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The Preakness
Air America
The Delta Embraer E75 from Reagan National begins its descent, and from my window seat I watch us settle into the thin layer of altostratus clouds covering central Florida like batting, diffracted and billowy, perfect mirror-imaged moguls repeating themselves as far as I can see. Soft rays from the five p.m. sun contrast the clouds and the blue sky, but we pass through quickly and everything below is muted aquarium blue, and blurry, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool. This is Orlando, the Orlando Airport specifically, and my three nights at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport Hotel (prime location within the airport!) are appropriate, given this is the last leg of my two-month trip and here too is where it started. The Orlando airport is Biosphere east, its giant windows and Macaroni Grill and hotel bar sporting too few barflies and too many Wrangler and polo shirt clad Grainger Industrial Supply salesmen small consolation for the sixty-something hours I spend within it. A flight should end in an adventure, not a cage, and the delicious snack mix upon which I gorge at the bar does not fulfill my need for adventure, or the potential for danger, not just the threat of broken bones and bruised egos and humiliation but also the kind emotive, that sensorial overload we earn from placing ourselves in positions unfamiliar. Adventurous my work trips are not.
G.K. Chesterton wrote that the danger of the modern person is his constant effort to escape from the street in which he lives, and that were he to be snowed in, with his neighbors and immediate surroundings his only stimulant, he “should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.” G.K. overreaches, and his early 1900’s didn’t have the luxury of today’s air travel, but his sentiments remain true: we delve not into our neighbor’s business, ostensibly out of respect but really because once we learn of that wilder world, we still have to face our neighbors in the morning, and wouldn’t that get awkward. But when your flights end in taxis, and domed airports, and city sidewalks, you take your adventure as it comes.
Nashville at night, to paraphrase Shawn Mullins, is far more Los Angeles than Grand Ole Opry, despite it being the home of modern country music, the proof in the glut of decorative, Crayola-box spectrum piebald cowboy boots and bought, not won, belt-buckles; embroidered, rhinestoned cowboy shirts more Affliction and Ed Hardy than Pendleton and Sheplers. And boobs. Boobs everywhere, huge, fake ones, spilling from spaghetti strap shirts and protruding out the front side of back-less dresses, on all ages, 16 to 60, inappropriately large when they should be average, or smooth and taut where they should be leathery, Tennessee such an unhealthy (third in obesity!)[1], unathletic state to have so many giant breasts on Time for Timer[2] bodies. Nashville also has, I suspect, more people per capita who talk to themselves. Loudly. No timid under the breath commentary here, and your presence is more likely nuisance than potential audience, particularly for those crazies lingering west of the railroad tracks running under Broadway; a stark juxtaposition to the itinerants on the east side, some brilliantly playing guitars and fiddles, or white five-gallon plastic buckets and accordions, mandolins and melodicas for whatever money you’re willing to throw down, metal or paper non-discriminatory.
Across the street from the Sheraton I pause to hear a young man give his testimony to a mix of itinerants and groupies, black and white, backpack-laden and homeless, some crammed at his feet like a mosh pit and an equal amount strewn across the plaza like morning-after red Solo party cups. A city bus roars by, denying me the opportunity to hear the preacher give his take on the role of wife, but at the same time a disheveled, scholarly looking man approaches me from the sidewalk, cigarettes and keys in one hand, newspaper in the other. We listen to the preacher for a few minutes, then talk ourselves, about Jesus, and wives, and bluegrass music, loudly enough that we get shushed by a half-asleep vagrant, until the man tells me he’s locked his keys in his car, and could he just borrow a few dollars for the bus and I realize it’s all a ruse and as epical a beggar’s pitch I have ever heard.
In Reagan National I pass Laura Bush and one of her twin daughters, the two of them focused, a string of dark suited men both in front and in back, a silent, woolen pinstriped elephant walk; on a flight to Phoenix I witness two robust twenty-something black women, obviously on their first flight, vociferously and adamantly refusing to part with their bags which the flight attendants want to check; as clear, I think, a manifestation of black mistrust of any sort of government bureaucracy as one could ask for. The black women’s resolve outlasts the flight attendants devotion, and they keep their luggage.
On a flight to Kansas a couple behind me talk to their young child, non-stop, explaining every detail, the finer points of acceleration and lift, depriving him of any element of surprise, or the exhilaration of flight, likely creating apprehension where there may have been only joy. Explaining how 80,000 pounds of alloyed aluminum defies gravity sounds sketchy to even my ears, and it must be gobbledygook if you’re two, so why not just let the kid enjoy the ride? I find hope for them when they discuss, at length and after smacking their son’s hand for smacking his own mother’s hand, their suspicion that “perhaps we’re sending the wrong message.” Realization late is better than realization never.
Leaving Detroit a middle-Eastern man – Yemeni, in fact, which turns out to not be a state-sponsor of terrorism – moves up several rows in order to sit across from me, in a row of empty seats, him wearing a thick winter jacket despite the stiflingly hot preflight airplane air; he looks from front to back multiple times, nervously, apprehensively, each one of his looks making me, in turn, more nervous and apprehensive. He spends too much time in the bathroom, and upon return begins to pray, semi-prostrate on the seat-back tray in front of him. This causes me such consternation that I lift the arm rest, unbuckle my seat belt and turn slightly towards him; I will not let him leave his row if it appears he’s making a break for the cockpit. And though I like the idea of hero, I’m more lover than fighter, so I instead engage him in conversation. He is neither bomber nor one-way pilot, but rather a Detroit gas station attendant on his way to Yemen to visit his three children, last seen more than two years ago, and he produces pictures of his two daughters and son. The eldest daughter, surprisingly, is the object of his most affection, and he pauses at her photo the longest, a Disneylandish five by seven picture of the girl standing, arms crossed, with her own airbrushed headshot in the upper right corner. Shame, I think, on me, and I wonder if any of the 9/11 terrorists had saccharine pictures of lovely daughters in their wallets.
From Orlando to Philly a precocious girl next to me asks me to smell the feet of her stuffed Minnie Mouse (I do), then peppers me and everyone else around us, for the rest of the flight, with all forms of the word “irritate.” She uses it correctly, if not gratuitously. She’s irritated, her father is irritating her, she doesn’t mean to irritate me, the air is irritatingly cold.
From Hawaii to DC I sit next to another daughter, this one a laconic college senior returning from a trip with her inversely verbose mother, them discussing the daughter’s future but the latter dominating the conversation. She solicits my opinion routinely; she wants her daughter to be in “policy,” but the daughter, wearing too-tight jeans, a long sleeve mock turtle with a peach colored button up sweater and a strand of pearls, just wants to write. She is uninspiring, and I wonder at what age the prematurely mature turn from precocious to simply boring.
In a Philadelphia airport hotel bar I witness a female bartender taking absolutely no shit from the Korean couple who own the bar, first exasperating the husband, then pleasantly taking my order for a beer (“another Sierra Nevada honey?”), then exasperating his wife. It becomes apparent the bartender has only worked here a few weeks, and I do not know how it can last too many more.
