On the Road (5): Talking about the South

I wasn’t sure about the best way to write what I thought about the South. It’s a big and varied place, and I had simply driven through it. I didn’t live there, didn’t built any deep relationships, I only saw things that surprised me. But in the wake of what happened in Charleston this month, I feel we need to do a lot more talking and stake out some positions.

What I noticed in our weeks down there is that “Southern hospitality” is real, and a little unsettling if you come from up north and aren’t used to every social interaction having so many elements. One afternoon we stopped for lunch at a chicken joint in Fort Payne, Alabama. The fellow who took order looked us up and down, and thoughtfully said “Now, I haven’t seen y’all around here before. Where you from?” It took about twice as long to get the words out as I expected, so I nearly began answering before he was finished. That began a friendly conversation about the amount of snow we’ve had in Massachusetts, about how long it takes for spring to come up there, about where we were heading, about what else we’d see in Alabama.

It was perfectly fine and fun in small doses, but for an introvert like me this amount of social engagement is grueling. And I wonder about the culture that makes them like that. The easy answer, which probably has some truth in it, is that most for most of the time the South was hot and sparsely-populated and there was no point rushing past the minutiae of daily life.

This kind of formal politeness can be suspiciously false, but it is a way of life. Only a cold and remote northern Romantic would believe that casual interactions should be based on honesty and sincerity, as an excuse to be rude and brusque. It’s no radical observation that these kinds of masks we were in society are essential to get things done. At the same time, politeness is essential if your culture is based on arbitrary race-based injustice and social regimentation.

It’s a reflection of a deeper kind of sense of self. I can’t remember for the life of me who said it — Faulkner? Fitzgerald? — that Southerners were the Americans most like Europeans because they had been defeated. That they preserved a sense of tribal identity and “heritage” that vanished in the fluidity and flux of the rest of the United States.

All these kinds of boundaries are defensive mechanisms in a sense, a way of engaging at a relatively shallow level so you can forestall engaging on anything serious. On the highways of the south, you wonder about even the possibility of national dialogue and exchange as you see one giant pick-up after another with some variation of the Confederate flag slapped on it. Driving through Alabama and Mississippi, you reflect every now and then that if you want to look into the eyes of real, burning, violent racial hatred you just had to get off any exit and drive to the nearest nursing home.

Back in March, I felt despair about this. So so many political and economic elites benefit greatly from division, there is no way we can have a serious conversation about this, even if we wanted to. The desperation to avoid these conversations is what struck me back in March. When you walk around Lee Circle in New Orleans, or ponder the pompous historical markers outside the mansion where the traitor Jefferson Davis died, or consider that the Emanuel Church in Charleston is on friggin’ Calhoun Street.

Or so I thought, until the shooting earlier this month. It is great to see that apparently a critical mass of people have come around to the empowering idea that maybe the state shouldn’t flaunt a symbol that to many represents generations of hate and violence. That all that nonsense belongs in museums, that they are about history — the reality of what happened — and not “heritage.”

No writer I admire ever wrote a passage that makes me cringe the way a certain passage in William Faulkner’s weak novel Intruder in the Dust does. At one point Faulkner himself seems to emerge and editorialize about how important it is for the South to grapple with its demons on its own and everyone else should butt out. That was wrong then, and still wrong now.

On the Road (4): Eatin'

Maybe best not to eat like this all the time, but you can really eat well on the road. Thanks to smartphones and Yelp, we never had to settle for fast food or drive-thrus when we were out. We had one lunch at a barbecue spot on our first snowy afternoon in Manheim, Pennsylvania. We had a late dinner at Hilbilly Willy's, in a half-empty strip mall near Chattanooga. There was Little Dooey in Starkville, which sadly still had a campaign banner for Mitt Romney up in the dining room, right next to a giant t.v. showing LSU's spring football practices. 

In New Orleans we ate gumbo twice a day, tore into fried oyster po’ boys at Mahony's, and spent a long rainy afternoon on Magazine Street pulling apart a giant sack of crawfish at Tracey's. There were red beans and rice, and jambalaya, and just one lonesome, forgettable Hurricane, grabbed on the go after a night at Preservation Hall.

Ribs with fried okra at Hillbilly Willy's, Chattanooga, TN

Some world-famous beignets at Cafe du Monde.

Fresh crawfish at Big Fisherman Seafood on Magazine Street in New Orleans.

Our national beverage. By the vat, at the Little Dooey, Starkville, Mississippi.

On the Road (3): New Orleans

Jackson Square

Café du Monde is just across the street from Jackson Square, on just the other side of the flood wall from the Mississippi River at the end of the French Market. It’s famous, and has a huge multilingual line of visitors stretching down the street to prove it. And rightly so: their plates of beignets — fried dough served in a dust bowl of powdered sugar — are a treat, and even their chicory-laced cafe au lait has a specific charm (that chicory is there as a coffee extender, as local historians and guidebooks will tell you). The place is as New Orleans as it gets, but it can’t escape being a part of the great big globalized world — most of the waitstaff are Vietnamese ladies. Probably not as it was in the old days.

I’ve been to New Orleans three times now — in 1993, 2001, and 2015 — and it remains every bit the great American city we think it is. But like any living place, it’s changing, and thanks to its unique topography it’s changing fast. I didn’t now what it would like now. Would it feel like it’s still on its sickbed, after surviving a near fatal blow just a few years ago? Would it still feel like a convention center adjacent to a permanent frat party, as it is to so many visitors? Or has it moved on to become a consciously dying oddity with the grace of Venice? or a hollowed-out theme park of gumbo and old-timey jazz? The greatness of the place is there is a little of all of that.

