, I spent talking instead). We’ve walked (including much of downtown LA and an afternoon stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge), visited the AMAZING new Broad Museum in downtown LA, hung with a raft of good friends — and with Mike and Allie for a weekend when they happened to be visiting from Ann Arbor — eaten scrumptious food, brunched in what-may-be the most beautiful house I’ve ever been in in the mountains above Malibu, seen no shortage of soaring bald eagles, and gawked childishly at the magnificence of California’s Central Coast. I’ve also worked a bunch, including time with two new clients. (That work-stuff really gets in the way of blogging and staying totally spontaneous. Oh well.)

We spent our first week or so in Orange County in a perfect living situation. Arlis and I have worked together for her employer for a few years, and now we are embarking on a team teaching adventure. (Having a wicked smart mechanical engineer at my side who also happens to be a great writer is a new … and welcome … experience!) She lives with her dog Zoe in a nifty neighborhood in a really cute house next door to her parents in Costa Mesa, in coastal Orange County. We hung together, taught together, cooked together, and ate together … including Dad, an enthusiastic high school physics/chemistry teacher and robotics coach, and Mom, a really creative and thoughtful elementary teacher. While there, we also had a chance to spend a great-fun evening with my fraternity Big Brother from Tulane and his wife. He’s a lawyer/business guy who has also managed to collect same fantastic art.

LA: America’s #1 Walking City

I have been traveling to LA for work on an almost monthly basis for 27 years. For many of those years, I thought I hated LA. Then I realized the truth: I hate the Freeways and driving in LA! About 10 years ago, I found a funky little downtown hotel: the Metro Plaza tucked on a hill between Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Phillipe’s (home of the French Dip and some of the world’s best mustard). My work friends expressed deep concern; they thought it was a really sketchy whorehouse. Really, it is just a clean, safe, quiet, affordable downtown hotel with few staff and fewer residents who speak English. The rooms are perfectly adequate. Most importantly, staying there requires little to no driving, and there is great food within a block! Contrary to much public sentiment, over time I discovered a delightfully walkable city with excellent public transportation!

A 20-minute walk from our hotel, the new Broad Museum is masterful. Its collection is up there with the Tate Modern and MOMA. Eli and Edythe Broad have collected multiple pieces from an amazing number of 20th-Century artists that span a lifetime of creativity, built an architectural masterpiece directly across the street from the Disney Center and one block from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and opened it to the public for free. Rebecca and I share a favorite artist with paintings in the Broad: Mark Tansey. He is a contemporary of ours, born in 1949. Rebecca introduced me to his work at about the same moment that we met, well over 20 years ago. We were elated to see three of his works at the Broad … except for one minor detail. Because of parking limitations and abject fear of LA traffic, we only had about 2.5 – 3 hours to spend at the museum. It is not enough … by a long shot. We could have spent that much time with the Tansey paintings alone. There was just too much to take in. We can’t wait to go back.

Our lodging and dining stayed as memorable in LA as they have been throughout this adventure. Following our time downtown, we spent a long weekend at a friend’s house in the Rustic Canyon section of Santa Monica. We fed them a fine New Orleans meal, had a delightful evening of conversation and laughter, and then bade them farewell as they went off to Palm Springs and left us tending the house and pooch.   Ahhh. Delicious quiet surrounded by a canyon-load of 1950’s modern architecture that had once been home to the likes of Will Rogers and Charlie Chaplin.

From Santa Monica, we completed the LA experience in Pasadena, staying at another of my favorite haunts, the Guest House of the Fuller Theological Seminary. It puts all of Pasadena within walking distance. Although I had to interrupt the relaxation with a few days of work , I never had to touch the car since the Gold Line light rail takes me directly from point to point for all of 75¢ (thanks to my Senior Tap Card!!).

As for LA dining, the food was fine; the company was superb! Joan was a favorite student of Rebecca’s and mine in Leadership for Change at Boston College. She is now a full-blown medical pro working on surgical technology at USC. We spent a few evenings together, meeting for drinks in the Arts District, eating barbecue near City Hall, and chowing down on Chinese food in Chinatown. The list of dining partners is just too long: Joan, Robyn, Deven, Brian, Sue, Ed, Tim, Michael, Ilene, Alan, Laurel, Suresh, Manju, Melissa, Dave, Eva, Brandon, Ryan, Laura, Ivan, Ashley, Don, Marcie, Steve, Jackie, Jeannette, John, Jon, Seth, Laura, Janice, Walter, Iliana, Rosanna, Adam, and on and on and on. But the most memorable was at our friend Lilly and Tarek’s house high in the hills of Malibu Canyon. Lilly and Tarek are both engineers, she at the water district where I frequently work (and where we became friends) and he (formerly) at Cal State Northridge. These days, his heart and soul go into high school robotics competitions. On the morning of our brunch at their house, he had just returned on a redeye from a two-day competition in Hawaii. What a trooper!

Lilly and I not only share a love for preparing large meals, we also share a fair number of good friends. Eight of us shared brunch that morning. With the exception of Europe, much of the world was represented: the US, Ecuador, Syria, India, and China. Lilly fixed a feast; the samosas and coconuts simply appeared … and I have never witnessed a case of coconuts get prepared and consumed so quickly.

The best part of the meal, though, was their home itself. Tarek’s brother is an architect who helped with the design. Lilly and Tarek are both ridiculously creative engineers. Their house is modest and simple yet utterly spectacular. When I walked in, I said it might be the most beautiful house I have ever been in. Now that a few weeks have passed, that sentiment remains unchanged.

From LA, we headed north. I had a day of work at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, so our first stop was Thousand Oaks. In addition to a fine day of teaching, Rebecca took advantage of the time to get a new set of tires for Barney, our trusty Ford Escape that has been the picture of comfort and reliability on this journey. Anything we can do to make Barney happy makes us happy. He seems very pleased with his new shoes.

From SoCal, north on California Route 1

Even though we sort-of followed the coast all the way from the Mexican border, we didn’t get really serious about hugging the coast until Santa Barbara.

Our walk through San Luis Obispo triggered memories of one of my all-
time favorite poems, “The Symbol” by Richard Brautigan, a long-dead hippie poet from the ’60s and ’70s. “When I was hitch-hiking down to Big Sur, Moby Dick stopped and picked me up. / He was driving a truckload of sea gulls to San Luis Obispo. / “Do you like being a truckdriver better than you do a whale?” I asked. / “Yeah,” Moby Dick said. “Hoffa is a lot better to us whales than Captain Ahab ever was. / The old fart.”

And what a driving adventure it was! California Route 1 and US 101 up the coast are everything they are stacked up to be. It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful stretch of many hundreds of miles! The photos tell so much more than words. There are too many vistas, waves crashing across rocks, switchbacks, mountains, redwoods, and basic breathtaking beauty to try to write about. Big Sur lives up to its reputation … complete with a hippie chick in a hippie van ecstatically building a rock cairn toward the sun for no particular reason.

Our favorite spot was Gorda, California. There we were on a sunny, cloudless day, driving north on a desolate ocean-side highway seeing little except the road, occasional other cars, and stupefying natural beauty. Cloudless days sound nice, but by 2:00 in the afternoon, I realized how unprepared I was. The glare of the westerly setting sun was bad enough; the glare off the ocean was many times worse. My eyes hurt. We had hoped to get to Big Sur, but no way. I hoped a lodge of some sort would reveal itself soon.

Gorda Lodges did the trick: A comfy room with a balcony overlooking the ocean, a general store beneath us, and a fine little restaurant next door attached to a two-pump gas station. Little did I realize at the time, but that assortment of buildings and businesses was 100% of Gorda, Population: 8. The photographs show the entrance to Gorda from the south and from the north. The only difference is that the same buildings are in reverse order, and in the photo from the south, the buildings are on the right, and they are on the left when entering from the north. The entire town is visible from the two signs — including the Falls at Gorda Springs.

After Gorda and an amazing morning at Pfeiffer Beach, we started getting citified again. Since Rebecca had never seen Carmel’s 17-Mile Drive, with its wind-blown Cypress trees and stupidly beautiful ocean views, I thought it might be fun. Nope! Fortunately, we were driving north. We happened to cross paths with the PGA tournament at Pebble Beach … on the Monterey Peninsula and in Carmel. We must’ve passed 20 miles of southbound tournament traffic. We encountered nary a delay!

Instead of Carmel, we moseyed through Castroville and Gilroy on our way to the Bay Area: the Artichoke Capital of the World and the Garlic Capital of the world, respectively. February, it turns out, is lousy time for artichokes and garlic, and we wasted almost two hours looking for good produce or a farmer’s market.