From Denver to San Francisco I read that the world still thinks America is the coolest country on the planet; boarding a plane in Seattle I overhear an older woman, fumbling with her dated cell phone over the tops of her glasses, ask her traveling companion “how do I put this thing on vibrator;” on the way to Kansas City a meticulously manicured male flight attendant hits on me, casually dropping my name during his rounds: “can I get you something to drink Joe?” Beat. “That is your name. Isn’t it?”
My cab driver from Incheon International Airport to my Seoul hotel is an American citizen; Mr. Kim – all Kims and Lees in Korea, no Hatfields versus McCoys here lest the country eat itself in genocide or mutually assured destruction – is 41, but has spent the last twenty years of his life on America’s west coast after spending the first twenty here. He left his fifteen year old daughter with friends so he and his wife could come home to take care of his ailing father, and he tells me, salaciously, that though his wife was born in America, her “body is all Korean.”
The flight to Korea chases the sun for the duration, mirroring the revolution and defying darkness; the return flight counters it, defying time (I leave Seoul at six pm on Friday, and arrive in Seattle at 1230 the same day).
Gone: the resetting of watches upon touchdown. Cell phones are tethered to satellites, and watches will be gone from the civilized world soon enough, at least for practical purposes, serving instead as they do in the Third World, nothing more than a bauble, a Swatch Watch for the 21st Century.
In Seattle, a friend’s beautiful downtown wedding is juxtaposed with listening to a convicted triple-murderer, being prepped to testify for the government in a trial against a co-conspirator, complain about his haircut. I crack a joke about the difference between a bad haircut and a good one (two days), and am later horrified at my detachment in the presence of bona fide evil.
I find that flying more often makes it harder, not easier, a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that my odds are decreasing; particularly on takeoff, where I start to imagine the plane nose-diving into a field, or houses, or a river, and I wonder if I will close my eyes during the fall or keep them open.
While waiting for my ride in the Incheon International Airport, I meet 32 year-old Keshab Raj Sapkota, an American Soldier as of one year ago and a Nepalese citizen the 31 years prior. He taught social studies in his hometown of Butwal until he won a proverbial Golden Ticket, a free path to American citizenship, just one of about fifty thousand annually out of nearly fifteen million applicants in the Diversity Program. Keshab had a point-six percent chance to win this Green Card Lottery, and after spending about six months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, here he is on his way to the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Republic of Korea, to be an air conditioner repairman in order to provide for a better life for his wife and daughter. Such are the things that make us American, and I think, perhaps, America is the coolest country on the planet, in spite of it all.
[1] Gold to Mississippi, Silver to Louisiana
[2] When I’m slow on the draw, and I need something to chaw, I hanker for a hunka cheese. When my ten gallon hats-a-feeling five gallons flat, I got something planned, which is little cheese sandwiches. When my get up and go has got up and went, I hanker for a hunka cheese. When I’m dancin’ a hoe down, and my boots kinda slow down, or any time I’m weak in the knees, I hanker for a hunka, a slabber slice a chunk of, a snack a day’s a winner, and it won’t spoil my dinner, I hanker for a hunka cheese.
Day Tripper
Provincial Police Headquarters, Kandahar City
Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out/Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out now
I stare up at a late-model Toyota Hilux, white with red racing trim down the side, sitting parked, incongruously, ten feet above the ground and atop a faded-maroon rusted steel shipping container, a dirty twin mattress balanced on its roof like a hat. It is an odd place to put a mattress, I think, on top of a truck on top of a shipping container. A wood and concrete water tower, ancient looking but likely built by the Russians, partially obscures my view, as does a tree of undetermined type. I know it is brown. Everything here is brown. There are varying shades, but far and away the most abundant is a sandy, tannish-brown, the color of the earth here in Kandahar Province, pervasive in the brick used to make the buildings, or in the mud and straw mix used to cover those bricks, or in the dust that covers everything from brick to tree to child to perched Toyota Hilux. Even the one frog and one lizard I see – the sum total of non-avian wildlife I spy in a thirty-day period – have adapted to a gritty light brown the exact same color as the ground upon which they walk; I would have stepped on them but for their movement. The houses and villages here, too, would be unintentionally crushed were a giant to walk among them, they rise up from the earth seamlessly, giving the effect they have either been molded out of the ground below or the earth scraped away from around them.
I turn from the truck and water tower and walk back towards Police Headquarters (PHQ), a two-story building on one end of a small dirt and gravel courtyard surrounded by other nondescript two-story buildings, stepping over a rivulet of sewer water and then around a line of men of varying ages waiting to do business at PHQ. There is activity here, the ubiquitous goings-on of daily life at a bureaucratic center, noteworthy only because of the loaded pistol on my hip and the stark absence of women. I see only one, though she sees me first, furiously waving her hand at me, an exaggerated version of the hand-and-arm signal my grandmother, in her rare moments of impatience, would use to hush me up. The woman is in full burqa, squatting in the courtyard against the passenger side door of a truck, no skin visible but for her left hand and wrist, and that only because of her extended-arm wave, violent, not to say hello or to beckon but clearly to indicate that I should, immediately, cease looking at her. I suspect she cares not that I was not, in fact, looking at her until her waving caught my attention, first causing in me curiosity that quickly shifted to bewilderment and then to something just short of alarm as I suspected this hand-wave was the functional equivalent of her running her hand across her throat.
This is very much Kandahar. The American footprint here is small, the few tents and plywood buildings housing Security Force Assistance Team-10 (SFAT-10) so jammed together into a space about as big as a basketball court I turn sideways to walk between them. SFAT-10 is on an open base, meaning the Americans walk around freely between their own small area and the police headquarters next to it, walking past a mosque in between; and though there has been a glut of “blue on green” (the board game-simplistic name given to the event when Afghan Soldiers shoot coalition forces) attacks in Afghanistan, this is PHQ, a relative zone of safety run by a Chief of Police one American calls a “god-king.” The Chief is a young man, somewhere in his early thirties – Afghans tend to give their birth date in brackets, like [in the winter, before the Russians came]; he’s also a Brigadier General and Chief of Police with neither military nor policing experience who rose to power the old-fashioned way, by being a complete but discriminate ass-kicker. Another American tells me he enjoys power and popularity because he is the epitome of what a Pashtun man should be, which I take to mean that in conjunction with valuing honor and respect, he has no problem sending you on your way, metaphorically speaking.