My memories from that first trip remain very vivid. I went over winter break while in college to meet up with some Southern friends I’d met the summer before in Washington. I remember eating crawfish for the first time, and going to Bourbon Street and enjoying the idea of being an adult for awhile and ordering a beverage without a hassle. I saw the Mississippi River for the first time there.

That second trip I went for a conference, which was much less fun. I remember going out to slightly better restaurants, walking around alone, dropping by Preservation Hall a few times, spending long hours during the day in impossibly long meetings.

This trip with the family, I felt like we had to touch all the basics for the sake of our daughter. The tourist economy of the city is doing great. I don’t remember ever seeing quite so many people there. Getting to Preservation Hall was almost an ordeal — not just because I spent the set with my daughter on my shoulders because we were stuck against the back wall. The set was more dutiful than inspired, but the line to get in was astonishing. 

Never mind the line, Preservation Hall is still worth it

There is still a great deal to see, and we took an architectural tour of the Quarter to get a sense of the layers of design of the city. Along the way we managed to avoid Bourbon Street altogether, and spent an evening on Frenchmen Street listening to music and going to an open-air art market. It feels alive and healthy, and the pockets of despair visitors like us found were very familiar — the spectacularly drunk, the panhandlers, the squatters, the various fellows you see walking a bit too fast and looking around too much who are clearly up to something.

We stayed a little bit uptown, in a neighborhood that straddles the very posh Garden District and the quite more pedestrian Irish Channel districts. Giant old trees pushed their roots through the sidewalk, and the potholes and scarred pavement was astonishing. It felt like a city falling apart from the ground up.

We tried our best to get a little bit off the beaten path, and were well-rewarded when we did. The most eye-opening place we visited was the Backstreet Cultural Museum, in the lower reaches of Tremé, which is an old funeral home that has become an overflowing collection of items documenting the city’s rich and misunderstood African-American social traditions. It includes a selection of the intricate and complicated costumes of the various tribes of Mardi Gras Indians, and artifacts and items from the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and specific traditions like second-line dancing. 

Mardi Gras Indian costumes at the Backstreet Cultural Museum

This is a part of life in the city that is considerably more difficult to understand for outsiders, and in many ways the museum raised way more questions than it answered. This even though we had a wonderful guide, one of the founders of the museum who helped us make sense of the costumes and photos and newspaper clippings. As an experiment in anthropology it is an amazing place — a look at how a living culture choose to represent itself to outsider in an honest and astounding way.

As I said, I didn’t know what New Orleans we’d find — I’d imagined a place once again pulling open and forced to welcome all, a place that couldn’t afford to remain the quaint museum of esoteric culture it was before the catastrophe. It’s a bit of everything, as it always has been when at its best.

Old beside older

On the Road (2): Destin

 

Destin, March 23

The beach in Destin is one of the few I’ve ever seen that can sell itself. It is way out on the Florida Panhandle toward Pensacola, surprisingly far from the rest of the state, and has clever marketing team at work for it that has come up with the name “the Emerald Coast.” That’s fair: the sea is a bright, lively green, especially in contrast with the perfectly white, powdery beach. It checks every box: the sea was even warm enough in March to go into it.

Beach economies tend to be so similar that the small distinctions become big differences. The infrastructure in Destin at first glance is very familiar: a strand of beach, fronted by hotels, with a strip just inland of eating and entertainment options (things to do in case it rains).

But Destin’s big advantage is that it is new. The hotel where we stayed was just across the beach road from the great ocean-fronting behemoths, and was so new it appears on Google Earth as a construction site. It is so new that no older, shabbier layers of development are present — the small motel-like places you find in older beach areas. The restaurants are new and mostly chain locations, which lack in local character what they make up in reliability. The alternative entertainments aren’t limited to just mini-golf places, but include some pretty rad-looking go-kart racetracks. The common denominator you’d find anywhere by the shore are those giant discount beach-supply emporiums, spaced on nearly every block which sell cheap beach towels with SEC team logos, novelty shot glasses, and spade-and-bucket sets for kids.

This sudden growth around the area shows just how efficient market capitalism is in talent-scouting. But this moment in capitalism isn’t much interested in long-term, sustainable development, but in developing resources and extracting as much money out as quickly as possible. So you see some big new hotels, and a lot of condos crowded wherever they’ll fit within walking distance of the beach. Most of them seem to be built on this generic ideal of fancy Southern living, with big galleries and porches and plenty of space for rocking chairs. They seem pleasant and comfortable, but blank.

All that newness is reflected in who you see there. We saw a lot of families with kids, a lot of late-model SUVs with stickers for soccer associations and the like in the parking lots. No battered sedans that look like they won’t make it back to where they came from, no rusting campers, nothing that a successful upper middle class family would be ashamed to climb into.

Word of this complacent bourgeois atmosphere has apparently gotten around. I read in the Pensacola newspaper an article about the Spring Break economy, which noted that college kids in the region had decided that Destin is boring as hell and to be avoided in favor of places like Panama City Beach. This was a relief to us, even if we did spy more than a few beer funnels on display at the beach shops, and a smattering of college kids on the beach who seemed pretty well-mannered. 

Unconvincing

It was interesting to see how these little groups of college kids interacted and spent their days. The girls would arrive in groups, content to lie in the sun listening to music on their headphones, occasionally taking photos of themselves. The boys would arrive a bit later (go-karts?), stand in little circles around a cooler of Bud Light and chat. Occasionally they’d take a break to throw around a football. Eventually, a group of the girls would take the initiative to go talk to the boys, they would throw the football around altogether, and there, temporary friendships are sealed, I suppose.