Then we hit the Bay Area — Mountain View and Sunnyvale — where we started eating again: mid-afternoon grilled chicken and vegetables (coupled with fantastic single-malt scotch) with good friends Marcie and Steve and daughter Jackie, followed immediately by a long, high-energy feast with Rebecca’s niece, nephew, their SO’s, and grand-nephew Seth. (We really missed you, Eric!) We topped it off with two of the world’s best Farmer’s Markets, Mountain View and Palo Alto, where we picked up fresh makings for a killer Greek salad that night at Brandon and Eva’s, who hosted us in San Francisco.

Eva was a college roommate of Allie’s. I successfully pulled off a Louisiana shrimp boil for her and Brandon’s wedding in New Hampshire a summer or two ago. We became really good friends, and what a ball we had in the City by the Bay! We walked the beach, cooked some meals, walked across the Golden Gate on what must’ve been the prettiest day in a decade. We also got to hang out a lot with Rebecca’s grand niece Ashley and best pals Leela (in Berkeley Hills) and Rosanna (on the Peninsula).

Our time in the Bay Area ended on a high note: a meal with my client/friend Walter and his wife Iliana, a day of successful teaching in San Jose, and then a reunion with Brother Joe, who flew in from Oregon so we could all drive back to his place on the coast together. Friday morning, we waited for traffic to subside, waved goodbye to one of the best cities in the world (albeit too crowded and too expensive) as we crossed the Golden Gate, then made our first stop shortly thereafter to take a hike in Muir Woods among the Redwoods.

The day set the pace for the journey north. Five hours on the road; 75 miles covered; average speed: 25 mph. We did much better toward the end of the trip, covering the 400 miles way more quickly than a wagon train ever could: four solid days of driving.

Garberville, in Humboldt County, is one damn cool town with great Cajun cooking (Go figure!) and superb local music. I’m ready to move there. The Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt State Park is as beautiful a drive as exists in the world. We learned on our hike in the redwoods that we were walking through the largest cache of biomass in the world, larger even than the Amazon jungle! A virgin Redwood forest with a forest floor of fallen 12-foot-diameter trees crashed on top of one another and splintered can do that. That’s a mess of biomass!

On average, we probably stopped every 5 miles or so on the entire trip to photograph one breathtaking vista after another. The last two stops had nothing to do with scenery: a world-famous hotdog from the Langlois Market and a few dozen oysters from the Umpqua Aquaculture store in Winchester Bay. From there to Joe’s, where we ate like kings (smoked salmon, fresh salmon, fresh-caught Dungeness crabs, fresh oysters, fresh-dug Oregon black truffles, gumbo, Oregon cheese, etc.), enjoyed the majesty of his little piece of heaven in the woods, and I actually had time to get some computer work done, bring our bills up to date, and get this damn blog entry out!

From here to Portland for a few more days of work while Rebecca prowls Powell’s and the rest of Portland, then off onto our 3,500-mile trek (with detours) back home.

 

Rebecca and I ate dinner the other night in Los Angeles with Sue Meltzer. Sue and I have been friends and colleagues for almost 30 years. I love Sue as a friend, as a collaborator, and even more importantly, as someone who believed in me at a point in my career that really made a difference. In retrospect, my career … like many successful careers, I expect … fell into place as a result of hard work, lots of luck, and a few amazing people who arrived at just the right place and time.

The first of those people I can recollect was Jim Thomas, a professor from West Georgia College, where I earned my Master’s degree. Jim literally found my first college teaching job for me. He heard of the job opening and said to the school, “Look no further. I have just the person for you. He will be in touch as soon as I can contact him.” With that, my teaching career began.

Henry Moore was another professor from West Georgia who also changed my life … but not my career. Thanks to his sons, David and Bill, and a Dave Brubeck concert in Boston, he introduced me to Rebecca!

German philosopher/theologian, Martin Buber, had a deep influence on my life, though I never met him. (I did study with a colleague of his, Nahum Glatzer, at Boston University.) Buber provided insights into relationship, dialogue, and respect for fellow human beings that formed the foundation of my personal philosophy.

My doctoral dissertation committee at Boston University — Hillary Bender, Dick Rapacz, and Howard Zinn — allowed me to take a ridiculous risk in spite of the hellacious dictatorial hand of University President John Silber. They totally supported my off-the-wall desire to write a dissertation in education on life in the coalfields of central Appalachia. When asked, “But what does that have to do with education?” I would sheepishly answer, “I have no idea, but it feels right and important.” Now that I have worked in the field of water and energy education for the past four decades, the only thing that has changed is the sheepishness. These days, I deliver the same “I have no idea” response with great confidence and pride.

Following my degree, I went to work with a solar energy firm developing solar thermal educational materials where I worked with the graphic arts department at the local vocational high school in Wakefield, MA. Manny Rainha headed the plumbing department there. Manny was one of the kindest, brightest, most engaged teachers I have ever encountered, and he blew me away when he asked if I would keynote the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Association of Plumbing, Heating, and Cooling Contractors. “Why me?” I asked incredulously. “Because you are committed to education and tradespeople,” he said, “and I think you’ll do a great job.”

I researched the role of plumbing in protecting the public health by reading books, visiting the mechanical engineering department at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and befriending Charlie Manoog from the American Plumbing Museum in Worcester, MA. (On a very coincidental side note, the American Plumbing Museum is now housed in Watertown, MA at the offices of J.C. Cannistraro and Son in the exact same office space where I had the office of The Writing Company for eight years in the 1980s and 90s.) The talk was a hit. Manny had given me a real jolt of confidence, and all of my subsequent work in the water industry grew from that experience.

Not long after that talk, still in the very early 1980s, I attended a meeting of energy educators at a middle school in Lexington, MA. At the end of the meeting, a woman stood and asked a long-shot question: “Might anyone here know of someone who knows about coal and education?” I raised my hand and said, “I suspect that person might be me.” Dena Lehman was the Manager of Education for Boston’s electric company, Boston Edison. We worked together for well over a decade, developing terrific school outreach materials and becoming good, good friends. I was distraught to hear of her early death from cancer.

By 1985, I had started making a reliable living as a writer, but I desperately missed teaching … even though I had no clue what I might be able to teach. Psychology and education were barely visible in the rear-view mirror. I couldn’t really teach writing because I wasn’t really a writer; I was an educator. By then, I was just starting to get comfortable with the idea of calling myself a writer (an illusion I maintain to this day). I knew I couldn’t teach fancy literary stuff, but I could teach the nuts and bolts needs of the business and technical communicator, so I put together a business writing course. Joan Kopolchok from the Human Resources office of the Metropolitan Bay Transportation Authority — the T — liked what I built and gave me a shot. With that, my training career launched. I am now in my 31st year of teaching business and technical communication. Where would my career be today if not for Joan and the T?

Right on the tail of launching my training career, I re-crafted the plumbing talk and the “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” published it. It became my calling card for adding water to The Writing Company’s existing energy education portfolio. Neil Clark (who remains among my closest friends) managed the School Education Program at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Faced with increasing water demands that were stressing the capacity of the entire delivery system, the MWRA wanted to teach high schoolers about the water system, the value of water, and the need for conservation. I put together a small team of educators, and we submitted a proposal. Neil and the Authority gave the contract to us. The program we developed worked. The Conservation Section of the American Water Works Association had the amazing good sense to name “Water Wisdom” the nation’s best school-based water awareness program, thus putting The Writing Company and me on the map. Not only did we get recognized for the work, demands on the MWRA system declined and continue to stay low. “Water Wisdom” was not the reason for the drop in demand. An aggressive leak-detection program coupled with years of improved technology (such as low-water-use toilets, showers, and landscape irrigation equipment) led the charge, but aggressive consumer awareness definitely did not hurt!

With that success, I headed to California, the holy grail of water issues. That is where Sue Meltzer and I met and became friends. Our two stories of how it happened share no common ground, and we have no clue whose memory is less feeble. Sue contends that I made a cold call to her, and she liked me from the outset. (A perfectly plausible story that I rather like.) I contend that the success of “Water Wisdom” and the Camel Award put me on her radar, and she contacted me. She laughs at the very notion!