I have come here to speak with the Chief via the good graces of both the Chief and SFAT-10, who picked me up from my own home at Kandahar Airfield in a three-vehicle convoy of giant, armored vehicles having a passing similarity to a semi truck with a gun turret. Kandahar Airfield (KAF) itself is as a big a base as any in Afghanistan, essentially the acreage of any one-runway international airport, plus outbuildings, and a deployment experience here is a world away from the smaller, spartaned existences of the FOBs and COPs and VSPs spread throughout the villages south and west of here. At one of these male-only outposts, you might walk past a Soldier nonchalantly pissing, openly, into a steel pipe sticking out of the ground specifically for this purpose, and time is passed by patrols and camp improvements during the day and video games and muted masturbatory sessions by night, but KAF has indoor showers, and a KFC, and a T.G.I. Friday’s, and its own currency and at least six different dining facilities and The Boardwalk, an oval, wood-planked, covered walkway with shops and restaurants and barber shops on the outside and a turf football field, basketball court, and hockey rink, courtesy of the Canadian forces, on the in. I spend less than thirty days here, but the surreality of the multitude of nations and uniforms and civilian contractors and armored vehicles and budding Boardwalk romances and sheer bizarreness of the post-apocalyptic Mad Maxness of it all never lessens. Rocket attacks are spare but marked by their own oddity, precursed with a siren and a disarmingly calm human-imposter female voice. The siren wails and then, over a camp-wide P.A. system, the Rocket Attack lady warns: ROCKET. ATTACK. ROCKET, ATTACK. Her digitized accent is slighted to the British just enough to share their air of understatement and calm, yet still conspiratorial and a bit creepy and certainly not human enough to assuage my suspicions she’s in on it, like she knows the rockets are coming and waits until the last minute simply to continue to exert her dominance over us. There are just one or two sirens in a matter of weeks, but then there is a night with five in a matter of a few hours, two of which are followed by audibly impacting rockets, and she has us scrambling from vehicle or office to bunker and then back again, multiple times, like cockroaches when the lights are turned on.
SFAT-10 picks me up in their M-ATVs, huge, rubber wheeled vehicles one driver tells me handles “like an F-150”; we wind our way past the NATO barracks, and the infamous “poo-pond,” indisputably Kandahar Airfield’s signature landmark, a Walden Pond of treated human shit. We exit KAF through one of the several Entry Control Points and onto the highway towards the city. The forty-five minute drive from KAF to PHQ in Kandahar City is smooth and uneventful; I pass it largely by staring out the thick, quadrilateral slit of window to my left, looking forward only when I feel the beginnings of backseat-nausea. Each vehicle is manned by four personnel: a driver, a TC (truck commander), a security man, and a turret-gunner; their radio chatter is brilliant in its mundanity. They discuss the vast array of dirt available at KAF; their live-burial preferences, were their choices limited to concrete, gravel, or sand; how much it would hurt to get run over by one of their own vehicles (clarifying question: “are we talking head to feet, or feet to head?”); how many pounds in a ton; the cultural and religious transcendentalism of Hacky Sack; how KAF, due to the excess of sports injuries, is the most dangerous place in Afghanistan; the delicious irony in the name of the gypsy people of Afghanistan, the Kuchis. A female soldier in another vehicle delivers, spoken word and over the radio, the first forty-five seconds of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s magnum opus, “Baby Got Back.”
My vision of Afghanistan is asterisked: I have a uniform, and a gun, and I travel via helicopter or armored vehicle and see the world through bullet-proof glass. I have no beard. I speak with the locals exclusively through a translator, outside of my disastrously pronounced “asalaam alaikum,” “sangyee,” and “manana,” and I speak with them only because of the tragedy imposed upon them by an American soldier who murdered their children and wives and fathers. I am neither a Muslim nor one of the People of the Book. I am an intruder, I reside here only for an eye-blink, and, being Western and specifically American, my worldview is based selfishly upon me and how I fit into it, not upon my father’s history, or my tribe’s, or my people’s. Yet, also being Western and specifically American and perhaps a bit introspective, I have opinions, and difficulty squaring them, or posing them for that matter, and am perplexed by much that is Afghanistan. I, perhaps unfairly, also determine that I could be here one hundred years more and my perplexity would not be much diminished.
On the way home to America I stop, again, at Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, for years now a stopover for service members on their way forward, or home; once a thriving metropolis and now a bit of a ghost town as one war ends and another, presumably, winds down. The USO is still open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and always populated by Soldiers and Marines and Airmen in uniform, asleep on couches or armchairs or on the phone to family at home or, most likely, either playing or watching first-person shooter video games. For some, just like real life. There are six televisions and 360 degree viewing of, I assume, some version of Call of Duty, the sights and sounds of death and destruction and carnage piped in for your viewing and listening pleasure, be it four a.m. or in the heat of the late afternoon. Like the Afghans I see, I know not how to square what I see with what I think, and with my own asterisked experiences, and I think instead of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote, to paraphrase, that words are simply abbreviations anyway, perpetually inadequate to properly express what you see and feel, which I take to mean you have to be there to know it, and even then it’s probably not enough.
The Renaissance Project: (1 of 4)
I’ve made the long trip from my high desert town in Mason Valley to the rugged, feral Jarbidge Mountains in the northeast corner of Nevada just twice in my life, both times in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s 1962 Ford truck, homemade plywood and metal horse trailer following behind. The Jarbidge Mountains north of Elko were, and are, prime mule deer hunting grounds, and for a week each fall my grandfather, his off-spring, and the many others in the Venn diagram that was his life would gather for a primordial return to drinking, hunting, and cooking that was, I would only later realize, my only significant Y chromosome exposure in my otherwise XX-filled adolescent world.
The 8-hour by car/12-hour by trailer-dragging truck odyssey started early in the morning for me, even earlier if you consider the amount of time my grandfather surreptitiously put in teaching me how to saddle a horse, how to shoot a rifle, how to crack preposterously silly jokes (including one that ended in returning, while standing in an elevator, a strange woman’s skirt to her ass-crack) – all skills needed to survive a week at deer camp.
My grandfather was efficient with his words, and my memories of those long drives are monopolized by the nostalgia-inducing rattles of hand-cranked door windows, a heater that worked remarkably well on my left leg but not so much on my right, a compass glued to the dashboard, seemingly bobbing in time to the Marty Robbins and Charley Pride 8-tracks grandpa alternated in the bolted-on stereo. We would stop for a quick breakfast at the Wig-Wam in Fernley, then drive onto a pristine I-80 pockmarked by the lonely alfalfa- and gold and copper mine-fueled economies of northern Nevada: Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin; even today, blips on an interstate causing only fleeting, sad astonishment to all those traveling between, precious home to those who know nothing else.
In Elko we would stop on Idaho Street downtown, both coming and going, but always at the base of the giant Styrofoam polar bear looming from the facade of the hundred year-old Commercial Casino, metal arrows shot from compound bows of alcohol and adrenaline-infused teens protruding from her exposed abdomen. I remember, once, waking from the narrow bench seat of my grandfather’s truck to see that white bear directly over me, spectral, back and bottom-lit by the soft red and yellow neon lights of the casino and contrasting starkly with the cold dark of a Nevada night and the foggy haze of my sleepy fourteen year-old eyes.
Deer camp itself was, in spite of night, snow, mountains and cold, the temporally organized chaos of men who, though arriving at different times on different days, possessed that institutional knowledge inherent to habit, the end result a harmony of horses, saddles, guns, and military surplus tents and equipment of an era congruent to the man who occupied or handled it: World War II for my grandfather, Vietnam for his sons, the Korean War for those falling in-between. Everything was durable and thick, huge cast iron stoves spewing wood smoke from heavy gauge, wax-coated canvas tents; bottomless Dutch ovens hanging over fires or warming on gas stoves; cheap beer and rot-gut whiskey flowing, oh the whiskey. The stuff was a marvel to me. It seemed to have no effect on my grandfather (I only later found out he had stopped drinking years prior), made one uncle talk even louder (a Marine Corps cannoneer in Vietnam, he was occupationally hard of hearing in one ear and genetically in both) and jollier, and made a great uncle frighteningly mean. I stayed away from him at night, but during the day and when sober he could be disarmingly nice. I shot a rabbit once and he taught me to skin and clean it, showing neither impatience nor condescension with my timidity and apprehension.
