jfb

I ate the last lunch of my trip in Reno, surrounded by tourists and casinos. I didn't like it very much.

Fifteen miles later I was in California, instantly recognizable as I conducted a late merge into the out-of-state vehicles lane for "agricultural inspection". (As far as I know, California is the only state whose state line feels like an international border.) Apparently some days they don't bother inspecting anyone, so I needn't have put so much thought into whether I was in-state or out-of it after a month on the road.

The Donner Summit Roadside Rest Area was crowded and sunny, with a pond and giant conifers and a mountain vista. All around me were yuppie couples and working families and vintage hippies, taking a break on their way back from gambling or camping at Reno or Tahoe. Everyone looked healthy and happy. A guy sat outside the restrooms playing classic rock songs on an acoustic guitar.



And an hour after that, I was in the Sacramento suburbs, passing chain stores and exit signs, surrounded by everyone else going home. Traffic on I-80 was stop-and-go starting sixty miles away from San Francisco.



Home at last.

The worst day of my trip was in Nebraska. The landscapes I drove through for most of the day were drab and dull, and then it got worse. A Nebraska State Patrol car passed me; I slowed down from my slightly-speeding pace; the patrol car dropped behind me; I thought uh-oh; the flashing lights went on; and pretty soon I was stopped on the shoulder of the next exit ramp.

I rolled down the automatic window before shutting off the car. Officer A. Indecipherable (as I later read his name from an official document) then walked up on the passenger side, so I had to put the key in the ignition and start the car up again just so I could roll down the other window. That probably didn't get us off to a good start.

Officer Indecipherable looked about 19--if memory serves, he was wearing braces--but he projected authority well. He asked me some questions about where I'd come from and where I was heading. I explained that I was on my way home to California after a month driving around the country. "Sort of a vacation?" "Yeah," I said, "sort of a vacation." All through our encounter he had a perplexed look of concentration on his face, like he was sure I was up to something, and if he could just find the hole in my story, he'd blow this case wide open.

The question of speed--well, let's say of velocity--never came up. The reason he pulled me over, he told me, was that I had no front license plate. This was because I had bought the car shortly before leaving California, and the new plates the DMV was supposed to send me hadn't arrived yet. My explanation didn't seem to satisfy (and later I learned that it was wrong--thanks, Toyota dealer!). "It is my intention," Officer Indecipherable told me, "to write you a vehicle defect card." There would not be any fine or jail time associated with the vehicle defect card; I would just have to correct the defect, and have a law enforcement officer witness it and sign the card so I could send it back. That sounded easy. I was relieved.

Officer Indecipherable asked if I'd mind coming back to his car while he wrote out the vehicle defect card.

On my way back to the squad car, he stopped me to ask "Do you have any weapons on your person?" I told him I didn't. "Not even a knife?"

Not even a knife.

As he wrote out the vehicle defect card--it seemed to require an awful lot of writing--we continued our conversation. "What have you got in the trunk?" Instruments, I told him, and some suitcases. "Oh, you're a musician?" Sadly, I admitted that I was. "So that's why you've got all those bags in the front of the car?" I had an awesomely messy car because I'd been driving for a month, but that seemed like extraneous detail.

"Do you have any weapons in the car?" I told him I didn't. "Not even a knife?"

Not even a knife.

"Do you have any contraband in the car?" No. "Any heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD?"

Some of you don't know how prudish I am. I didn't have heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or LSD in the car. I have never had any heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or LSD in the car, or in anything else that I own. I don't use the legal drugs, either--I've never smoked a cigarette, my use of alcohol has been limited to communion wine and a couple of sips of champagne. I don't even like to take aspirin when I have a headache.

So when someone insinuates that I've been, I don't know what, drug-running? my reflex reactions are to become indignant, and to laugh.

I laughed.

Uh-oh, I thought again. I turned toward him to look him in the eye and give him my sincerest "No," and that's when I noticed the guns that were securely locked in their upright position, three inches from my head.

"So if I were to search your car, I wouldn't find any contraband?" No, he wouldn't. "Would you mind if I searched your car?"

Sigh.

Obviously I'd mind if he searched my car, but I had a feeling it would take less of my time to let my car be searched than it would to refuse. "If you really want to," I said.

So he searched my car. He had some trouble with the car alarm transmitter on my keychain, so I had to sit in the squad car and re-disarm the alarm each time it looked like he was about to try to open another door. He pulled out my suitcases, opened them up, browsed through my clean laundry and my travel-sized toiletries. Curiously, he didn't open any of my instrument cases, so I guess now I know where to keep all the drugs I have no intention of transporting.

Eventually he motioned for me to get out of the squad car and take my vehicle defect card. He had one more hope of busting me, but he already knew he'd lost--"So those CDs in the back," the box full of identical CDs with my name on them, "did you make those?" Amazingly, I was confused by this (I didn't manufacture them), but we straightened it out, and then I was free to go.