Regardless, Sue had only recently become a water educator. She taught elementary school, became principal in Santa Monica, and then went to work for a gas company. When the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California decided to start a school education program, Sue found the idea intriguing and landed the job. Developing a social studies-based (rather than science-based) high school-level water awareness program was part of her plan. Immediately upon meeting, our minds melded, and we began work on a program, then called “Water Politics” and now called “Water Currents.” When Sue retired from MWD, our friendship never waned. And “Water Currents” is now getting its fourth major facelift, this one ensuring that it meets the needs of 21st century schools and students. Metropolitan quickly became my most treasured client, and almost 30 years later, it still is … though it and Harvard share the platform together.

When I think of Jim and Manny and Dena and Neil and Joan and Sue — plus so many others I did not mention — I think of amazing people who believed in me, gave me plenty of very loose rein so I could run freely, and with whom I have delivered the most relevant, creative work of my life. I am incredibly fortunate to have encountered each of them, and I am astoundingly grateful for the trust they placed in me.

Good work gang. I love each of you a lot and will always be grateful to you!

We’ve been on the road for eight and a  half weeks and have fewer than eight weeks left to go. I’m already getting weepy and nostalgic!

The trip from Tucson brought us to the geographic turn: Southern California … but not before we got to say goodbye to Arizona with our friends Karen and Craig. We met for breakfast at the Hotel Congress, a magnificent relic where in 1934 an employee recognized the face of hotel guest John Dillinger, which led to his capture. What a place! (And for the nostalgic men who remember the good-ole days at the ballpark, the men’s room off the lobby also has a classic trough urinal. You just don’t see enough of those these days.)

The rest of southern Arizona was … well, to be honest, it was a lot like the first parts of southern Arizona. Just sort-of blah. We tried a nifty-looking side jaunt from Casa Grande through Maricopa to Gila Bend, but mostly we just saw some very long trains and a lot of mineral processing. And the highly entertaining stands of saguaro cactus were growing thinner and thinner.

From Gila Bend to a few miles west of Yuma, we had no options but to take the Interstate. Boring! Then at State Route 34, we headed north toward the Salton Sea. Paydirt! We explored a bit of an old mining ghost town (not much to it) then headed west on Highway 78.

The terrain went from scrubby desert to pure sand dunes — the Glamis Dunes, part of the Algodones Wilderness Area. It could easily have been the stage set for Lawrence of Arabia: vegetation-free sand dunes as far as the eye can see. Hundreds of dune buggies frolicked on the south side of the road interrupted only by occasional spontaneous/flash RV campsites. To the north: pristine, tire track-free dunes for miles and miles and miles. It was, to run the risk of sounding a bit smug, a real gas …. a really loud gas! My do-good environmental politics notwithstanding, though, those folks really looked like they were having fun!

From the dunes, we entered the Imperial Valley. In minutes, we went from scrubby desert to barren dunes to incredibly verdant fields spanning the horizon! The Imperial Valley is one of the world’s richest salad crop producing regions. The juxtaposition of desert and farm is utterly surreal. Oh yeah, the occasional dairy farm also provided a bit of variation to the landscape: thousands of tightly housed cattle doing sad little with their lives except eating, mooing, shitting, and giving milk. Need I mention anything about the stench?

Our destination for the evening was Brawley, California, at the southern end of the Salton Sea. I’ve flown over the Salton Sea. I’ve read about the Salton Sea. I’ve talked with folks about the Salton Sea. But I’d never been there. I couldn’t wait to see it, and it proved to be exactly what I had expected.

Well before dusk, we drove the main street of Brawley, found a terrific looking Mexican restaurant, checked into yet another clean, quiet, personality-rich independently owned motel, and headed north to find the Salton Sea.

Despite its immense size, however, finding the actual sea is not so easy. Few public roads go to it, and as a result of the drought and the general geography of the lake, the shoreline — where there used to be water that has now receded a very long way — is just hard to find. We found a bunch of roads that went nowhere, and we saw a few of the lake’s geothermal electric generating stations. By then, nightfall was approaching quickly, so we headed back to Brawley for an amazing Friday night meal of $1.50 tacos at Christine’s.

Every weekend at Christine’s, Arturo sets up his wood-fired grill on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and he makes pollo, asada, and tripas tacos. Yep. You got it right: chicken, beef, and tripe. I can’t say that I have ever been a big fan of tripe, but what the heck. We are on an adventure, and the taste Arturo gave me had real potential. Yep. You got it right again: tripe is cow stomach. I’ve tried it in Cuban restaurants and other Mexican restaurants but I never tolerated it, much less liked it. Arturo’s tasted good! Two tripas tacos later, I am a believer … but I’ll only be a confident believer if I eat Arturo’s tripas tacos at Christine’s in Brawley. The asada tacos were even better. Amazing, in fact. $10.50 later (7 tacos) we were stuffed, happy, and ready for a morning of more Salton Sea explorations.

On the one hand, the Salton Sea has existed intermittently as a large inland body of water for millennia. On the other hand, its current incarnation was an accident, the result of slipshod engineering. The sea itself fills the Salton Sink, which, at its lowest point, is only 5-feet higher than the bottom of Death Valley, 234 feet below sea level. Over a span of many millennia, the Colorado River shifted course. When its course shifted to the Imperial Valley, it deposited its fertile silt and filled the Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea. As the river kept changing its course, the sea would dry up, leaving the salt-rich, bone dry Salton Sink desolate until the river decided to change its course and refill it again. Who knows how many times the Salton Sink has filled and then dried up again. Perhaps thousands. The last time it dried up was around 1700.

This time in history was supposed to be a dry period, but realizing the fertility of the valley, farmers in the early 20th Century tried to build irrigation canals. They made a cut on the riverbank to prevent silt buildup, and OOPS! The riverbank burst. Colorado River water flowed into the Salton Sink for two years before the flow could be stopped. Now, for the first time in the history of the earth, we have a human-caused Salton Sea instead of one caused by nature. And with the controls put on the Colorado River, we may not have another naturally caused Salton Sea until homo sapiens are extinct.

In the morning, we set out yet again to find the Sea. This time we succeeded, but not before finding the most delicious, unbelievable, sweet, flavorful dates I’ve ever imagined … in Westmorland, CA. If all goes well, I will never again be without Westmorland dates. They make the world a better place. How can it be that all other dates taste bland while Westmorland dates taste like a spoonful of natural sugar. Go figure.

Not far from Westmorland, we set out on dirt roads through farmlands to try to find the sea We failed yet again. But this time, we successfully found the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. (Sonny Bono, of Sonny and Cher fame, served in the US House of Representatives from 1994 until he was killed in a skiing accident in Colorado in 1998.) At the refuge, we saw American pelicans, endless egrets, small songbirds, and a flock of tens of thousands of Snow Geese … a totally humbling, stunning experience. We didn’t get to the sea, though, and we gave up on the bird watching because the mosquitoes beat us to a pulp. It was January. Who on earth would have thought to bring deet? Certainly not us. So we retreated.

We were confident we could actually get to the water from Salton City, so off we went to the west side of the sea, happily driving 40 miles round trip out of the way. We were right!

Salton City is an inner sociologists dream, a dusty armpit of a village (of course with a fantastic taco stand) that once had great aspirations. Decades ago, developers envisioned the Salton Sea as a southern California vacation paradise, despite the fact that it is a 300-square-mile cesspool. They bought acreage around it and built roads, waiting eagerly for in the influx of seasonal owners. Today, the landscape is barren except for hundreds of undeveloped streets with names like Sea Nymph, Sea View, Dolphin, and Salton Bay. The roads themselves are much more vivid in a blown-up Google map of the town than they are in real life, and at best, each street sports one structure, usually a dilapidated bungalow or trailer.

While three “rivers” “feed” the Salton Sea — the New, the Alamo, and the Whitewater — most of the sea’s inflow comes from nutrient-rich agricultural runoff. There is no outflow. The water just sits there, so with evaporation, the salts and contaminants get more and more concentrated. The only fish that can survive in the sea itself is tilapia, and frankly, eating a steady diet of tripe tacos sounds far more appetizing than eating anything from the Salton Sea.

As a result of evaporation, exacerbated by the ongoing California drought, the sea continues to shrink, so the shoreline, where the developers once envisioned vibrant marinas and restaurants, continues for hundreds of feet before water finally appears at an unreachable distance.

The best part of the Salton Sea is that it is such a vibrant flyway for migratory birds. More than 400 species have been identified there, and interestingly, the only more diverse avian home in the U.S. is Big Bend National Park in Texas, where we were a few weeks ago.

The Salton Sea bugs me. Should we protect it or let it return to nature? Is it a natural part of the landscape or a human-caused anomaly? If we protect it … to protect the migratory birds that rely on it … what does that mean? Nature’s way of dealing with it was to let it fill and then dry up over cycles lasting centuries. With our harnessing of the Colorado River as an essential water supply source for the cities and farms of the southwest, those filling and drying cycles are ancient history … at least until the Colorado River infrastructure disappears. Damn it’s a hard one. If you make an argument one way or the other, I will probably agree and disagree with you vigorously.