Of all the characters in the annual, week long rite of passage, the Ford looms largest. My grandfather had an aluminum Caravan Camper bolted to the bed of the truck, muted water-color western scene curtains (homemade) over the windows and door, a plywood table (homemade) bolted to one bed rail, a modified metal-spring cot bolted to the other. Sometimes my grandfather would sit in the camper, reading old newspapers by the light of a Coleman kerosene lantern, emerging occasionally with some treasure from years gone by. I rarely went inside any further than my arm would reach, partially out of some instinctual respect to not invade a place so obviously his, partially out of awe of the overwhelming number and variety of objects the camper would produce.
Now the truck is mine. I asked for it, ostensibly as a joke in one of the many moments of twistedness as my family negotiated the transition of my grandfather’s possessions from him to us as the last years of his life unhurriedly but unmistakably crept towards him. But I meant it, I wanted the truck, and though perhaps I wasn’t the most deserving, I think my grandfather knew I would take the obligations of owning such a thing seriously. I drove it, on my fortieth birthday, the ninety miles from Yerington to Reno, stopping three times to bang dirt out of the choking fuel filter as the engine sputtered prior to dying, me cruising to a stop on the shoulder of a snow dusted US Route 95A. The trip was different than all the other hundreds of times I’d driven that exact route, perhaps because I was now 40, but more likely, I suppose, because I was driving my dead grandfather’s truck and the rattling-windows brought back more than just memories of quarter-century old deer hunting trips. Right there I used to work for a man who, upon reflection, might very well have been some sort of pedophile; here is the dirt road entrance if you want to take the back way to one-hundred-fifty-year-old Fort Churchill; after this curve in the road you’ll see the little valley where, as a kid, my grandfather would invariably point out a herd of wild horses walking amongst the sagebrush and creosote.
I left the truck in Reno at my mother’s house, directions to a long-hauler as to where to pick it up and where to drop it off. I failed to prepare him for the verbosity that is my mom, and certainly failed to extrapolate for the fact that she would be seeing off a truck that was first her father’s and now her son’s. And now the truck sits here, in front of my house in Tennessee, where I can sit and look at it out of my window even as I type, visualizing what it will be and hoping I don’t forget what it was.
This is a Machine (2 of 4)
My first day with the truck is a good one: I’m woken at about 8 am on a Saturday morning by a phone call from Vince, the long-hauler who brought me the truck and whose semi is now parked on my street, the Ford already disembarked and sitting, lonely, too far off the curb but not quite in the middle of the road. I sign paperwork for Vince, who gets back into his truck and makes his way back to I-24, where he will continue east and then south towards Atlanta. We are now alone, the truck and I, and I am anxious. He brings out the Animist in me. The truck is defiant, a huge, bulbous hood, the tapered cab, that cowcatcher-ish steel grill like a lower jaw forward-thrust, it’s momentarily intimidating, and I wonder what I have gotten myself into.
I stare at the truck for a few minutes; I circle. He looks like he has weathered the 2,100 mile trip fine. It must, I think, be awfully confusing to spend a lifetime in front of a double-wide trailer at the end of a dirt road, only to have someone pack you up and ship you off to some unknown extended family in the middle of Tennessee. Here he is, alone, trying to appear confident and unaffected despite all his possessions in the glove box or on the rusty passenger side floor pan. What I mistook as aggression only moments ago I now see as uncertainty and the image of the set jaw reminds me instead of Chairy from Pee Wee’s Playhouse. It’s time to get to work.
**********
An Army base is a self-sustained community. Mine, Ft. Campbell, has a grocery store, several gas stations, a liquor store, a Wal-Mart type general store, houses and duplexes, and barracks for the single soldiers; a bowling alley, gyms, chapels, day care, a YMCA, softball fields, a football stadium, police and fire stations, schools, swimming pools, and a golf course. The Army goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure Soldiers and their family members have what they need, and plenty of opportunity to take up and perfect hobbies, like woodworking, arts and crafts, or auto repair, and here is where I drive myself, the Ford sputtering and threatening stall at every stop light, this Saturday morning. I make it to Gate 6, it’s still early, the base relatively empty due to deployments and, in all likelihood, hangovers. I’m the only one passing through so I can keep my foot on the accelerator and the clutch slightly engaged. My plan is to hand my ID card to the security guards, say hello, and get my card back without ever stopping. But there are two guards – one has come over from the next lane over – and they eye the Ford. “Nice truck” he says, but pauses between words, emphasizing, each a one-word sentence in and of itself: Nice. Truck. A grin creeps from the corners of his mouth; he is old and white and grizzled, and wearing huge unwieldy ski gloves and I think the smarter and more appropriate picture would be him inside this truck and me outside with the gun on my hip, but here we are. My plan to keep moving is foiled, he and his friend want to chat, and after a few words I make it out without the engine dying.
The self-help auto shop is just about a mile away. I drive through the open gate, park, and walk in through one of the big open garage doors, the smell of gas and oil and other things unidentifiable to me permeating the air. There are ten bays, four of them with hydraulic jacks to lift your vehicle off the ground, and small tool lockers at the head of each bay. The floors and walls are clean, and because this is an Army base, and because we are a family show, I take note of the deficit of out-of-date calendars featuring moderately attractive bikini-clad girls hawking Snap-on or Rigid tools or Holley carburetors. There is a dirty-blond, middle-aged woman behind the counter, territorial and aggressive in a way that makes it clear she is in charge, but you can tell there is compassion lurking nearby. I tell her about my truck, rambling and inefficient and unconfident with my words and she does not even pretend to care. “Do you need a lift?,” she asks, and I say I don’t know.
“CHUCK! DOES HE NEED A LIFT!”
Chuck, wide hips and narrow waist and belt cinched so tight that it pulls the loops on his jeans together so they are touching one another, strolls over and asks what I want to do. I tell him I don’t know, but I that I have a ’62 Ford, it was my grandpa’s, he had it almost the whole time but bought it off a friend of his in ’64 or ’65 and I want to make it reliable and maybe make it look nice but nothing like a car show.
“What,” he drawls in an odd what I find out later to be a Virginia hillbilly accent, “is your level of knowledge?” I’m not sure how to answer this, and I think of the doctor’s office pain chart. Am I a zero? Pain free, aw-shucks grin, post-coital eyes? A six, which should reflect some pretty serious pain but instead looks like I woke up an hour earlier than I wanted to? A ten? A reddened-face, sweaty, agonizingly teary-eyed emoticon conveying far more emotional damage that physical pain? I wonder how to translate this into my comfort with an open-end wrench. I’m better than my mother, for sure, who is probably damn close to zero, but I’m certainly not as good as the guy who has joined our group, he with an earring in each ear, and ponytail and goatee and name in cursive stitched onto a white patch on the pocket of his shirt, a pack of Marlboros peeking over the top. The truth is that though I took auto shop in high school, I seem to recall spending more time trying to make out with Jeanna in the tool room than I do learning how an engine worked.