It looked a bit backwards from how these things happened when I was their age, but the elements were all the same. What has really changed — and so much so to be alarming — is how technology has butt in to even the simplest things. One night, we went to a restaurant on the main drive, one of those giant seafood shack places. As we waited for a table, an enormous group of college kids arrived and was seated at several long tables pushed together. This kind of group you expect to be loud and fun, but on the contrary, they were dead silent. Each of them settled in, whipped out their phone, and stared down, maybe occasionally showing something in a whisper to their neighbor. To be young, at the beach, with an abundance of people to flirt with, and they stare furiously at their phones imagining they were elsewhere. I fear how crippled these kids have become.

I think my phone stayed away most of the time we were there. When I wasn’t silently judging college kids in my near vicinity, I was busy just enjoying being outdoors in the warm air, rejoicing to be outside again and not freezing to death. Who could ask for more?

Our seaside fortification, Destin, Florida. March 22.

On the Road (1): Getting there

Outside Lexington, Virginia

I’m often surprised and amused when I realize that I’ve seen more of eastern Europe than of the United States outside the little corner where I’m from and where I’ve spent most of my life. It’s something I’ve long wanted to correct, which is why my wife and I have long talked about setting off and spending some time driving around the rest of the country. We finally got around to it last month, inspired by an awful long winter up here cooped up, and a curiosity about what’s going on down South. 

Over ten days, we covered 3,434 miles and 13 states — not a bad tally to rack up in a 2005 Subaru Forester. Along the way we drove through the gamut of North American climate zones. We drove slowly through a substantial snowstorm in Pennsylvania, which obliged us to take the side roads through Amish country to avoid accident traffic on the interstate. We got through a huge downpour in the Florida Panhandle, and another weird flurry storm in Tennessee of all places. But the best parts were the hints of spring we found — perhaps fewer than we’d have liked, but they were there all the same.

March snow, Pennsylvania

We did a good job of taking breaks along the way, although we had a plan to stick to and couldn’t be as open-ended as a proper road trip demands. So alas, we drove right by the Shenandoah battlefields and right under Lookout Mountain without taking a look around. Those weren’t the only regrets.

The idea of the open road is a deep part of being an American. It began with the idea of pushing out, away from the coasts and the familiar and into a new world (I’ll gently set aside the obvious problem of who you might be pushing aside to do so, or who you might be bringing with you as coerced labor). It is an idea so strong it rebounded back on itself when our ancestors finally ran out of horizon to flee into.

I brought along with me my old, beat copy of On the Road, a book I’d valued since high school, when road trips were just a funny idea about a kind of thing I’d do when I was grown up and my own person. The book is so much about the kind of desperate wandering and searching that would land you an Adderall prescription nowadays, but beneath it is an acute awareness of the sadness and disappointment of life. That all these moments of travel and experience have a fleeting value, but don’t change much about human nature and what is mournful about it.

There was that idea in my head, but the real lessons of making such a trip have to be that there is just something grand about having your psychogeography broken down like that. Every now and then when you drive out of the driveway to the grocery store or work, you wonder what it would be like to just keep going. Where would you find yourself? what gas station off what road would you have to stop and look around? The great beauty of a road trip is that you begin to answer those questions.

I had that sense on the Thursday evening when we left, as I set the trip odometer to zero and imagined just what I would see over that dashboard over the next few days. The familiar old Hudson, the wide Susquehanna, the Smokey Mountains, the orderly farms of Tennessee, the heliosphere on the Knoxville skyline, the red earth of Alabama, the scrubby tropics of the Panhandle, the ocean mists of the Gulf of Mexico, the endless bayou on the way into New Orleans.

Near Andalusia, Alabama

You realize along the way that despite great variations — between slopes and rises, farms and cities, forests and fields — that it really is all connected. That the lines and labels of a map, or the views from Google Earth, aren’t the reality of what the land is.

And then you start thinking about all the people on it, and you see fewer and fewer license plates like your own on the highway. We were astonished at the number of crucifixes you see by the side of the road — both the giant constructions outside certain megachurches and the temporary, humble ones set up for Lent. I was amazed that for huge swathes of the trip the only things on the radio — the only things — were Christian radio (usually talking about abortion. What is your world like if you spend that much time thinking about it?) or “today’s country,” a reliable swirl of cultural references (cold beer, girls with southern accents, the value of weekends, overhearing a child praying, admiration for an elderly veteran, trucks). How can we make a a nation when we’re this far apart?

Chattanooga, Tennessee

For a northeastern travel makes you realize how alone we are. Living a paltry three hours from Times Square or Fenway Park makes you realize how compact this part of the world is, which is something I didn’t appreciate enough before.

This is the first installment of a few posts about the trip. Stay tuned!

The sea, Destin, Florida

SF: North Beach

No matter how hard I try to repackage it, my idea of San Francisco is permanently peopled and shaped by the Beat Generation. I know well that the place wasn't discovered by Kerouac and Cassady driving over the Bay Bridge, like a pair of irresponsible East Coast Columbuses. I know that California has welcomed generations of vagrants, crooks, and artists. But with any idea, you have to come in somewhere. And this is how I arrived.

I didn't make it to City Lights until my last day in the city, but there was certainly no way I would miss it. The legendary bookstore and publishing house founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been on my mind for decades now — at least since 1989, when my freshman English teacher came to class one afternoon with a beret and bongoes and read Ferlinghetti's poems to us. Despite the Maynard G. Krebs props, Mr. Cook seemed to love and respect the work, which unlike everything else we read in the course, was alive. He told us that Ferlinghetti was still alive, and still had this bookstore in San Francisco, and you could still probably find him there. Wearing a beret, no doubt. To a kid still stuck in a small New England milltown worldview, that was an amazing concept.