So, yeah, as stories of police harassment go, I'm aware this is pretty mild. I got my car searched for having long hair and a messy back seat. It was an invasion of my privacy, but it probably cost me half an hour at most. (It felt like hours.) The worst effect was that I had to spend the rest of the day driving alone down the highway muttering to myself about what I could have, should have done or said to somehow handle the whole thing better. But it was enough to make me never want to go to Nebraska again.

My original plan was to spend three days travelling from Boston to Chicago, via Ohio, where I had a friend to visit. But when the Ohio plan fell through, I figured out I could stay an extra night in Boston (to see, you may recall, The Animators) and drive a more direct route to Chicago in two days.

The halfway point was somewhere in upstate New York or Pennsylvania, but none of the cities around there particularly captured my attention, so I picked Buffalo more or less at random. (I did think about routing the trip through Toronto, a city I loved last time I visited, but one of the goals of this trip was "see America," and crossing the border seemed like a dilution.)



When I got to Buffalo, I realized two things: that one of its selling points was its proximity to Niagara Falls, and that, despite this, it was probably a more interesting place than I'd suspected. There were lots of interesting-sounding restaurants and buildings and things, but what I wanted to do was hit an open mike, and to my surprise there were at least five listed for that night in the local arts weekly. So I chose the one that sounded like a coffeehouse and looked close to my motel and headed out.

What that turned out to be was... a different conception of the open mike than I had previously encountered. The first thing that struck me was that, although there was something musical happening, the cafe was completely full of people talking loudly to their friends. The second thing was that I was older than their friends by at least ten years.

While I was ordering a cup of tea, the guy who seemed to be in charge--I think he brought the amp--yelled to one of his friends, "Hey, you should play something," and that set up his friend as the featured performer for as long as it took me to finish my tea and leave. The performance consisted of him sitting at a table playing sullen riffs on an electric guitar, while another guy sitting next to him sporadically started to sing something and then subsided.

You win some, you lose some.

---

The next morning I went to Niagara Falls. I'd never particularly intended to go there, but I was right next door, and I figured, if not now, then when?

What I learned is this: Niagara Falls is not a good tourist attraction for a person with even a mild fear of heights. It had been raining all night, so the sidewalk was slippery. It was still raining a little, so I was carrying an open umbrella. It was windy, so the umbrella tugged gently in various directions. And the sidewalk? It slopes down towards the falls.

But I went out there anyway, because I hate feeling constrained by fears. I wasn't actually able to look at the falls for more than a split-second at a time, but I did manage to look at the camera's viewfinder long enough to produce this utterly unexceptional photograph of America's oldest state park:

My journal method for the trip was this: I bought a little blank book with pages in various bright colors. Along the way, stopping for meals or sleep, I would jot little notes to myself about what I'd done and seen, notes like "looking for Belgian waffles" or "trying not to step on the cat" or "Jews in Denmark in WWII". The idea--which worked out for a while--was that I would get to a computer soon enough that these fragments would jog my recent memory and I would know what to say about them in full sentences.

I have no notes from Boston. But I remember I had a great time.

Boston (and Cambridge and Somerville) was the most aggressively nostalgic stop on my trip. I figured I had a lot of old favorites to visit, and only a few days to do it, so I'd better not waste any time. With a few exceptions, I went only to restaurants and stores and cinemas and places where I'd hung out when I used to live there. People would say "I know this really great Greek restaurant" and I'd veto it solely on the grounds that I'd never been there. So I went to the falafel place across from my old school, and the Thai restaurant down Mass Ave., and the CD shops in Harvard Square, and generally was all about rekindling old affections.

The major exceptions to the nostalgia campaign were the open mikes. I played at the Cantab and had a good time, and played at the BCCA and had a good time, and in between I played at Club Passim, which felt like an achievement even though I only got to play one song and I had to pay to get in.

The one song ("Snowblinded") went over well, though--after a long, depressing drought across the south, I made my first CD sales to people who didn't already know me. I also traded CDs with Sam Bayer (who traded me his mammoth 3-CD compilation for my 22-minute EP) and Myq Kaplan (who I hadn't seen but who turned out to be really funny) and I think some other people but it was a while ago and to be honest I haven't unpacked the CDs yet. And also The Animators were there and it was great to see them again, and I stayed an extra night partly so I could see them at the BCCA.

And in the process of eating at old haunts and playing at new venues, I met some online friends for the first time and saw some other friends for the first time in years and saw some other friends I'd seen earlier that week and saw a whole lot of dougo, who I was staying with. I'm doing this from memory, so I'm sure I'll forget someone, but let's see: There was bnewmark and perci and evandra and shoebox_bird and rawrin. And dougo. Seems like there were more. Anyway, all of whom were fun to hang out with. Except one. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Just kidding, it was all fun.