I tell Chuck I feel OK doing things on my own, but I have no idea where to start. He has me drive the truck into one of the bays, extends the lift arms so they sit just under the frame of the truck, and raises it. Chuck grabs a shop light, walks underneath, and begins his analysis: Mmmm. Yep. Hmm. Look at that. He is talking to himself, or perhaps the truck, but certainly not to me, and his coos and warbles are, I think, a good sign. Decades of desert air have apparently been good to the truck, and Chuck can’t stop telling me what great condition it is in. He says he can tell that my grandfather took good care of it, and that I’m lucky, and that it is a prime candidate for a “frame off resto.” I ask if this means we can make it so I can drive home without it stalling.
We lower the truck, and Chuck does something with the carburetor where he changes the fuel air mix while I just stare at the engine, one foot up on the bumper, trying to absorb as much as possible of what Chuck says and does. I nod my head occasionally. Other people working on their cars – there are only men here – frequently come over and stick their heads under the hood with me, staring, laconic, all of us joining in this manliest liturgical in existence surely since Henry Ford or Otto Daimler or whomever first decided to put the engine in front and put a hood over it and to make an open back end for hauling around your crap that you never really use. Sometimes they ask me a question – “is that a 302?” and I answer with “nah, it’s a 292 Y-block” at which point I have exhausted my knowledge of my vehicle.
Chuck finishes and sends me on my way, my first task to get a new gas tank. I spend the next weekend first removing the bench seat (the gas tank is behind it), then disconnecting fuel lines and electrical wires and rubber hoses and brass fittings and even the fuel pump and filter and the tank itself and I replace them all. I make, in total, five trips to Auto Zone over the weekend but by the end of it I have a brand new fuel system, from tank to engine, and the truck fires up the first time I turn the ignition. There are no leaks, and the fuel flows beautifully and clearly where before it was stunted and chunky and honey-colored.
This is a victory, I want to revel in it, so decide to take the truck for a deserved victory lap. I make sure the truck is in gear, turn the engine off, then move to kick out the wooden blocks I have propped behind the wheels while the truck sat on my declined driveway. The first, on the driver’s side, comes out easily, but the passenger side block takes more than a few kicks. The weight of the truck is clearly heavy on the block, but my powers of deductive reasoning have been squashed by my joy in my first success in making it run, and my arrogance has prevented me from realizing that there’s a problem here: when I removed the bench seat, I knocked the four-wheel drive stick shift into neutral, therefore negating the usefulness of ensuring the truck was in gear in the first place, and after swinging my foot back to give the block one more kick, I realize, simultaneously with swinging my foot forward, that there is about to be nothing keeping this beast in my driveway. The truck immediately begins rolling backwards, and I move around to the back to try to stop it. My truck weighs almost two tons, and I unsurprisingly have no effect. There is, I see, a car parked across the street behind me, and another coming down the road towards me. I run around to the driver’s side, and, running backwards, open the car door, crank the bus-sized steering wheel (no power steering) clockwise, jumping into the cab at the same time and applying the brake. I have missed the parked car behind me by a long shot, and the oncoming car passes by me without slowing down. My heart is pounding, and I take the lesson: don’t park on declines.
**********
Replacing the fuel system successfully emboldens me to make other minor improvements, to buy new wheels and tires, to even drive the truck in to work a few days a week. I stay in the right lane on the way in, driving the speed limit not because the truck lacks power, but because I am in no hurry. I drive leisurely, downshifting and braking early once traffic lights come into view, occasionally leaning my entire chest against the giant steering wheel, arms crossed so my right hand is at 10, my left at 2, wind whistling through the poorly sealed vent windows. At work, we talk about the truck. One of my young sergeants calls it an “eyesore,” and, seeing my hurt, follows quickly with “but I don’t really know about old things.” This same Soldier once asked me if I liked Kylie Minogue because that’s the music her mother liked. Another, not knowing it was mine, called it a “beater,” but these are the exceptions. The truck, I find, is smile-inducing and is gender, age, and race neutral. The black security guards, my administrative assistant, the senior attorney in my office, who flew helicopters in Viet Nam; young Soldiers in Punisher t-shirts or wearing flat-billed hats; the ladies who walk at lunch hour, they all have a comment and a smile about the truck or a story from their own past. It might have been their own grandfather, or their dad, or the one whose much older brother had a truck, just like this one, with a bench seat so clean and slick it would cause him to go sliding against the door every time his brother made a hard left turn, a game to both of them, a way to so clearly express your love of your little brother or your idolization of your big one without having to say it.
This, too, I share, this love without having to say it. Every time I get into the truck, I shut the heavy door solidly, metal on metal, my concerns and worries and stressors dropping and my love and endorphins increasing, swapping levels like a canal lock. It can sometimes seem that I deal with badness all day, every day. If I know your name, it’s likely because you did something wrong, or someone suspects you did something wrong, or you’re probably about to do something wrong and I have to go tell someone else what they should do about it. It is a system, and one that works, and one into which I have wholesale bought, but it can be exhausting. But every time I get into the truck – whatever my temperament or mindset – and close the door and turn the key and hear the engine ignite, first turn, I am listening to goodness and I reconcile accordingly.
When I’m driving any other car, it is simply a vehicle, and a vehicle in the strictest sense: something to get me from here to there. But the Ford is a machine. It is here, generically, to make my life better, as a machine is supposed to. But also something more, something essential and of consequence. We turn a key and move the vehicle into drive and turn on the cruise control and the radio and the DVD player for the kids and continue to be preoccupied by things mundane and banal and low but, inexplicably, consuming. But the truck is different. It is simple, yet demands your attention. I pull the choke and turn the key and can see the mechanical fuel pump pushing fuel up through the carburetor where the choke plate is minimizing the air flow but increasing the amount of fuel pulled to the engine; I listen to the idling rumble to know when to push the choke back in, letting me know that it’s okay to engage the clutch and slide the stick shift into second gear, revving the engine to get rid of that sticky pedal, heavy on the first step like a double-action pistol on the first pull, easing the clutch back out to slowly, smoothly accelerate into third gear, and then fourth, where I then rest my left arm on the door sill, steering with my left fingertips while my right rests casually on the cracked shifter knob, holding my speed with a sensitive right foot. If I turn, I must remember to move the signal back into the center position; the soft “click-click, click-click” reminding me if I forget.
I am not so maudlin to think that life was better in 1962 when we didn’t have cruise control and in-car DVD players, I know every age has its own historical and personal challenges. But today, in 2011, this 1962 Ford does, in fact, make life seem easier. I have an identifiable goal, an end-state for the truck that I can envision as if it were sitting here in front of me, shiny and new. There are little goals I need to achieve in order to reach that final one, and each step I take, each time I get the fuel gauge to work, or see the instrument panel lights flicker to life, or successfully remove the manifold exhaust, I feel relevant. I feel connected. The truck has a smell and feel so familiar to me now, already, that I don’t know if the nostalgia is, in fact, nostalgia, or I’ve just convinced myself of it, like a childhood event memorialized in a photograph you’ve looked at so many times you’ve confused the reality of the actual event with the picture of it, the two to never part again.