From the Salton Sea, we headed west toward San Diego. Fortunately, State Route 78 not only kept us off the Interstate, it also took us through Julian, another village I had read about but never seen. Julian is an old mining town at the top of a mountain that is now home to a very decent smattering of hippie farmers, musicians, artists, and other neer-do-wells. We passed the first and only camel farm I have encountered this side of the Middle East, and as we passed it, we simultaneously passed a gent leading a llama on a leash. No one in Julian would ever have looked twice.

A few wineries and apple orchards later, we were in Poway, at the doorstep of San Diego. Amazing! I have seen San Diego dry and brown, and I have seen it on fire. Never before have I seen it lush, verdant, and bright green! As a result of the rains that fell earlier this winter, the mountains east of San Diego looked shockingly like Vermont, a sight that I am pretty certain I will never see again.

From Poway, it was a short hop to the Clairemont neighborhood, just south of Mesa College, where our friend Brandon had offered his mother’s condo. She and he had lived there when they attended law school, and now they keep it just in case a couple of traveling vagabonds like us need a place to crash for a few days. Other than the fact that it had no wifi and awful cellular service, it was perfect … and with amazingly convenient access to a very big city.

Our first night in San Diego we met up with our friends Risa and David Baron for dinner. (Risa is in for a fun roller coaster ride. She recently left the employ of San Diego Gas and Electric — where we became friends when she was my client — and started working for the San Diego County Water Authority. Welcome to the water industry, Risa. You’re gonna love it!)

I had been itching to take Rebecca to Saffron’s, a tiny Thai take-out place on India Street near Washington. The actual history of the place is a tad too arcane for my brain, but the abbreviated story goes something like this: Su-Mei Yu immigrated from Thailand and became a successful restaurateur in San Diego, known far and wide for her Thai chicken. In 1992, she became romantically involved with the Italian-born artist Italo Scanga. They lived together thereafter at her home in La Jolla. Scanga and his friend Dale Chihuly were artistic muses for each other. As a result, not only is the food terrific, and not only are the walls adorned with photographs of Su-Mei Yu and countless celebrities, but they are also adorned with Scanga art and probably 30 or 35 original pieces of Chihuly glass. As good as it is as a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, it is even better as an art gallery. Man, I love finding places like that … and like the First State Bank in Uvalde, Texas.

Balboa Park is no slouch of a place either! Quite likely the most beautiful city park in the US, the park was built for the 1915 International Exposition and then donated to the city. In addition to housing the world-famous San Diego Zoo, it also houses the art museum, a science museum, an air and space museum, an automotive museum, an organ pavilion, a botanical garden, a girl scout camp, endless miles of magnificent walking trails, and insane views of the city. It is a gem, and if I ever live in San Diego, I plan to visit the park at least once a week. Rebecca says that she would go every day!

From Balboa Park, we headed south to Logan Heights, an old Hispanic neighborhood just south of downtown. Risa knew of a tamale joint she thought we should try, Las Cuatro Milpas. It’s been in the family for over 80 years, and their business plan is simple: make only a few dishes, including tamales, rolled tacos, carnitas tacos, and rice and beans; charge only $5 cash for each item; and stay open as late in the afternoon as necessary to sell out of everything. The three of us spent $15 total. The food was incredible. The place exuded personality and great vibes, thanks in some part to the palette of white and blue collars, including no shortage of bus drivers and city workers. We each ate lunch. Nothing more. We drank water. We were so full that all three of us skipped supper, and Rebecca and I ate little more until dinner the next day.

One block away from Las Cuatro Milpas … a block that is home to a few really skilled homeless beggars … I-5 passes overhead. The concrete supports holding up the highway provide the canvas for some truly beautiful under-the-highway murals. It’s amazing how people can create beauty in the most unexpected places.

During our week in San Diego, our adventure took a new turn: I started working again! I taught a writing workshop in Chula Vista on Tuesday, and another in Encinitas on Thursday. After two months of not being in front of a class, it felt great! I will now be teaching a couple of days a week until early March, with the exception of a week hanging out with Bro Joe on the coast of Oregon. The length of time we have available to drive east from Portland to Boston has already been set by my teaching schedule: March 3 in Portland and March 24 in Cambridge. That gives us 21 days to traverse the northern tier in late winter with definite stops in Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Canandaigua/Geneva. We’re hoping for a warm, sunny spring in the Rockies!

For starters, Texas is a ridiculously big state! We took seven days from Beaumont to El Paso (by which time we had eliminated half of New Mexico because El Paso is so far west), and another three days to cross the rest of New Mexico and arrive in Phoenix … for a chill afternoon of football: Eunice, LA to Houston to Gruene/New Braunfels to Del Rio to Big Bend to Alpine to El Paso to Silver City, NM to Globe, AZ to Phoenix … all on one $20 tank of gas per day!

The two most unexpected sights we saw were in Uvalde, TX and Silver City, NM. In Uvalde, we spent about an hour in the First State Bank building. Dolph Briscoe, Jr. served as president of the bank until he served as governor of Texas from 1973-1979, replacing John Connelly. He also happened to be the largest single landowner in the state, and by the time he died in 1980, the Briscoe family had accumulated a net worth of $1.3 billion. The bank constructed its main building in 1979, and Briscoe and his wife, Janey, decorated the space with magnificent period furniture and their personal art collection: mostly western art coupled with a couple of original 500-year-old Rembrandt etchings. The art collection is totally open to the public. One of the officers greeted us, chit-chatted us, and then escorted us as we toured the collection. The bank president simply could not have been more cordial or welcoming. It’s worth making Uvalde a destination just to spend an afternoon in the bank.

Silver City, NM provided the most encouraging moment of the trip … a markedly different moment from those we had in various spots that screamed anti-government, anti-Obama, firearm paranoiac vitriol. There in the middle of Silver City we happened across a “Bernie for President” campaign office (closed of course) and a bunch of “Bernie” lawn signs. We just hadn’t expected that. Our experience was that New Mexico is to Arizona what Vermont is to New Hampshire. It’s amazing how two such apparently similar adjacent states can feel so different. (We cross New Hampshire to get to Vermont for a reason!)

The most beautiful scenery we saw was in Big Bend National Park, especially Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande. Everything about the park is out of the way, and it boasts the largest variety of tarantulas in the U.S. (Winter travel has its benefits: we encountered no tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, bear, or mountain lions. WooHoo.) We forewent a lot of sights for the sake of time, but the hike up the canyon alone was worth the drive.

The Big Bend region of Texas has virtually no light pollution, so it is the darkest single region in the continental United States. For the sake of time, we had to choose between hiking in Santa Elena Canyon and viewing at the McDonald Observatory. Reluctantly, we chose the hike in the canyon. We know it was a superb choice; we don’t know what we missed!

The best innkeeper we found was Sam Acosta in Alpine, TX.  The Highland Inn, a run-down family-owned side-of-the-highway motel with $45 room rates, sits directly across U.S. 90 from Sul Ross State University. Trip Advisor reviews gave us a sense of confidence: Sammy confirmed them. He’s a sweetheart. The only drawback was that the train track runs directly behind the motel. I heard nothing all night; Joe and Rebecca heard one train that they thought was so close it was coming through the room; Sammy informed us in the morning that three trains had passed during the night. I guess we were all pretty tired and sleeping well. For what it is worth, the Highland Inn is exactly as far from the tracks as every other building in downtown Alpine.

The greatest hilarity of the trip came from brother Joe and Prada. Joe spent twenty-five years as a prop master in Hollywood, mostly making high-end television commercials. When we looked at the map, he said, “I once staged a rodeo in Marfa, Texas.” Not only that, he had an immense knowledge of the state that fooled him as much as it fooled Rebecca and me. Until we were there, he just didn’t remember. He had propped commercials in Greune at the Music Hall, at Big Bend, in Marfa, in Langtry at the Judge Roy Bean Museum, and who knows were else. He was a regular encyclopedia of stupid Texas minutiae.

Marfa, by the way, is a minor adventure in an of itself.  From what we could find, it has only two hotels: one is an upscale, expensive refurbished boutique hotel; the other consists of tepees and yurts.  As we drove into the town, we encountered this inexplicable yet deep mural covering the side of a building.  You got any ideas?