When I made it to the store the night before we left, the sun was gone and it was drizzling. Before heading in I crossed "Kerouac Alley" to visit Vesuvio, the charming little dive where the boys did some of their famous drinking. It was just after work, the bar was pretty crowded. There were two groups of what were obviously tourists on some kind of literary pub crawl, filling the big tables and looking around while making slight small talk to each other. I squeezed up to the bar, between two groups of office women talking earnestly about their days at work. Way off in the corner, where the bar met the wall, there was a young man in a button-down shirt and glasses reading a giant book open in front of him. It could have been me, but I'm the kind of loner at bars who pulls out a notebook and starts scribbling all the time.

I like the place very much, even though it was crowded and loud, and managed to have installed gigantic plasma tvs that were showing sports. That, ironically, is one of the only things I remember about the first time I arrived at Vesuvio in 2004, when I watched some of the Athens Olympics there.

Back over to City Lights, which is so much smaller and quainter and less crowded than I expected. To my surprise, the big event seemed to be an anniversary run of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, published by City Lights 50 years ago. It had a fancy new edition in bright blue and orange, and it included in the back reproductions of the correspondence between O'Hara and Ferlinghetti. I sat on a stool upstairs and read the whole thing, and felt perfectly at home. Despite the sheer amount of time I've spent in them, many kinds of bookstores feel alien to me — except, oddly, used bookstores which have a kind of down market charm that makes me think that time has vanished.

City Lights has an astonishing poetry section: full and broad and evangelical in the way it welcomes you and practically admonishes you to stay and have your mind opened a little. "Sit down and read something!" the sign commands. There are photos of Mayakovsky and Corso on the walls (and Yevtushenko, alas. No one's perfect). It is one of those places that remind you that poetry is important and matters, and isn't necessarily as frippy and dispensable as daily life can lead you to believe. It is a kind of temple to remind you of why poetry is important to you, and I dearly wish there were more places like it around.

I learned from a few other books about the lives the gang led in San Francisco, and the realization that Allen Ginsburg wrote "Howl" in an apartment on Pine Street, which is just behind the place where we were staying on Bush Street. That the Moloch he wrote about, the red-eyed monster in the smoke and mist, was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Powell Street that we'd walked past dozens of times already. That the hum of the cable car line in the street was the rhythm of that second canto of the poem.

It was a very literary block. From our window we could see the alley, where I key event in The Maltese Falcon happened (Dashiell Hammett Lane was right next to us). A plaque a few buildings away revealed that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there for a little while. But the revelation about "Howl" was really amazing to me. I had always imagined it as a great New York poem — the references to Harlem and Rockland. Putting it there on that block, in that very specific location opened it up for me. A stew of very specific images and sounds had been born, something that nearly achieved the level of the universal. This poem that I read one afternoon in my high school library before baseball practice, shortly after Mr. Cook's performance. When I remembered those strange, long lines, those explicit bits that embarrassed me, the idea of freedom and space and future that poetry has in its guts.

SF: Haight Ashbury

Broken Clock, August 2014

With a few hours on my own, I took a walk around Haight Ashbury to see what's left of this place that has such a large presence in our idea of counterculture. What stuck out about the place to me the most, the idea that I couldn't shake no matter how much I tried, was the amount of bad energy that swirls around the place.

A big part of that is in how the place still attracts and draws people who are looking to live in a certain way. Walking up past Buena Vista Park, you smell marijuana and you can't figure out from where. No big problem there, but you see the folks huddled around — there was a fierce, cold drizzle bearing down from the ocean. I was a bit stunned by how young many of them seemed. They are living some kind of fantasy of self-realization, but the reality looks more like a very sad joke.

This particular vibe around the neighborhood is hardly new. Joan Didion explored it at great length in her magazine piece "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" about the human cost of the "Summer of Love." For awhile I thought her tone and focus was excessively negative — that she was more interested in making fun of Jerry Garcia than hearing his music. But it's really there. The way she identifies in the inarticulate longings and hopes that characterize the people that went there and tried to make a life, and how that is a product of our consumer culture that has only gotten much, much worse in the past few decades.

There was, of course, something self-indulgent and self-absorbed about the whole thing. It is one of those things in the art and music of the period that I try to ignore. Though sometimes, it just pops up. I happened to come across an article quoting Garcia and the Dead upon hearing of the death of their friend Janis Joplin in 1970. There was no talk about the tragic, avoidable, and stupid loss of a brilliant talent. It was all about how that was her trip, man, and ain't nothing nobody could do about it. It sounded monstrous.

There is a weird, complacent danger of "finding your tribe." On Haight Street I spent some time at an anarchist bookstore, and it was a very warm and pleasant place for me. All the books were interesting, all the t-shirts proclaimed sentiments I would proclaim were I the type to proclaim things on my clothing. There was a whole rack of small press pamphlets and broadsides — a scene that appeared more vibrant than their minuscule circulations would suggest. I bought a book by Viktor Serge and was happy to be a part of the solution.

There was a young man at the counter chatting with the fellow that worked there —volunteered there, rather. He was gushing, asking about writers and books and where he could find them. The guy at the register had walrus-y sideburns and was glad to talk. The young man explained that he was passing through town — just traveling from one place to another, you know? But he'd definitely be back. The walrus-y fellow piously declared that the Haight was the only part of the city worth anything anymore.

Which based on the rest of my wandering around the neighborhood is a pretty wild assertion to make. If he said Berkeley, or Oakland, I'd buy it, but the rest of the area seemed warped and frozen in place, but in a preposterous way.

I'm fascinated by what Haight Ashbury means to certain generations. I feel very much for what drove all those kids there in 1967, but even more so for those that felt the pull but stayed put. Much has been made of the way that the "Summer of Love" was inflated, exploited, condemned, and killed by mass media. But the message of it must have been very powerful for young people trapped in sad cloudy milltowns, or the military, or any of the less exciting parts of the country. It must have been very important to know in the back of your mind that there was the idea of escape — as you dragged yourself through school, or a tour in the Army, or a shift at the factory so you could pay your suddenly adult-looking stack of bills for your new family. Sometimes ideas have power.