The one sad thing about visiting Boston was this: If visiting New Jersey was emotional but fraught, and visiting New York was thrilling but exhausting, visiting Boston was... well, nice. It was nice because it was a nice place where I used to live, and I knew where some cool stuff was. (Somewhat proudly, I didn't pull out a map the whole time I was there.) There was nothing about it that I didn't like. But it didn't pull me back the way it used to, the way I expected it to.

So maybe next time I visit I'll try to cut the strings of nostalgia and see Boston like a new place. But on the other hand, I miss Bangkok Cuisine and Boston Shawarma again already, and I'd hate to miss whatever's showing at the Brattle, and I didn't even make it on this trip to the Someday Cafe or the Museum of Fine Arts. So maybe I won't.

About that choir: It was the Moonies. Here are the Messages of Peace from 36 Former American Presidents.

I think I am too bold to call You Father. Dear Father, You are so miserable! You are a God of great grief and bitter pain. What can I say to bring You words of comfort, Father? I am Roosevelt. At one time, as the president of the United States, I invested all my energy for the welfare and prosperity of the American people, but I didn't guide them in any way to help them prepare for life in the eternal spiritual world. It is this point that has caused my heart to feel untold suffering. Heavenly Father, please forgive me.

Even Nixon got involved, although he doesn't seem to have made a personal statement.

I lived in New Jersey for two years. Two years is long enough to get attached, but not long enough for a return to feel like a homecoming. What it feels like--and yes, no doubt there's some personal history behind this analogy--is like seeing an old girlfriend. You remember with sudden vividness all the things you loved about her, and all the things that got on your nerves. Worse, there are little pockets of unfamiliarity, and you don't know why: Has she changed? Or have you forgotten? Or were these things about her that you never even noticed?

So: New Jersey is still beautiful. If you've never been there--or if you've only been to the turnpike and Newark Airport--you don't know how green it is. My camera's battery died just before I crossed the border from Pennsylvania, an hour before sundown when the sun makes everything glow, and I was sad not to get the photographs, but I still got to see it. As darkness fell I left the interstate to take the back roads I used to drive, back when the freeway scared me, through old-growth suburbs and past Fort Nonsense into Morristown.



And New Jersey still has terrible traffic (the next day, a half-hour standstill on the way to New York!) and the worst signage in the country (misleading or simply false, where they bother to put it up at all) and the most confusing roads (every town has a road named after every other nearby town, and none of them match up across town borders, and none of them lead to the town they're named for), and the curious property that, no matter where you are and where you are trying to get to, there is no good driving route from here to there.



And Jersey Boy Bagels is still the Home of the Eggel, and the Edison Family Restaurant still claims to have the World's Best Oatmeal (and is still correct, as far as I know), and the libraries and banks and post offices and train stations are still grand old brick stalwarts, and the churches are grander still. But was that house in Plainfield always lavender? And when did the abandoned mall downtown, or any mall anywhere, get carpeting? And Clearview has been buying up all the old Bob Roberts art house movie theaters. And the Afghan restaurant is still there, but the gigantic U.S. flag in the window is new. But the guy at the Sweet Dreams Cafe still recognized my face, and that felt good.



Near the post office I looked down at the curb and saw "I LOVE SEAN" etched in angular letters into the curb. I don't know who wrote it, but I can guess that she was in high school or not far from it, and I can guess that she doesn't love Sean anymore. Does she still live in Morristown? Does she walk by it on her way to buy stamps or send a package? What does she think when she sees her youthful love still proclaimed there? How many years has it been?

Tonight for the first time I did that thing where you nervously press a copy of your meager little CD into the hands of one of your musical idols. More importantly, I finally got to see Ida in concert (seen here with special guest Fred Thomas).



Time for bed now, and tomorrow, Omaha.

Virginia was the first Eastern state on this trip that struck me, from the interstate, as beautiful.

Everything from Louisiana to North Carolina was pretty, and there were breathtaking moments, like Lake Pontchartrain and the chapel in the mountains. But Virginia--the part that I-81 runs through--was beautiful through and through.



Part of this is natural--rolling hills, mountain ranges, rivers--but the built landscape is great too. Lots of farms, with red barns and colonial houses and horses roaming around on the hillside.

All of it looks old--in a good way--perhaps because of Virginia's general attention to history and preservation history. But the period-piece look isn't limited to the 1700s. Much of downtown Roanoke--as creepily deserted as any science fiction city--looks frozen in, oh, the 1940s? I don't know architecture, but I know what I like. And there's a wall full of old ads, restored in the 90s and now fading again.