Sammy from the Highland Inn had warned us about the Prada installation we would pass in 75 miles or so, but even that did not prepare us for the shock. Twenty-six miles west of Marfa, deep in the middle of the starkness of the Chihuahuan Desert, stood an unstaffed Prada outlet building: just a display booth with very high-end shoes (only one shoe per pair so no one would be tempted to steal them) and purses. Miuccia Prada herself selected the display items. As we stood around, laughed uproariously, and took photos, a family pulled up in a pickup truck. They had driven from Austin, some 460 miles, just to see it and photograph it!

The lore of the place is wicked cool: An independent foundation funded the project that was then designed and installed by artists by the name of Elmgreen and Dragset. The door to the structure is non-functional, so it cannot be opened. The artists’ intent is for the building to never undergo any repair so it slowly degrades back into the landscape. The state almost forced its removal because they deemed it a non-conforming billboard. Instead, they reclassified it as a museum, and as far as I can tell, it will stay there for a few hundred more years before nature reclaims it. Unlike the bank’s art collection in Uvalde, it is assuredly not worth the drive, but if you happen to be in the area, it is indeed memorable.

The Prada outlet wasn’t our only surprise. We also happened across a giant radar blimp parked comfortably beside the highway. We must’ve been in eyesight of its stark whiteness for 25 miles as we approached. Amazingly, as we grew closer, our first three guesses were 1) it’s an aircraft of some kind, 2) it’s a blimp, and 3) it’s a radar blimp. I’ll be damned. We nailed it!

 

As we drove, the trip became a study in subcultures: gulf coast seafood, Texans, Tex-Mex dives, mining, rock hounds, National Park volunteers, folk artists, and incredibly nice people.

As if we had not eaten enough in New Orleans or had enough fun in Mamou, we spent our first night just east of Houston with our good friends Patrick and Julie. Patrick works in sales; Julie was in television production for PBS in Texas (and has a shelf full of Texas Emmys to prove it), and she now directs the “Telling Project” Institute (http://www.TheTellingProject.org). They were amazing hosts who totally got our

adventure and welcomed us with open arms. We had brought a sack full of Cajun boudin sausage from Mamou for supper, but that wasn’t enough. Patrick had to show Joe and me the seafood markets along the Gulf coast near Clear Lake while Julie and Rebecca caught up with each other. Amazing! There had to be 6 or 8 different markets, and each one had hundreds of feet of display counter jammed with every imaginable kind of seafood. We bought a few more shrimp, but mostly marveled at the seafood culture in the eastern suburbs of Houston. We got out of Houston early Sunday morning, successfully avoiding traffic. In fact, we successfully avoided traffic in all of Texas, sliding smoothly through San Antonio and El Paso on Interstates at off hours … and those were our only forays on Interstates as we successfully crossed the state on blue highways.

Texans just love being Texans. In addition to being its capital, Austin does a fine job of trying to be home to that subculture, but I don’t think it really is. Greune (properly pronounced “green,” improperly pronounced by Joe as “grew-in,” and insistently — and obnoxiously — pronounced by me as “groin”) and its immediate neighbor New Braunfels arguably represent the Texas subculture even more than Austin.

We arrived in Greune late-ish afternoon on Sunday. The hamlet was packed, with all of the parking lots were full and cars parked interminably along every side road. We asked what was going on to attract so many people. “Nothing,” we were told. “It’s just a weekend in Greune.” Our first stop was a beer garden with a small bandstand showcasing a kick-butt Texas blues band with a drop-dead good harmonica player. Joe and I drank a beer and we took in the crowd, made up entirely of proud Texans: mountains of cowboy hats, boots, and rhinestones, bikers wearing leather chaps, and no shortage of Kinky Friedman wannabes sporting big, stinky cigars. Our personal favorite was the weekend cowboy with pressed jeans, fancy boots, gaudy belt, cowboy shirt, jean jacket, cigar, beer, and styled gray hair. Our collective assessment was that he was a dermatologist acting out for the weekend.

After checking into our hotel and stuffing ourselves on bona fide Texas barbecue at Coopers (a famous joint for those in the know … albeit way too pricey), we went back to catch the end of the music at the Gruene Music Hall, a 100-year-old wooden dance hall that even I think is just wicked cool. All in all, a perfect dose of “Texas.”

Most U.S. Highways ending in a “0” span the coasts. U.S. 90 is an exception, going only from Jacksonville to Van Horn, Texas. We did not drive its entirety by any matter of means, but we did take great advantage of it: heading east from Jacksonville, then Mobile to New Orleans, and then across much of Texas, mostly from Gruene/New Braunfels clear to Van Horn … with a major detour to Big Bend.

With the exception of the art collection and cordiality of the First State Bank in Uvalde, the best parts of the drive from Greune to Del Rio were the road runners, the company in the car, and the occasional roadside hilarity, like the full-size canoe sculpture in the desert. The Looney Tunes geniuses who created Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote had obviously paid some dues by spending time on the same route we drove. Road runners are hilarious birds, darting across the road and through the cactus. Coyotes stealthily rule the desert. With the endless mesas and buttes, it was easy to envision Wile E. plotting strategies to nab supper by outsmarting one of those ridiculous birds … and imagining the roadrunners looking at him, smiling, and thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m outta here. BeepBeep.”

Del Rio is another pass-through town with no redeeming qualities that I can recollect: a perfectly average (though cheap) motel room, a perfectly average (though cheap) Tex-Mex meal, and gone in the morning.

Langtry, Texas, on the other hand, is a hoot. Just west of Del Rio, we crossed the Pecos River and entered the land that had been governed by Judge Roy Bean of Langtry, a man who called himself “The Law West of the Pecos.” The state has preserved his legacy, including the Jersey Lilly Saloon, where he held court and the one law book he flaunted to show that his decisions were indeed based on law. (Whenever newer volumes of the state statutes arrived, he burned them as kindling.) When “Judge” Bean put down roots in the crossroad that is now Langtry, he named the town for the beautiful British actress Lilly Langtry, and he named the saloon/courthouse “Jersey Lilly.” Sadly, despite his deep infatuation, Judge Bean never met Lilly Langtry; she did not get to Langtry until after he died in 1903.

History may also have dealt Judge Bean a bum hand. Although he is known in lore as “the hanging judge,” records show that he actually sentenced only two men to death … and one of them escaped. Not bad for Texas! (The Wikipedia entry on Judge Bean is a great read … and the museum is a great visit.)

From Langtry, we headed southwest for Big Bend National Park. Our big splurge was a room at the lodge and a meal (elk burger and elk chili). A great decision indeed! I would love to write a book sometime about functional, efficient, professional agencies of the U.S. Government. (I bristle at the bad rap that government so often gets!) The U.S. Park Service tops the list. For starters, at age 62 we qualified to buy the Park Service’s “America the Beautiful Senior Pass.” For a lifetime fee of $10, we have access to every US Park Service and Forest Service fee area. What a motivation to experience the dramatic beauty and take in the history of this country! It’s the most cost-effective purchase of my life! What’s more, every single Ranger we’ve encountered has been remarkably nice and knowledgeable. I’d love to hang out at a meeting of Rangers some time. I’m not sure I can imagine a more interesting single group of self-reliant people.

While Park Rangers represent one subculture, park employees represent another … also really cool. A number of private hospitality corporations manage the lodges and gift shops at National Parks and Recreation Areas. Some are full-time residents; many are nomadic retirees enjoying the country. They apply for a position at any number of national sites then plan their travel around available openings. The government provides a stipend and free space for their RV. We learned about the subculture from the nice Midwestern lady who used to own a Dairy Queen franchise and was running the visitor center at the Okefenokee Swamp. We learned a lot more from the gray-bearded guys running the lodge at Big Bend. It sounds like a perfect way for some folks to while away a few years between retirement and old age.

Not only is the Park stunning and majestic, it also embodies the sensitivity and competence of the Park Service. We drove about 25 miles through the desert on a dead-end road from the lodge to Santa Elena Canyon, where we hiked. Just before the Canyon, we arrived at the Castelon Visitor Center. It is an old army barracks from the Mexican Wars with a few pieces of old steam-powered machinery because a nutcase in the early 20th Century tried to establish the area as a cotton growing mecca. (The closest railroad was in Marathon, a treacherous three-day wagon ride away.)

When we arrived, I noticed that the building was fully electrified and wired, but we had not seen a utility pole or a solar panel on the entire trip. The Ranger explained that the Park Service was sensitive to the rugged natural beauty of the landscape and had worked hard to keep the electrical infrastructure out of sight. On the drive out of the canyon, now more aware, I noticed occasional signs of poles and cables. Amazing! Job well done!