So what would that person who stayed make of what the Haight has become. It is part tourist trap, part magnet for purposefully lost children. It is a regular procession of shops selling everything tie-dyed, with water pipes and mood rings and vintage Quicksilver Messenger Service posters. But even that message, its own history, is getting a few whacks in strange directions. The sonic firmament is shifting — lots of Grateful Dead, of course. Janis Joplin remains big, and there is a definite presence of Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles are there ex officio. But the plot starts to get confused with Bob Marley — now we are interpreting the spirit a bit more broadly. But it goes wildly off with Led Zeppelin. This story belongs to no one anymore.

And progress and capitalism diligently, relentlessly clomps on. Haight Ashbury is in San Francisco, and markets wait for no man in the United States. I strayed off Haight onto Ashbury Street to find the Grateful Dead house, the cheap dilapidated rowhouse where the whole band and its various hangers-on and friends lived in a brief kind of communal harmony (for a little while at least). It was easy to find the house, thanks to the impromptu sidewalk graffiti featuring Dead iconography (and Bob Marley, for whatever reason). But the house itself is just another amazing old Frisco Victorian. With huge windows and fresh paint and plenty of urban appeal. When you walk off Haight Street today, you are transported in ways Owsley and the Diggers could have never imagined — you are dropped right back into some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

Haight Ashbury, August 2014

SF: Unlikely Geography

Bay, bridge, and Pacific fog

The first thing you notice is the weather. If you land in Oakland you see it before you feel it: the great Pacific fog hanging over the city ready to engulf it. In August, it is chill, fogs, and wind, of different degrees and variety depending on where you are, but always there.

The Chronicle, in its weather boxes, absurdly lists the day's high temperatures as between 62 and 90 degrees. Every day.

Given the unlikely geography of San Francisco it is amazing there is a city there at all. At Mission Delores, the first Spanish settlement in the area, there are prints of what the land looked like when Europeans first appeared. The peninsula was all hills and dunes and weird strange weather. And no one even found until hilariously late because the Golden Gate was hidden by fog so often. Most of the local Native Americans shunned the place, preferring to spend their time in any number of friendlier locations around the Bay.

It takes a lot of collective enterprise to pull of a city in a place like that, perhaps not on the scale of Venice or Amsterdam or St. Petersburg, but the same idea. That's why the Golden Gate Bridge is such an apt symbol for the city. It is a thing of astonishing scale — about 1.7 miles long, with towers that soar to 746 feet. It was designed and built in the very teeth of the Depression, when the global economy had completely cratered, almost as a deliberate act of will. And even more so, why was it built? It connects the city to... Marin County? Was a crowded ferry to Sausalito really such a burden? If you think about it, it is hard to imagine a national project that was less necessary.

But when you see it, you forget about all that. It's like the space program in a sense. One of those things societies do just to remind themselves of their potential as a species.

A series of words about San Francisco

Powell Street

On the premise that no travel should be wasted by not writing about it, I'm going to post a few small pieces about what we saw and did on our trip to the City by the Bay last month. It's taken me a while to get around to it — probably because I can't seem to get this fall underway, because the summer felt so short. But now it's back to work.

A Day at the Space Center; or, Lamenting our Lost Space Age

Playground of the Musks: although historic Launchpad 39-A looks empty and still now, SpaceX has the commercial lease to launch from there in the future.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it felt like there was something suspicious in the way our tour guide at Kennedy Space Center kept talking about Elon Musk. In my last post, I gushed about how much I enjoyed our visit to the center, but hearing so many times about how this South African billionaire equity dude was a "visionary" and the future of our space program seemed inappropriate.

Every museum is a window into the time and place where it exists. So, while the American Museum of Natural History is a case study in the "benefits" and contradictions of modern American plutocracy, the lesson at KSC seems to be the ways Americans are avoiding the subject of how wealth polarization is an integral part of our national decline, and how it is a process we refuse to acknowledge, let alone understand or attempt to address.

Everything at the space center is a celebration of a specific moment in American history. That period of a few decades — which is emphatically now in the past — when we had a sense of common purpose, and the ingenuity and motivation to do amazing things. We look back at what we did with awe and pride, but when we turn to the present and the future, we have… well, Elon Musk.

We are now at a very low point of the history of our space program — though you hate to say "the lowest" point because it certainly could get worse. We have to rely on the Russian's to get to and from space. The Chinese have the kind of "let's show the world who's boss" gumption that we had 50 years ago. And the void is filled with Musk's SpaceX, and other companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Sierra Nevada. Each of these is a perfect representation of late-stage capitalism: entities designed to create value for shareholders, not to produce a profit while doing cool and useful things for all of us.

These companies alone are what makes KSC what it always has been — a working spaceport and the 20th century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. That's important to the tour guides who now talk about CEOs with the same kind of awe we once reserved for John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and for the entire regional economy, which with zero irony calls itself the "Space Coast." Guys like Musk are the only viable future in sight — a future that is also seductively exciting and profitable as well.

This is the great fever dream of privatization — the twisted logic that things that ought to be free of the greed and callousness of the market should be handled by anything other than the government. It is a dream shared by the stunted adolescent boys who think Ayn Rand is a great thinker, and the centrist Democrats who so admire their own genius and virtue that of course they should get fabulously rich solving the world's problems.

But to have these thoughts at Kennedy is an insult to the memory of what Americans did there. You see very clearly, now that nothing is really being launched from all those disused pads spread all over, that the glory days are well past. That the practical reality of what SpaceX and the others propose (not the fanciful p.r. chatter about going to Mars), is merely redoing what we figured out how to do 40 years ago.