Downtown Roanoke is also home to Tudor's Biscuit World, a cafe restaurant whose entire menu consists of, yes, biscuits, with optional stuff on them. Let me clarify: Heavenly, to-die-for biscuits, with anything you could want on them. For breakfast I had three.

Later in the day I thought I would head over to Shenandoah National Park--home of the folk song--and head up Skyline Drive, rejoining the interstate near the Maryland border. But Hurricane Isabel had thrashed the whole park, and it was closed to through traffic. So here's my view of this scenic byway:



It's just as well, though. The interstate was scenic, too, with not nearly as far to fall.

I've said a few words about my visit to the Carolinas, but here are a few more.

I've gotten into the intermittent habit of visiting the tourist information center as I cross each state line. The man at South Carolina's (how do you get that job?) was insistently helpful, and pointed out that a scenic route up to Asheville would only cost me 15 or 20 minutes, so I decided to take him up on it.

And the road through the mountains was very pretty. It also taught me that South Carolina roadside stops are a good place to buy hot boiled peanuts, and a bad place to find public restrooms.

Once I crossed the North Carolina border, I stopped at the first gas station and general store I found--right by the library--where I discovered my new favorite food product: Home-Baked Pecan Cake In A Jar. Mmmmm.

The morning of the wedding I went wandering around downtown Asheville, vaguely destined for an internet cafe and bookstore, which I found. It almost goes without saying that as soon as I found net and coffee, Dave showed up.

The wedding itself was really lovely. It took place way up in the mountains, just over the border in South Carolina, in an ancient-looking stone chapel which sloped down toward the altar and no back wall. So the whole ceremony took place against a backdrop of most of South Carolina, or North, depending on which way we were facing.

And the ceremony, designed from scratch for Dave and Kendra, was beautiful too, delivering exactly the combination of humor and sentimentality that I'd been primed to expect by a recent viewing of The One With Chandler And Monica's Wedding.

Some radio moments:

• Something I've always enjoyed is the juxtaposition created when you're between two radio markets, and stations at the same frequency start to bleed into each other. On my camping trip this summer I listened to a weather service station playing over an Andrews-Sisters-ish old country song with occasional bits of numbers station filtering in. In New Mexico this week, I heard the new Jennifer Lopez song for the first time, while at the same moment a distant station started to enumerate the various rumors about her breakup with Ben Affleck.


• In Fredericksburg, Texas, I listened to a call-in radio show on which diverse political opinions were treated with respect. The topic was the Rangel-Hollings effort to reinstitute the draft, and the context was a Christian radio station, although few of the discussants mentioned religious grounds for their positions. I was a little surprised to hear this sort of discussion on a religious radio station, but I shouldn't have been--I think in this case it was the host's faith that led him to try to listen to and understand his callers, instead of just score points.
  
  For a while a couple of years ago I kept a Christian station on standard rotation in my car radio. During my afternoon commute there was a show in which people would call in with their spiritual and ethical questions, and a thoughtful, slightly hoarse preacher would answer with interpretation of scripture. A memorable, poignant and awful moment came when a caller, suffering from chronic and acute pain, asked if suicide would really consign him to eternal torment--because, he said, sometimes he just didn't think he could stand to go on.
  
  The host tried to answer, basically, "Yes, you can go on," because God will help you. But the caller kept saying, "Yes, but what if I can't?" The host, you could tell, couldn't say that suicide wasn't a sin, but he kept trying, within the confines of his worldview, to be kind and encouraging and somehow help this caller who had given up hope. It was kind of horrifying and kind of deeply human.


• On the way out of Austin, on another Christian radio station, the hosts expressed outrage on behalf of an Algerian pilot who says his career was ruined by the U.S. government, who made him "a scapegoat because he was a Muslim and a pilot". While this was an unexpected bit of inter-faith support, I suspect it was less pro-Islam than anti-government. The next topic on the show was a planned act of armed resistance against a Michigan act of eminent domain--nobody wants it to come to violence, but when they come to take away a man's house, he has to do something.


• Later on the same station, I heard an ad for organic farming (because that's the way God intended it) followed by an interview with an anti-fluoride activist.


• I heard Randy Newman's formerly-over-the-top sarcastic song "Political Science" used as a transition from Laura Ingraham's show to a commercial: "Let's drop the big one and see what happens."


• In rural Alabama, flipping back to radio after an hour or so of MP3s, I found the station I'd been listening to was now out of range, so I hit the "scan" button, and watched as the receiver spun around and around, trying and failing to lock in on any signal.


• In Atlanta, I listened to WCLK for hours. It's the most I've enjoyed a jazz radio station since I left New Jersey. In California I have KCSM, which is good but sometimes feels weighed down by its sense of history, art, and responsibility. WCLK doesn't make jazz feel like a tradition it's holding up by force of will; it plays jazz because that's the music it plays.