**********
I spend an hour or two cleaning the underside of the truck, fifty years of dirt and grime and oil grown solid so I can scrape it off in layers. Then new windshield wipers, new exhaust manifold gaskets, new sun visors, new hinges for the tail gate. I end the evening sitting in the bed of the truck, a cigar in one hand and a Negro Modelo in the other, Kristian Matsson on the stereo, he about five foot seven but ambitiously calling himself The Tallest Man on Earth; he is of 2010 but sounds, appropriately, like 1962.
We are all products of our times, at least to some extent, and my grandfather was Depression Era, no doubt. I go through the papers he has left in the glove box of his truck, the original operators manual, and old insurance documents from as far back as 1980, and an emergency blank check (number 3453) and maintenance records scrawled neatly in pencil on an amalgam of papers, a Sahara Hotel and Casino scratch pad and Consolidated Freightways receipts and even on meticulously clipped-out squares from magazine pages. He changed the oil on August 2, 1992, and also on April 2 of some unknown year. He packed the wheel bearings in November of 1985 and on a date unrecorded he sketched out a wiring diagram for the trailer lights. This I will keep.
There is a drizzle slightly increasing and sunlight simultaneously dissipating behind a clouded sky. The sunset shows amber, the sun itself absent but its nimbus prevalent. A woman walks by with her dog, short-legged but long and heavy-bellied, him on leash but holding it in is mouth, as if it is he taking her for a walk, not the other way around.
A Junkyard is a Social Network (3 of 4)
Humans are predictable creatures. Even the least sedentary, those of us who thrive on surprise and impulse and passion, who cultivate an identity of impetuousness and spontaneity, travel, over time, in patterns insinuative of the loveliest childhood images you ever created on your Spirograph. But occasionally we hiccup, or have a chance encounter, or simply stumble upon something that catches our attention, causing us to roll back the scroll wheel of our life, shift to the left or to the right, and, upon dialing back in, discover some alternate society, an association of enthusiasts whose arms welcome you unconditionally, based solely on your shared love of, for example, 1961-1966 Ford trucks.
I discover, just 1.3 miles from my house, a junkyard. That I have spent almost two years in Tennessee not knowing this is unsurprising; that I find, the first time I visit, a completely restored 1964 Ford F100 in the parking lot, is. The young man behind the counter, after stamping my hand and having me sign a liability waiver, tells me the truck belongs to Anthony, that he is middle-aged and that he will be wearing jeans, and a blue zip-up hoodie, with thick glasses and a thick mustache and a bowl haircut, and that if I go past the Dodge trucks, and the Chevrolet cars, I will find him walking amongst the Fords.
I pass through a giant roll-up garage door and into the gravel-and-mud lot, acres and acres of cars and trucks in varying stages of disarray and dismantle; many tireless, amputated at the ankles, but all of them precariously elevated on rusty, horizontal rims, a pointed reminder that they may never walk again; yawning hoods revealing de-toothed mouths, guts occasionally spilling out over fender wells and under doors slightly ajar. I pass two young, rotund white teens, then a black man, my age, towing an oversized wagon equipped with oversized off-road tires and a small child, perhaps his son, pushing from behind. At the far side of the lot I find Anthony Jenkins. When I meet him he is crawling out from under a Lincoln Town Car, his blue zip-up hoodie wet from lying in the mud but otherwise meeting, perfectly, the attendant’s description.
I introduce myself to Anthony and, mentioning his truck, tell him about mine. Anthony says he has seen it – “a friend told me there was a blue long bed four-wheel drive around town, but I didn’t believe him!” – and we begin a question and answer session dominated by simple questions and inadequate answers; Anthony initially speaking to me in a language that may as well have been Urdu, but quickly dumbing it down to Restoration 101, walking me over to an engine, showing me exactly which four screws to undo, and how to take a straw to the interior of the carburetor to assist with stalls; or how to take steel wool to the stainless steel emblems, making them shine like new; or which wire to cut and where to attach it to make sure the brake lights work. Anthony gives me his phone number and tells me about his buddy who had seen my truck, a retired soldier with whom Anthony is thinking about starting a club, “not really a car club but something where we can meet and just take a drive, maybe the next town over and grab some lunch.”
And here is where I find my social network: Anthony, the former Nissan mechanic who took an early retirement in order to open his own, at-home auto restoration business, dispensing free wisdom to me on the side; Mitch, the retired First Sergeant, generous with both his time and parts and with the “sirs” not because I am an officer, but because he might be the politest, friendliest guy I know; Gary, a retired bridge-welder whom I meet after Mitch gives me a phone number to a guy who gives me a phone number to another guy who does not have the part I’m looking for but directs me over farm roads and up a hill to two big white garages where I meet three men, one holding a Busch Light tall-boy, wearing dirty sweats, a mesh cap and a red plaid flannel shirt, with a veiny, bulbous nose to match and what must be years of chin and upper-lip hair growth and who gives me more directions, this time by toeing the ground with the outsole of his boot. He too sends me up the road, where I knock on Gary’s door, unannounced, telling him the gentlemen at the two big white garages thought he “might be able to help me fix my cracked exhaust manifold, though someone else suggested I just put on some headers and get rid of the crossover pipe” – I barely know what I am talking about – but Gary rolls his eyes dismissively, contemptuously at the mention of “headers” and says leave it here, I’ll fix it for you no problem. He calls me back later and says he’ll be out-of-town, but that he’s left the manifold in the apartment above his garage, just knock on the door and Uncle Fester will get it for you. I have, fortunately, spent enough time in the South to know better than to automatically dismiss this as some Southern-sticks tomfoolery, and I retrieve my manifold a few days later from a white-bearded, slipper-wearing, pants unzipped and unbuttoned Uncle Fester.
*********************
I work on the truck a little at a time, though I have taken to pouring over truck-parts magazines, and Ford websites, and eBay and craigslist, and even to driving four hours, trailer in tow, to a Birmingham salvage yard in search of a hood but finding, to my bemusement, assimilation: with my filthy Carhartts, finger-smudged hat brim, and dirty t-shirt, sleeves rolled up, and but for my significantly smaller waistline and lack of a mullet, I am indistinguishable. I have also, I think, begun to feel like maybe, perhaps, learning how an engine works and trying to make it look like it looked 50 years ago is a pretty damn important thing to do. There are, certainly, moments of pause: removing the camper, where my grandfather spent so much time; purchasing a new seat cover, switching from brown to blue; throwing away the ragged, disintegrating mud flaps. Even cleaning the grime from the clouded, grungy grill causes me to stop, half-way done, and look: the grill shines, beautiful and new, one side what it was and one side what it will be.