The heroic Space Age celebrated at KSC is the product of a stream of circumstances in the post-War years, when most of the world had blown itself to rubble and the U.S. completely remade the global economic system to our advantage. Back in the day when we had the will to dream big, the willingness to pay our f--king taxes so we could have nice things, and the trust that collective action could do things like send us to the moon. When we had a rival in the USSR that pushed us stay on track.

But that's all well over. We've turned into a third-rate plutocracy where NASA has to beg hillbilly congressmen who believe in the literal truth of fairy tales from the Book of Genesis for change from the sofa.

Space is gonna do me good

The early ones

As we drove across Merritt Island, which in addition to being the home of the Kennedy Space Center is also a giant nature preserve, we kept count of the alligators we saw in the drainage trench beside the road. The idea of wild alligators is a trippy one for northerners, but Florida is like that in every single way. You get to have fun down there with sharp contrasts — palm trees all over, egrets and herons hanging around, air temperature that isn't too cold. The land is lush, packed, and green, and it is a bit jarring to think that it is from there that humans blasted off to explore the cold vastness of space.

We went to Cape Canaveral on our last trip to Florida with Mila and my mom, and it was something I'd been looking forward to for years. That place is deeply burned in my memory, because I must have been about seven years old myself when I went there. That whole trip is pretty much welded into my consciousness — right from the flight on Eastern airlines, which was quite an odyssey to me. About the space center I remember lots of open spaces, and a kind of bright sunlight that made everything glow in a weird way. I remember the sandy soil and sharp prickly grass, and the rockets lying around at all angles around like broken pipes.

That trip we also had a chance to watch a space shuttle launch. It was a few days later, and it was from Daytona Beach up the coast, but I remember being told about it and being very excited. I was a bit disappointed when the thing itself was just watching a long matchstick arc into the sky over the ocean, along with a distant rumble. I was expecting something more akin to what you saw on t.v., so I was a bit disappointed. I tried hard to remember that feeling as I got all excited explaining things to Mila, to not take her occassional indifference personally.

I realized the challenge right off the bat, when we signed up for a bus tour of the vast facility, driving out to the old launch pads by the sea, which at this point are really not much more than disused industrial sites. The idea of what happened there requires a massive act of imagination, and I'm not sure if I convinced her it was worth her time.

She bravely got through the experience, but I was fascinated throughout. NASA has been the repository for so many dreams of what it means to be on the technological cutting edge that seeing the actual buildings where it happens is very weird. At the center of the base is a non-descript cluster of buildings called the "Industrial Area," which features the center's headquarters and its operations building. That's the one where astronauts would train and be quarantined just before their missions, the one they walked out of to the bus for the drive to the pad. The buildings are almost comically common, like some backwater office complex. And it is hard to believe that men and women could plan and execute the launch of people to the moon and back from from a plain building make of cinder blocks, with air conditioners droning in the windows, and blinds keeping out the intense afternoon sun. With a few alligators lolling about not too far away.

And there are the hilarious contrasts down there that you can't really appreciate. The Vehicle Assembly Building is one of the most interesting structures on earth — the world's largest single-story facility, with nearly the most interior volume on earth, and at 526 feet high believed to be the tallest building outside a city. That last fact is what grabs you — you stare at the place and realize there is something up with it, but it feels like some kind of optical illusion because there is no context whatsoever. 

Bigger than it looks

The KSC experience really takes off with the exhibits, which are slick but not simple, and dump a lot of information at you in a flashy and fun way. There's lots of engineering and aviation science, and well-done history. You get a real sense of the enormous leap between the early Mercury-Redstone rockets of the Mercury program and the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program just a few years later — the jump from modified ICBMs with people strapped to the top designed to throw you off the face of the earth, and actual spacecraft designed to throw you out of earth's orbit. They do an amazing job of presenting just how amazing and strange the Apollo program was — that we really haven't seen or done anything like it before or since.

If there is a disappointing angle to all this, it has to be the coverage of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which are assigned to their own pavilion near the entrance. The exhibit feels campy in a way that disrespects what these these guys in aluminum foil suits with their buzzcuts and cool expressions represented.

The new big thing at KSC is the space shuttle "Atlantis," which has been housed in its own brand new pavilion since last year. The shuttle program gets the respect it deserves, which had definitely faded in the years of routine missions to haul up satellites and space station modules. The exhibit makes you realize what a technical achievement the program was, and that there was never anything routine about what they were doing.

As you can see, the visit brought out something unusually boyish in me, and I'm aware how silly it seems. Earlier this spring, I took Mila to hear two astronauts speak at MCLA, and there was something about their demeanor and the way they spoke that was timelessly earnest. It was in the way they rattled off statistics about mission specs, payloads, and the mechanics of keeping yourself alive in an absurdly hostile environment. And at other times they became awkwardly poetic as they described watching whole continents pass under their eyes, or about the giddy sense of purpose that comes with being able to see the whole earth as a frail little ball hanging in vast black nothing.

KSC has created a space that allows you to appreciate all that, and frees you from the obligation to be an eye-rolling teenager. For me, I realized that if you look at it with a squint, the entire space program doesn't have to have been about what I cynically assumed it was. Not a public relations branch of the military/industrial complex, nor a heroic advance in the science of understanding our universe, nor about practical stuff like better communications and weather satellites. In a sense, it is a great big poetry program designed to make us wonder in a secular, humanist, nondenominational way about what we are and what we could be. About the great things we can do when we inspire one another, and share the burden of designing our technology and paying our bills. To feel pride and astonishment about what we did in the past, and to think constructively about our future.