The southwest is all about open land. Its residents have no choice but to be self-reliant, and that includes entertaining themselves, often with hilarious art. Our favorite was the store-restaurant-gift shop “trading post” somewhere northwest of Big Bend and east of El Paso. It had five or six tables with plastic tablecloths. The tables used to have 2X4 legs. Actually, they still do, but the 2X4’s are invisible. The owner explained that she got tired of looking at them, so she dressed them up. Every table leg in the place sported blue jeans and cowboy boots. What’s more, the place sports a sign reading, “Western Town available to rent for special occasions, birthday parties, quincaneras, church groups. For prices, call Mayor May Carson.”

Other trading posts we visited lacked some of that creativity. They just amassed endless amounts of weird shit. Each place was good for a single visit. Anything more might have become tortuous. The one in Duncan, Arizona sold “antiques and oddities.” (That would be the one with the rooster in the back of the truck.) I asked the owner if they might be interested in selling my brother. HaHa. I also offered $25 for a too-big-to-lift case of used horseshoes, but they said the offer was too low. I’m still bummed about that one. There’s no telling what you could do with a case of used horseshoes.

In Marfa, Texas, we stopped to jawbone for a while with a rockhound who owns a shop on the main street. We bought a fossil for our granddaughter’s birthday, and Joe got a few crystals for a friend back in Oregon. Mostly, we spent our time looking at maps of New Mexico and Arizona with the owner. He pointed out 5 or 6 towns with rockhound populations. I’m not sure what it is about southwestern rockhounds, but I freakin’ love them. Every one of them is crusty, smart, and just damned interesting.

The trip took a short-lived turn in El Paso. We had a final supper together then Joe and I dropped Rebecca off at the airport on Friday morning for a flight to Omaha. Joe and Rebecca hugged goodbye until we re-connect someplace between San Francisco and the central Oregon coast in a few weeks. Rebecca’s daughter in Omaha has three children: Aaden is 16, Seff is 15, and Ella just turned 13. Rebecca has never missed a birthday. A driving adventure wasn’t going to affect that record. Plus, it gave Joe and me a few days of spectacular brother time! By the time I picked Rebecca up at the Phoenix airport on Monday, Joe was back in Oregon … and I actually got to spend a day alone.

From El Paso, there we were, toodling our way to Deming, NM on a tiny state highway when we passed a sign for the Rockhound State Park, and a nearby hand-painted sign for the Spanish Stirrup Rock Shop. I was heading south on a rough two-lane road before Joe had a clue what was going on. Five miles later, we walked into the shop.

The owner, a camo-wearing iron lady with the brightest, most sparkly blue eyes I’ve ever seen, was on the phone getting impatient. “NO! I am not going to send THREE Thunder Eggs to Germany! If he wants Thunder Eggs, he can come to the show in Quartzite (AZ), buy a ton of them, and get them to Germany himself!” Joe and I entertained ourselves looking at her stunning inventory of uncut, cut, and polished rocks. (As with birds, I really wish I knew much, much more about what we were looking at!!)

When she hung up, we started jawboning. An hour or so later, it was all we could do to pull ourselves away and get back on the road … by which time I was the proud possessor of a genuine “sex rock,” a gift from Lori to Rebecca. A small, cracked geode with a few crystals inside, Lori explained that it was, after all, just a plain old F-in rock!

Lori showed us photos of the antelope she had recently shot and field dressed. I showed her pictures of small-mouth bass from Lake Champlain. Joe showed pictures of Chinook salmon from Oregon. We left as fast friends and an expressed desire to all meet up again in Oregon to see if we couldn’t hook some salmon. Lori also tapped into Joe’s sheer hilarity, and we laughed about that encounter for the rest of our time together.

From Deming to Silver City, we climbed about 2,000 feet. The snow starting falling shortly before Silver City. As gorgeous as it was, when night fell, the sheer black ice became treacherous. We slid our way into a bar for a beer and a game of cribbage. Like too many of the bars we visited, it had every indication of being totally cool … and just wasn’t … though the blandness of the bars in Silver City didn’t hold a candle to the blandness and weirdness of the bars we visited at our next stop, Globe, AZ. We made it back safely to our motel (another cheap, but surprisingly clean and quiet dump) and saw no reason to exploit any more of the town’s hospitality. The following morning, we crossed the Continental Divide at 6,355 feet in a magnificent snow-covered desert on our way to Globe.

To my eyes, Southeastern Arizona provides a window into the political opposites that are this country. In general terms … and largely in my experience … Arizona is a politically conservative state with a deep disdain for anything governmental. The idea of an EPA telling business what they can and cannot do engenders visceral passion among conservative Arizonans. Nevertheless, the landscape is defined by hundreds upon hundreds of miles of eyesore: copper mines, silver mines, iron mines surrounded by mountains of tailings that sit untended polluting the horizon and the water.

For my entire life, I have wrestled with society’s need for resources and our habitat’s need for protection. “Sustainability” is a concept that resonates with me, and I define it with what I call the “Boy Scout definition”: Leave the campsite better than we found it. Southern Arizona, like much of the coalfields of central Appalachia and much of the rust belt of the Midwest give testament to human beings’ contempt and disregard for our home. Some people I know wrongheadedly contend that we are destroying the planet. We are not. The planet is in great shape. We are merely destroying our habitat: through climate change and air and water pollution. The planet will continue well after homo sapiens go extinct. The idea that corporations can destroy our land … and our habitat … without restoring their damage and paying the societal costs of their greed simply nauseates me. Enough said!

Globe, Arizona is a poster child for that rant. The mountains are destroyed. The corporations have earned their wealth while snubbing their noses at the rest of us, and through it all, the huge Indian reservations, in this case a vast Apache reservation, exhibit the same state of poverty as found in too many Appalachian hollows. So sad. But you try talking sense into the rabid anti-government conservatives. It can’t be done. Greed, selfishness, and short-sightedness win.

Fortunately, Globe, Arizona was not a totally negative experience, thanks to the manager of Chalos Restaurant. It seemed like it might be a decent place to grab a bite, and Yelp gave us some hope, but we really weren’t sure. We were as interested in watching football as we were in eating, but the lady at the cash register told us they did not have a television …. but she would go check nonetheless. How, you may wonder, would a restaurant employee not know whether or not the restaurant had a television? We learned when she re-approached us, smiled, and said they had a TV for us to watch after all. Then she escorted us to a small banquet room in the back.

A cook wearing an apron watched the Arizona State – USC basketball game on one set, while Joe and I watched the Packers and Redskins on the other. The cook was the son of the owner and the restaurant’s proprietor. No one can eat in the banquet room, which is why the lady in front told us “No television.” He wasn’t even sure that the second television worked since service is intermittent and no one has watched it in months. When he saw that it did work, he invited us in.

The basketball game was fabulous: 4 overtimes. The football game was boring, but at least we got to watch it. The conversation was terrific. We learned about his golf game, his work hours, his four wives, his motorcycle, his children — ranging in age from 8 to 36 — and what it takes to cook for 200 or 300 people a day in small remote-ish restaurant. Best of all, the machaca and green chili were deelish!

And that about did it. Off to Phoenix. A bona fide city. A decent meal, the Seattle-Minnesota arctic bowl, a good night’s sleep, our umpteenth Tex-Mex breakfast burrito, then adios: Joe off to Florence via Eugene and Rebecca in from Omaha later that afternoon. I spent the afternoon in the lobby of the airport Marriott answering emails and getting started on this blog entry.

With Rebecca safely back in the front seat, off we went to Green Valley, south of Tucson, for a few days with Rebecca’s brother and sister-in-law. Here is the honest but abridged version: Rebecca’s kinfolks are gracious hosts who could not possibly have made us feel more welcome or comfortable. We ate well, slept well, and explored the region. I even got in a little Arizona winter golf and made ample time to blog and prepare for the next month of real work up the CA coast. However, this is southern Arizona. We’ve watched more Fox News in the past few days than we have in the past few years. We endured the Republican debate in its entirety. The bumper sticker we saw in the grocery store parking lot says it all: “Hey Obama, YOU’RE FIRED! Trump 2016.” Once in a while, I really miss Watertown and Vermont.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s get things straight: New Orleans is the best city in the world. No place holds a candle to its food, people, humor, or general level of insanity. As the vendor in the French Market said to us during a morning walk, “Playing music is better for you than eating your vegetables.”

We arrived at our friends Jon and Elisa’s in time for lunch after a leisurely drive along the Gulf Coast from Gulfport. They have recently finished rehabbing an old home in the Marigny, right where Treme, the Marigny, and the French Quarter come together.