On a Saturday it is cold and overcast and reflective, and my mood matches. I take the truck for a drive, turning right out of my neighborhood and then right again at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, March is MISSION Madness, down a road I have never been down before. Long and narrow, it is closer to an extended driveway than a road, nameless; no signs, no center stripe, no shoulder stripe and no shoulder anyway – the fields of corn and soy, just inches out of the ground, grow right up the road itself; a gray overcast sky turning the fields a verdant Playdough green. A country road, in a country truck, in a part of the country that is, without a doubt, country. For forty-five minutes I drive, passing just one other automobile, another truck, and we wave, simultaneous fingers lifted off the steering wheel but palm remaining in contact. A radio-less car on a country road is a recipe for thought, and I realize I have been here almost two full years; that my people, my Captains and Sergeants I admire so much, are almost done with their year in Afghanistan; that I have been in this profession just short of eighteen years. I decide to drive until I am lost, up to the point where I think I may be, in fact, lost, and remember that my gas gauge is stuck on one-quarter tank. I see grain silos vaguely familiar, set just off the road, amongst a pond and gently sloping hills peppered with black dairy cows and the stumps of trees cut down long ago. I wave to a stationary farm dog because it seems like the right thing to do. I wonder what comes next. Do I strap on a back pack and walk across Nevada or move to Africa and run an orphanage or drive a 1962 Ford F100 from one side of Canada to the other? Another right turn, another long, flat gray asphalt road, another soot-crusted tobacco barn next to another generational red brick or white clapboard house; a child’s red umbrella, opened, in a uniformly green and untrampled field; a one-horse Mennonite carriage, red safety triangle the only concession to progress. I want to go home to get my camera, but I know it won’t look the same when I return.
The Church Invisible (4 of 4)
A spring day in Tucson: the sun beats down, already, the heat magnified or diminished by the absence of humidity, I can never figure out which. On a mid-morning run with a friend and the air hangs heavy, with heat, with smells of a morning-after detoxification, with my own history. Biennial trips to this town are conducive to foolish sentimentalism, particularly if one already tends that direction, and much of me is here in Tucson. Almost all of me is of the desert.[1] Here for, some would say, an overdue wedding (though nothing good in the desert happens quickly), we run on a Mesquite and Willow Acacia-lined path along the Rillito, a sanded wash that lately, due to groundwater pumping and population and a depleted Tucson Basin aquifer, only very occasionally answers to River; scattering in front of us Harris’s Antelope squirrels and Lesser Earless lizards, brave until we are right on top them and then sprinting away, blindingly quick and beautiful in a devilish sort of way. The desert, it seems to me, despite its desolation and acerbity and extortive leanings, is accommodative and prone to potential.
Example: the wash. Heavily vegetated and waiting for liquid fulfillment, patiently, it bides its time as a temporary reprieve for anything with legs, or wings, non-discriminatory; and there, on the banks, the presently vacant City of Fun, Inc. carnival, octopus arms and mallet-ended fulcrums and tea-cupped turntables dormant but for one man hosing down a tractor-trailer; fleeting, precarious joy in abeyance only until the sun goes down when it will then come to life, iridescent with light, and the momentary absence of worry; with the sparkled pubescent longing to steal a moment alone, if for only a flash, at the top of the Ferris wheel or in the darkened back corner of the House of Horrors; here, continuing on the path, the Cactus Wrens and Vireos and Abert’s Towhees calling safely from the spiked confines of the ocotillo and acacia. They can leave – they do have wings – but they do not. Something keeps them here, something in this non-judgmental desert that lets you, if you can stand it, be who you are and stay as long as you want; it is addictive, it becomes home in a way that is either incapable of or beyond description – that somethingness Edward Abbey reduced to, well, “something”: there is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and how beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.[2]
The desert, though it can be a trap, an inert ambush lying passively in wait, where it will, if you let it, consume you, leaving you parched and cracked-lipped if you are lucky, starched-white boned if you are not; is also a preservative, sanguinity and resilience rewarded by people or things (a fifty-year old truck) from the past, the discovery striking in you a flint of something, nostalgia or love or a rumination on destiny, if such a thing exists. Surely this truck doesn’t have one, it has neither destiny nor free will, it has no choice in its fate but there is something, a sum of parts or energy or personality or history. The arid, high desert has preserved the truck, and memory may preserve emotions, but there is always something more, something frequently both frustratingly and gloriously invisible and unexplainable in its potential.
This church invisible has converted me, and I have self-imposed a deadline of the first week of July to finish the truck. I work relentlessly. I have done all I can do with it in my own garage, and for the last several weeks it has occupied a spot in Anthony’s workshop, where I can use both his tools and his expertise. I go there on weekends, a coffee in one hand and an offering in the other, a twelve-pack of lemonade or a bottle of Fast Orange hand cleaner, something to karmically defray both the kindness Anthony has shown me and the experience I am taking. Today we remove the bed, crisscrossing nylon webbing from alternate corners of the truck and then raising it using Anthony’s homemade hydraulic lift, setting it back down on a wheeled-cart where Anthony will tend to it later. We set to work, Anthony surgeon to my lumberjack, he cuts, removes, copies, welds, grinds and paints the multiple rusted-out spots on the truck, leaving not a trace of his graft and simultaneously allowing me to keep my grandfather’s truck almost entirely in the original.[3]
I, alternatively, am the antithesis, methodically breaking rusty bolts, crudely spray painting smaller parts, oafishly grinding away at the frame with a steel wire wheel. It is here, I decide, my grandfather’s truck becomes mine, decades of Nevada dirt and rust and mouse turds and Cottonwood leaves falling from places that haven’t seen the light of day in almost fifty years, my grandfather no doubt wondering what in the world it is I am doing expending so much time and energy scrubbing half-century old leaf springs. He was a man who spent a life time making something, using his hands, concluding each day with a visual confirmation that his toil had amounted to something identifiable, even if it were grading a stretch of road or irrigating an alfalfa field or shoeing a horse or front-end loading buckets of dirt from one place to another, and I wonder if perhaps he, over his lifetime, had become desensitized to the emphatic corporeal nature of what I feel only after working on my truck; this thing I encounter after seeing my reflection in a hand-shined stainless steel grill, or in grinding away the rust from the frame to reveal a stamped FORD emblem, unchanged over the lifetime of the company; or in hearing the basso, diaphragmatic WHUMP of the laden door closing soundly against the metal cab.
There is a shameless self-satisfaction I find at the end of these days, a mute self-aggrandizing I proudly display in the grease and paint on my one pair of Carhartts; the dirt in my fingernails an unmistakable sign that I worked, the progress on the truck visible to anyone who looked at it in the morning and then again in the late afternoon. I become obsessive, my need for organization and aggregation and order manifesting in the urge to remove one more bolt, or clean one more part, or paint one more piece, and I find myself unable to distinguish between a need to finish the truck or to extend my time restoring it. The truck, the desert, the end of my time in Tennessee, the preparation for yet another move, this reconnection, albeit temporary, have all made me pensive and introspective.
But now the truck is finished, and it is beautiful. The oxidized powder-blue has been replaced by the original, Baffin Blue, contrasted by a two-tone of Corinthian white on the hood, a band along the top of the bed, and in the interior. All the rubber is new, the clouded stainless steel burnished, the bench seat reupholstered, gearshifts and heater box painted. Anthony has patched the floor pans and corrected all the imperfections accumulated over a lifetime of camping, deer hunting, and pulling horse trailers through creosoted, dusty roads at the whims of a transplanted New Jersey Irishman and his brood.