Jeez, that's corny. They must've put something in the water.

The stones of San Juan

The way these things work, I didn't get to see a lot of San Juan — let alone Puerto Rico — when we passed through last month. We spent most of our day climbing around the fortress at San Cristobal. For fans of fortifications, like me, this is plenty fun — even if I had to play up the pirate attack angle to keep my daughter's attention. Here's are the coastal defenses of the old city, looking over toward El Morro and the entrance to the bay.

Around the Homosassa River

Had a few weeks of heavy work (eh, freelancing), and am now down south in Florida for a visit. Today spent the afternoon on an airboat poking around the Homosassa River, seeing the inlets and islands out around that patch of the Gulf Coast.  

The new ICA in Boston

The new ICA on the waterfront, Nov. 22, 2013

The homer in me can't resist putting it this way: on a recent trip to Boston I had a chance to finally see the second-best contemporary art museum in Massachusetts. The Institute of Contemporary Art is a perfectly respectable museum, with a marquee new building, but it's no MASS MoCA.

I had once visited the ICA's former home, in a converted firehouse in Back Bay which it had quite clearly outgrown. But that it took so long to get its new facility says a lot about the politics of art funding around here. In the 80s and 90s, while MoCA was struggling through its long gestation, no institution complained louder and longer than ICA. The couldn't believe the state would spend tens of millions of dollars on a brand new contemporary art museum in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe they had a point, but since I live here in Berkshire County and not in Boston, I can't give it too much thought. Boston has a lot of cultural offerings and economic opportunities. We get the short end of the stick often enough — there are real reasons why in many ways we feel closer to New York than to Boston.

The new ICA, like MoCA, was built at at time when museums must be considered more than simply places to store art. Today, they have to be part of a broader economic development scheme, in their case an effort to bring something to the desolate stretch of waterfront between the Moakley Federal Courthouse and the cavernous new convention behemoth. It seems like that project is coming along in a rather fitful way. Walking to the are from South Station, it feels like lots of parking lots and glass towers, not like a neighborhood in any meaningful way. In a city with such a deep history, and with so many vibrant and ancient communities all around, the ICA finds itself anchoring the one part of Boston with no personality whatsoever.

The building itself is quite an achievement, in a very showy way. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it shows off its engineering skill and cutting edginess every way it can, through its contours of glass, steel, and concrete. The effect can be disorienting — it feels to me like it was built upside down. Many of its enthusiasts talk about how open it is, how it interacts with the water in front of it. All true, I guess, but you might also note how noisy it is, and how many of the spaces don't make much sense. One of the weirder features is something called the "mediatheque," a long narrow pod emerging from the belly of the building which is filled with rows and rows of computers, and where visitors are invited to relax and watch videos and other content relative to the exhibits. That's alright, but scourge of concrete building, I couldn't help but notice the giant crack in one of the upper steps.

The building got me thinking about architecture in Boston, and led me to a strange realization: the much-maligned Boston City Hall might be the last truly brave and interesting thing built in that city. Partly that's for the simple reason that it came from a distinct school of thought, and had the guts to stick to it. Whatever would replace it — and the new mayor has already said he's open to the idea — would be timid, flashy, and as brave as an investment banker's new BMW. You only have to look around the Financial District from across the Fort Point Channel to see how dumb and bland things have gotten. One mediocre high-rise with a cheap gimmick feature next to another. And don't even get me started on the TD Bank Garden.

These are building that just do their job. And the job of the new ICA is to shout, "Look at the neat arty thing sitting over here!" And the exhibits on display didn't really convince me that any serious path-breaking work is going on. A retrospective of the work of Amy Sillman, which was entertaining, along with an obvious show of new work considering the boundaries of painting, and the work of a photographer who takes unflinching images of postindustrial society. In other words, nothing really surprising.

There is so much awesome stuff in Boston. A day at the Museum of Fine Art is as great an art experience as you can have in America. On my last trip, I paid my first visit to the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, which boasts an astonishing collection hiding in a quirky setting (perhaps too quirky at times, but that's just me). Boston also has an amazing aquarium, a stupendous science museum, and a world class symphony. But contemporary art remains an afterthought.

Keeping a watch

After years of being off our mind, left to the weird realm of luxury items advertised in the Wall Street Journal and such, we seem to be ready to start thinking about wristwatches again. The rumor mill is chirping that Apple and Android are working on Dick Tracey jobbers, which I guess would be a more accessible and convenient than the dinner table platters some smartphones are beginning to resemble. Reading up on it, I realized that I hadn't even worn a watch since July, which got me around to fixing my favorite and I'm really much happier because of it.

I love watches, really, dating back from when they were intense objects of desire, mostly because my mom wouldn't get me one until I could tell time on a regular analog clock — which was probably pretty wise. I finally got a Casio digital watch once, which I wore until it fell apart, and lusted for one of those calculator watches, which could have permanently altered my relationship with school mathematics. I still remember noticing them, and I particularly remember my Uncle Gerry showing me his, which could keep military time which he said he could never keep straight from when he was in the service.

I bought my current watch in spring 2000, and it remains very special to me. I'd long wanted a Swiss Army watch since I saw a friend in college with one, and when my previous one broke I decided the time was right. I bought mine at one of those odd Midtown electronics stores, which was in my office building on Broadway and 57th. It is a Wenger  — which I guess is the RC Cola to Victorinox's Coke — and I likely paid too much, but it is still with me. It was important because I was still even then getting over a nasty break-up, and the idea of marking my future hours and days in a totally new way was very appealing to me. I thought about all the time I'd looked down at my old watch waiting to meet whats-her-name, etc., and it was like getting a totally fresh start.