We immediately adjourned for lunch. (It is New Orleans, after all.) Café Rose Nicaud on Frenchman Street has become one of Rebecca’s favorites. A local hangout with fresh, well-prepared food, a do-it-yourself approach to bussing, and kick-butt ginger limeade that Rebecca could drink all day.

Just as New Orleans is about food and music, it is also about walking, or more accurately, strolling. It’s how we filled most of our time there … when we weren’t eating.

Supper was vintage New Orleans. Rebecca and I drove a few blocks to Cajun Seafood, a _______ (DAMN! I’m hunting for an appropriate adjective for Cajun Seafood but I don’t think one exists. It’s just New Orleans) fresh seafood and prepared food emporium directly across North Claiborne from Ernie K-Doe’s (and now Kermit Ruffins’) Mother-in-Law Lounge. The prepared foods include fried turkey wings, boiled turkey neck, a chinese rice dish, and corn on the cob. We bought a couple of pounds each of boiled shrimp (heads on, of course) and crawfish. My brother Joe contends it was the best boiled shrimp and crawfish he ever ate. I almost agree. It was really good New Orleans boiled seafood. Finding the BEST New Orleans seafood boil is a quest I’d like to undertake. Jon threw some fresh drum and asparagus on the grill. Rebecca made one of her world-class salads, and voila, we ate like royalty.

The company was pretty wonderful too. Jon and Elisa (whom many of you know) are the best of the best. Lorraine shared New Orleans with us too. Lorraine, a hard-core native Bostonian with the accent to prove it, is becoming vintage New Orleans. Another Boomer in the throes of the great transition, Lorraine has sold everything, bought a small RV (van-sized) and hit the road. Her long-term goal: visit every National Park in the continental US. It is amazing how beautifully a life-long New Englander can effortlessly morph into a New Orleans showpiece. Lorraine rocks, and we had a total blast together!

Day 2 tipped the scale. I will be on a weight-loss campaign for the rest of the trip. (In truth, I really hate New Orleans. If I lived there, I would become a full-sized blimp.) Lunch: Lil Dizzie’s in Treme with our dear friend Al “Carnival Time” Johnson. Al is a New Orleans Rhythm and Blues icon. Many of you remember Al because Rebecca, Jon, Elisa, and I hosted a fund-raiser for him in Watertown after Hurricane Katrina. He now lives comfortably in a beautiful home in the Musician’s Village.

We often meet Al at Lil Dizzies on Esplanade near North Rampart. The Baquet family has run this creole joint for decades. Everyone but Jon and me were smart. They ordered from the menu. We got the damn buffet: fried chicken, veggies, smothered pork chops, gumbo, creole bean stew, bread pudding. I got full … and stayed that way. Supper at Mandina’s didn’t help.

Mandina’s is a classic creole joint on Canal Street in MidCity. I like to think of it as Italian-Creole. Their trout almondine and trout meuniere are amazing. I had the creole catfish. It was amazing too. In fine Mandina’s tradition, we arrived about 8:00 without reservations.  Fortunately, we were with Jon’s son Bryce and his girlfriend, Ruby. Bryce attended Watertown High with Allie and Joanna after Katrina.  I deeply love spending time with him, and it saddens me that with 1,500 miles between us, we cannot spend nearly enough time hanging out together! It was close to 10:00 before we got a table, by which time we sort-of cared but we didn’t really care too much. We all ate until we could eat no more and left completely sated … and stuffed!

Day 3 started with an effort to walk it off. Joe hasn’t been to New Orleans for almost 40 years. There was so much to show him: Frenchman Street (an amazing music mecca), the Mississippi, and a serpentine weave through the Quarter. Café du Monde might have been fun, but on the day before the Sugar Bowl with Ole Miss playing, the line stretched 2 or 3 blocks. Jackson Square is a reliable winner; we walked past the buskers just as they launched into “Jambalaya” with its opening line of “Goodbye Joe.” “That’s Joe,” I said. “He’s my brother.” With that, the trombone and sax players slid apart, invited me to sit, and played as I clapped time. Joe and Rebecca took pics.   Last year, our son-in-law Mike sat in on piano at Preservation Hall. Not only that, we met a woman at Lil Dizzie’s whose father was the first black bartender at Pat O’Briens. We simply had to walk down St. Peter Street since the two icons are next door to each other. When Rebecca and I first met, we realized we shared a favorite bar/restaurant: The Napoleon House on Chartres Street with one of New Orleans’ most classic courtyards. I read Plato’s “Republic” there as an undergraduate. From there to Iberville for a stroll past Acme Oyster House and Felix’s.

Felix’s warrants its own paragraph. Many years ago, Rebecca and I sat at Felix’s counter eating oysters as I related a story about my father and grandfather, who both loved New Orleans. As soon as possible after their arrival, we would go to Felix’s for oysters. When I first visited the city with my daughters, Allie and Joanna, the first place we went was Felix’s. For four generations, oysters at Felix’s has been a top-tier priority. In response to the story, Rebecca said, “Wow! That’s incredible. You have to write that story.” I turned to the old oyster shucker behind the counter and asked, “How often do you hear this story?” Without lifting his head or raising his voice, he said in the most matter of fact way possible, “Every day.” New Orleans is not so much a city as it is a way of life.

The morning walk, albeit long, did little to counteract the gluttony. We had to go to Domilise’s for a po-boy. Joe ate an oyster po-boy there 40 years ago and remembered it like it was yesterday. Domilise’s is the ultimate uptown neighborhood joint, on Annunciation, one block from Tchoupitoulas and the river, and only a few blocks from Audubon Park. Sadly, we learned on this trip that Dot Domilise died two years ago, but her daughter-in-law Joanne is continuing the tradition. (I love you, Joanne. Thank you!!!!!!) In response to the sandwich, Joe was amazed: after 40 years of holding onto a memory, the reality was exactly what he had anticipated. Nothing had changed, and the sandwich was perfect.

So was our brief afternoon visit with sisters Mandy and Liza, two great friends from Boston, who now teach in New Orleans and live one house from the heart of Frenchman Street. Joe and I became best friends when we lived together from 1974-76. Joanna and Allie’s friendship soared when they lived together in Ann Arbor. What a treat spending a little time in New Orleans with sisters whose lives will be forever improved by virtue of living together … much less one house from Frenchman Street.

The perfect po-boy and a short visit with Mandy and Liza led directly into New Year’s Eve. Lorraine is a terrific chef. Jon, Rebecca, and I are too. We prepared a New Year’s feast of boiled shrimp and crawfish, Cajun chicken, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, cabbage, salad, and hand-made desserts from Tee-Eva’s: sweet potato pie, pecan pie, and the best pralines on earth.

Then it was time for music, so we followed the morning’s route in reverse: Jackson Square to Frenchman Street. Fortunately, we were all exhausted, so we made it home in time to toast the New Year together.

We kicked off 2016 by driving from New Orleans to Cajun Country and an amazing Saturday morning of music in Mamou.

My stomach hurts from recollecting the joy of being in New Orleans, the best city in the world.

 

Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, Louisiana is one of those places you could spend lifetimes hunting for and never find. We only went because our friends Jon and Elisa told us to. They had gone about 10 years ago. Even after googling Fred’s, we had no idea if the show was still going on or if there would be anything happening on New Year’s weekend. A phone call fixed that.

Fred’s is a genuine old-time music hall with fantastic Cajun music, great dancers, a rocking bar, the friendliest people on the planet … all between 9:15 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. every Saturday. Or as they put it, “We’re open 52 days a year.”

We arrived about 8 in the morning when the place was empty except for the drummer who was slowly assembling his set. We picked out a front seat: an old booth bench with a solid front rail and nothing else between the naugahyde and the floor. A perfect place to spend a few hours.

Every Cajun there was a showpiece: The guy with the black duster, long ponytail, full beard, sparkly belt, shined boots, and questionable front teeth. The women wearing more than a few extra pounds sporting world-class rhinestones. The lanky guy with a bow tie and patent leather alligator dancing shoes. And man, could they dance the two-step and the Cajun waltz! By 10:30, the place was shoulder-to-shoulder and strewn with empty beer cans.

The food in the area didn’t suck either. We arrived early enough on Friday afternoon to scout out Mamou for places to eat and sleep. Strike out. Mamou may be the Cajun music capital of the world, but its only hotel is closed and we found no open restaurants. Fortunately, Eunice is only 10 miles down the road. The Best Western was clean … and by paying for one night there, we earned one upcoming free night at Best Western and another on Hotels.com. WooHoo.