And together we had a lot to mark! I counted down the minutes before my wedding on that watch, I timed the minutes between my wife's contractions when our daughter was being born on it. Nothing about it suggests "bling," it is serviceable, now considerably scratched and scuffed, but wholly a part of my life.

And in July, I very nearly lost it. I mentioned earlier that getting home from my trip to Croatia this summer involved a six-hour bus trip from Istria to Venice, which finally ended at San Basilio ferry terminal. After I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus, I was about halfway to the terminal when I looked down to check just how awfully late we were when I saw that the watch was gone. I ran back to the still parked bus, urged the driver to open up, and prowled around what had been my seat on my hands and knees, pulling up the cushions, running my hand between the cracks (and really: yuck). No luck. The magnificently annoyed driver stood behind me watching, commenting that I probably lost it at the rest area where we stopped near Trieste on the way. I knew that wasn't the case — I'd been checking regularly at the end of our trip because I was desperate for it to be over. I knew the driver wanted to get going, that it was nowhere to be seen, and I quietly made peace with the idea that I'd lost it, somehow, in Venice. It was sad, but sometimes things just fly away when they have to.

To make perfectly sure, I left the bus through the rear door as I had the first time, and made sure to look around on the ground nearby just in case. I took a quick peak underneath the bus and, voila, there is was, just about beneath the rear tire, moments away from getting unceremoniously pancaked. Seems the strap had broken when I pulled on my backpack, and it had dropped. That strap, which I had gotten in Hungary a year earlier, had been giving me problems for awhile. I snatched it up, held it up for the driver to see (jerk), and put it snugly in my pocket, where it would remain for the rest of the trip.

Back home I put the watch on the shelf by my keys, and there it remained. In our age, it is pretty easy to get away without having a watch — we have our phones and their are clocks all over and there is blessed routine as well. But since I got around to fixing it and wearing it again I've felt much more relaxed in a hard to pin down way. Wearing a wristwatch is like having a temporal map on your arm, an non-intrusive presence that helps you locate yourself within your surroundings. Perhaps ironically, it gives you the comfort and security to live in the moment.

Just as long as you make sure the thing doesn't fall off.

The Negozio Olivetti

The strangest five euros I spent this past summer were at the Negozio Olivetti, which is just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice and a place that would be very easy to brush right past. It is near one of the passages on the far end of the square, closer to the Museo Correr than the Basilica, just beneath the arched arcade that lines the square. The little museum is a faithfully recreated typewriter shop, and in its way a statement of how Italy's fame for commerce and innovation evolved into a flair for design and the curation of lovely things. 

The place caught my eye on a blisteringly hot afternoon when I almost by accident found myself in the tourist Bermuda Triangle between the Basilica and the Rialto. I don't know what precisely I thought I was doing, but when saw all those typewriters in the window I stopped in my tracks. I've been obsessed with the machines since I bought my first one at a second-hand electronics and gadget shop in Jersey City in 1999. My somewhat decrepit, rebuilt Royal electric was a great start, so fun to draft out things with its noisy ease. Through the years I picked up more typewriters, often as gifts from people who knew my weird fascination. My current favorite is an Olympia SM9 from the early or mid-1960s, a great triumph of West German industrial craftsmanship that is as reliable as it is heavy (it is lovingly described by some as only "semi-portable"). I love when it rests next to my MacBook on the desk, like the twin poles of function and design, content and form.

But I've always longed for, maybe lusted for, an Olivetti, especially a Lettera, preferably with some cool candy-colored casing. Those guys are sleek and portable, and their very "thwack" seems both more sharp while mysteriously effortless and nonchalant — sort of like the way Italian dudes can pull off wearing a scarf and jeans.

So on that summer day I had to know why there were all those vintage machines lined up in the window. I walked inside, which was mercifully air conditioned, into what looked like a showroom, or possibly a museum. Turns out it was both. I asked the lovely young lady reading a very serious, thick book behind a desk what this place was, and she explained in her heavily inflected English that it was basically both: a museum about a shop.

Back in 1957, the Olivetti company commissioned a Venetian architect named Carlo Scarpa to design what they hoped would be a "business card" for the company. The place was ostensibly supposed to sell typewriters, but also the brand. Already Venice was awash in tourists, and the company was ready to spend to make sure that some of those international jet-setters would get an eyeful of Italian typographical excellence.

And boy did they! The space was small and narrow and dark, but Scarpa completely reshaped it and loaded it with brilliant design elements. The most important feature is a central staircase right in the middle of the two-story space, with stone slabs that form a sort of zig-zag pattern that looks a bit like the Black Flag logo, and similarly gave me a sense of movement, of pistons pumping or the arms of a typewriter rhythmically fwapping the paper. The slabs are Aurisina marble, from near Trieste, which honored local building traditions, and the shelves are of rosewood with teak flooring, which almost feels Asian in its clarity. Simple steel rods hold the wood up, very modest and very functional. The light is diffuse and insistent, and the sound of clacking keys is played on the soundsystem, which is a touch of overkill if you ask me. The various typewriters — and calculators, cash registers, etc. — are displayed with the dignity they deserve. But it's a shame you can't touch anything. It's also a shame the whole thing takes minutes to get through, which makes the admission fee feel a bit steep (also, the reason I don't have any photos from the inside is that I refused to pay extra for the photo ticket).

The company closed the shop in 1997, but in recent years a government agency called the Fondo Ambiente Italiano got involved to restore it to what it was like in its glory days. The FAI lists as its mission to "serve as the mouthpiece for the interests and expectations of the public, actively supervising and intervening on their behalf across the country to defend Italy's landscape and cultural heritage."

Venice is the sort of place that demands the kind of melancholy and nostalgia that made me imagine whether in a hundred years or so we'll have in America a similar group that will painstakingly recreate the first Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.