When we spoke with the lady from Fred’s to be sure the music would take place, she recommended Ronnie’s Cajun Café in Eunice. Over-the-top: “screamin” Cajun chicken, frog legs, boudin balls. Man, dem Cajun’s really know how to eat and have fun!

Scotty, a quiet guy at the bar in a whopper black hat, told me two things. 1) Cajuns are the friendliest people on Earth.  2) We should go to T. Boys after the show to get us some real Cajun boudin sausage … the best in the area. He was right on both counts … even if his directions led us a few miles astray. We finally got there thanks to an old toothless Cajun on his lunch break from his crawfish shop who said, “Just follow me.”

T. Boys is a slaughterhouse/retail store in the middle of nowhere, about 3 or 4 miles from very little else. It was packed. For lunch, we split a boudin ball and a sack of cut-up pieces of boudin. For supper, we bought a package of crawfish boudin and straight pork boudin that we grilled at Pat and Julie’s house in Houston. What a meal!

Thanks Jon and Elisa and Pat and Julie. Louisiana and our first stop in Texas were everything we’d hoped they might be. Patrick (a transplanted Bostonian) put the experience perfectly as he left for the Gulf early on Sunday morning: “Thanks for coming,” he said. “No, we’re the ones who thank you,” I said. “Nope,” he said, “Anything for a good pahty!”

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler!

(And in case you are wondering, with this entry, the blog has indeed lost its chronological order. There’s just too much to write about our few days in New Orleans. It’ll happen, but Fred’s was too important to let it wait!)

Our parents’ generation derived meaning from the Depression and World War II. For many years, I thought our generation would be defined by Viet Nam. It hasn’t. It has been and will continue to be defined by the Civil Rights Movement.

What a shift we have seen, from the Jim Crow south with its unabashed racism to a black president. We are now at the cusp of 2016. Despite how far society has come, there is still so much further to go. I cannot yet really imagine a “post-racial” America.

Having grown up in Atlanta and gone to college in New Orleans in the last four years of the 1960s – before the completion of the Interstates – my route took me through Selma on US 80 and across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I have no clue how many times I have driven across the bridge. But I never stopped in Selma. It scared me.

I knew the bridge was important. I knew the history of Bloody Sunday and the march from Selma to Montgomery that led to the National Voting Rights Act. Like many bright undergraduates, I knew it in my head, but I knew nothing about it in my heart and soul. That knowledge has taken me a lifetime to begin to acquire.

As Rebecca and I planned our “Transition Tour” with its obligatory stops in Atlanta and New Orleans, spending time in Selma became equally important. We needed to walk across the bridge, following in the footsteps of some of America’s most important heroes.

Interestingly, I have almost-personal connections with four of the march’s most important leaders. My parents met Martin Luther King, Jr.; many of the people I knew from The Temple in Atlanta, especially our Rabbi, Jack Rothschild, knew him personally and closely. In the summer of 1970, I spent an afternoon in the rec room of the Ebenezer Baptist Church with Daddy King when I escorted a church choir group from Greensboro, NC as a Gray Line tour driver. I worked on Andrew Young’s campaign when he first ran for Congress in 1970, stuffing envelopes and driving voters to the polls. He once commented to my mother that “I was a fine young man,” one of those moments that becomes a lifelong source of pride. Many of my political friends from Atlanta have come to know John Lewis. And I recently learned that my lifelong friend Alan Begner, an attorney in Atlanta, represented Hosea Williams for 18 years until his death in 2000.

The walk was far more emotional than I could have anticipated. That emotion was compounded by some of the poverty conditions we drove through on our way to Selma. From Atlanta, we took I-85 about 25 miles to Newnan, and from there, we drove only state and county highways to Selma. We saw some of the most impressive clusters of “manufactured homes” I have ever seen, and we left Selma heading south with a tornado watch to our west. A community of single-wide trailers in a flat, unprotected Alabama field during a tornado watch leaves a deep ache in the pit of my stomach. We have come so far, but we still have so far to go.

The National Voting Rights Museum fills an old building at the southwest end of the bridge. It’s a tired-looking place with no real outstanding features, privately run, and apparently chronically under-funded. It was closed for the week between Christmas and New Year, so sadly we couldn’t visit. Its only visible outstanding feature was the storage building between it and the river. Eight murals on eight garage doors told a powerful story that began with “Education is the Key to Control our Destiny” and ended with “Hands that picked cotton picked a President!”

My experience of driving through Selma almost 50 years ago was one of fear of the police and the good-ole-boys. I was an uppity city Jew-boy with long hair and a beard going to college in New Orleans. They’d go out of their way to find a way to bust me. Fortunately, they never did.

When a Selma police car pulled behind us as we were trying to find an open restaurant, my heart went into my throat. I prepared for the worst. As we approached a traffic light, the police car pulled alongside us, a young black cop at the wheel. We rolled down the window and asked if he could recommend a restaurant. We stayed at that light through three cycles as he thought of places we could try, explained what they were like, and gave us directions to each.

When we arrived at a small bustling family restaurant we were pleasantly surprised. We fully expected a totally integrated establishment. What we did not expect was how many of the tables had black and white diners eating together, many of them apparently family; all of them obviously good friends. The arc of justice is indeed bending.

Selma’s two lagniappes proved to be our lodging and our breakfast. Built in 1837, the St. James Hotel is reputedly the most haunted site in Alabama. We didn’t get to meet any of it “haints,” but we did bask in its splendid luxury, even if only overnight, and even if the beds were a tad on the soft side. We’d stay in places like that every night if we could find them … especially if they had a staff like the St. James. Breakfast at the Downtowner on Selma Street approached southern perfection: grits, fluffy biscuit, well-cooked egg, amazing bacon and sausage, plenty of hot coffee, and world-class conversations to eavesdrop. (The most important takeaway: my deep southern accent ain’t half bad!)

After breakfast, I visited the newspaper office for a quick chit-chat while Rebecca returned to the hotel to shower. A half-hour or so later, I too returned to the hotel. Rebecca had not made it past the lobby, where she stood grinning and jawboning with the hotel manager, Annette.

Annette, I really hope you enjoy reading this blog, and we cannot wait to see you and stay at the St. James again for the 2017 Jubilee and march from Selma to Montgomery!!

WOW! Do we ever have some great friends in Atlanta despite a 50-year absence! Bill and my older brother were already friends by the time I was born; I have lived none of my life without him in the picture. Ricky and I go back to when our mothers pushed us in baby carriages, followed by Sunday School, college fraternity brothers, and subsequent roommates. Wolbe and I met in nursery school when we were 2, and our friendship has never waned. His wife Judy and I don’t go back nearly as far; we only met in kindergarten. Joel was my younger brother’s best pal.  Bruce and Alan date back to elementary school. Their wives are somewhat more recent, and utterly wonderful people. Danny and I became friends in college at Tulane and our friendship grew through his law school years in Atlanta. Gus and Marsharee are my most recent Atlanta friends, from graduate school at West Georgia College starting in 1971, a mere 45 years ago.

It has been a real thrill spending time with them. They are remarkable people: four lawyers, two therapists, a mortgage broker, a fishmonger , and a CPA, and all of them hilarious, successful, and wise.   Of them, the best bird watcher I know, the best guitar player I know, the most amazing wine collector I know, and the TWO best First Amendment lawyers I know. Since Rebecca and I have only been married for 16 years, she and they are still getting to know each other. I am pretty confident that after this visit, they all approve of each other 100%! We have just had a fantastic time.

We are sad to leave and totally excited to re-hit the road. Sunday, Atlanta to Selma (all on back roads of course) for an evening at the St. James Hotel alongside the Alabama River and Edmund Pettus Bridge (http://www.haunted-places-to-go.com/st-james-hotel.html) followed by a walk across the bridge and Monday morning at the National Voting Rights Museum. Monday, a leisurely drive to New Orleans where we hook up with our great friends Jon and Elisa for the New Year. On Wednesday, my best pal in the world, my brother Joe from Oregon, will join us in New Orleans.

After the New Year, Joe and I will spend the next 11 days driving to Tucson.  Rebecca will be with us for most of that time …. but not all. She will be taking a detour through Omaha (by plane, of course) for Granddaughter Ella’s 13th birthday. Rebecca’s daughter Melissa has three kids, Ella, Seff, and Aaden. Next year, Aaden starts his senior year in high school. Rebecca has NEVER missed a birthday. Transition Tour be damned; she’s not going to miss one this year either!