Anthony assures me there is no other truck in existence like this one, and my instinct is to respond of course there isn’t, but then I realize he is speaking about its appearance, the fact it is four-wheel drive and has the original tailgate and an aftermarket diamond plate rear bumper and brush guard attached to the frame through a customized grill. Because this thinly veiled posit that a 1962 Ford F100 is somehow metaphorical, well. That’s just silly.
[1]Sand gets everywhere, even in veins. Another blood line: Nicola Hage, a blue-eyed five foot ten inch Syrian, left modern-day Lebanon sometime in the early 1900’s with fifty dollars in his pocket, in search of a brother and the idea of America on his brain. He made his way first to Turkey and then to Le Havre, France, where on November 12th 1910 the twenty-one year old paid second-class stowage on the S.S. Chicago to New York City, watched his name entered into the Ellis Island registry ten days later, and then headed west, eventually finding himself in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home. What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push him west? Was it a condemnation; a serial reminder of repeated failures, of loves lost or stabbing epithets or miscommunications? Was it simply a thirst for adventure? A woman? Or was it a collective; the potential only men like him could see in the precious metal nimbus setting daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed west, a beckoning Tantalus drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun. I want my great-grandfather to have found his brother and whatever else he was looking for. I want to picture him in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots familiar, assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the deserts of his middle-east, a nirvanic look on his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new town, his face turning up to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”
[2] Or, “what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
[3] Though I purchased a used hood and two fenders from a tooth-deficient man in southern Tennessee, Anthony used them only to patch the original parts, and the truck remains essentially 100% in the original.
The Balkans in Pictures
Episode I: The 141 to Union Station
For most Americans living outside the east coast’s metropolitan areas, riding a train is an event. It is a luxury for those in surfeit of both time and money, and its inefficiency, especially in the vastness that is America left of the Mississippi, further relegates it to “vacation” status. There is a reason Disney’s monorail – an absolute bore of epic proportions – remains one of the most traveled rail systems in the world. If you are an American and you are on a train, then chances are you’re on vacation.
Mine, then, officially begins as I’m sitting on my backpack, fleece zipped up against the Baltimore chill on a Thursday morning, waiting for the 141 regional from BWI to DC’s Union Station while sizing up the Asian fellow next to me. He sits down on the bench, two shopping bags, a shoulder bag and wheeled overnighter beside him, and strokes a few black, wispy hairs hanging from his chin. Alan – his American name – is a Chinese MBA student in his first year at Penn State, and he’s returning from a Spring Break trip west where he visited LA, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, where he scored a pair of Timberlands at an outlet mall.
“How much do you think these cost,” he asks me. I offer up $60 and he responds by raising his eyebrows and gently fingering a small “Gore Tex” tag sewed into one of the seams. I do not bite, and stick with $60. “Eighty dollars” he says, and though I feign surprise, lips pushed out and mouth corners turned down, he has a bigger point to make.
“Do you know how much these cost in China?” I do not. “Two hundred dollars.” He then exposes the tag on the tongue’s interior, revealing the words “Made in China.” Alan laughs like this might be the funniest, most outrageous thing he’s ever heard.
A north-bound train approaches, interrupting Alan’s laughter, and he excuses himself as he stands up to take a picture of the oncoming engine. “My first American train,” he says, quickly snapping photos. He asks me to guess how many pictures he’s taken on his 5 day trip – Alan likes to make me guess things – and I err on what I think is the highside: “twelve hundred.” Alan pauses, then says “five thousand.” He follows with more raised eyebrows, sucking his tongue against his teeth in that Asian conversation filler that can indicate emphasis, assent, or the Chinese version of an American “um.”
After finding out I’m in the Army, Alan says he too was a Soldier, for ten years. He also says he was in “IT,” and I immediately peg Alan for a spy. I’ve been reading too much of The Atlantic lately, and am seeking adventure, so it is not a difficult leap for me to make. Alan doesn’t help matters when he opens his laptop to show me his vacation photos, his screensaver an SR-71 Blackbird flying over the Sierra Nevada’s. As any halfway decent spy, Alan must sense my shift in mood, and he explains away the rookie spy move with an “I like airplanes.” He asks me what he should do in DC, and I start into a list of museums and monuments he can see for free and over a short time period. The Smithsonian – there are eighteen, not counting the zoo – plus the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials, the Viet Nam vets memorial, the Korean, one of my favorites. Alan listens politely and then asks “how can I get into the Pentagon?” I quickly tell him he’s not allowed, but my Walter Mitty imagination subsides as he begins cranking through his vacation photos. The incredible tediousness of other people’s pictures spans cultural divides, I conclude, and I think that if Alan is a spy, he is either awful or exceptionally good. He realizes the pictures are boring as well (“these are kind of boring”), and I think that if Alan wasn’t trying to hack into my computer, we might just be friends. May we achieve peace by boring the snot out of each other with left clicks and mouse pads.
I leave Alan at Union Station, after first taking a few pictures of him with his camera, and exit out the west side of the building to DC Metro’s new bike station, a small but beautiful glass building that looks like the breaching back of the Loch Ness. I go inside to take a look, and am greeted by a guy sporting a shaved head and a ridiculously good Mark Twain mustache that parts to reveal less than perfect teeth but a great grin when I mention the sifaka Lemurs, two-pound circus freaks that run in loping strides, arms longer than their legs and held erect above their heads whenever they’re on the move. They leap between razor-edged spires in the Tsinghy de Bamarah nature reserve in northern Madagascar, where the bike worker has told me he just returned from two years in the Peace Corps doing “environmental stuff” – compost, gardening, water recycling – and he’s staying in DC to continue his efforts. I wonder how hard it is to get to Madagascar, but then he’s pulled away by customers, and I suspect our conversation is as good as it’s going to get anyway. Besides, I can see the Irish Times directly over his left shoulder, and with a day to kill, it is calling to me.
The permanently sticky table-topped Irish Times is what an American dive bar should be: sedate, local, cheap and decidedly irreverent. Tacked up around the bar are what must be over a thousand patches from fire and police departments around the country, and though there is Guinness on tap, the only top-shelf liquor I spy is a dust-covered bottle of Tanqueray. The chalkboard specials are Meatloaf, $10.95; Cold Meatloaf, $8.95. I wonder if it will be free if I wait around until Monday. An oil painting of John Wayne in an Indian chief’s headdress and a Warhol knockoff of Margaret Thatcher acknowledging a crowd, Crime Wave scrawled above the painting, frame a television, where Georgetown is about to beat Syracuse in the Big East tournament, and the heated rivalry explains the gathered Thursday afternoon crowd. It is equal parts older drunk white guy and late-twenty yuppie black guys (Georgetown University: 6% black; Georgetown Hoyas basketball team: 82% black), but Syracuse is Syracuse and beating them brings many a DC foe together.
A DC dive bar is as good a start to a trip as anywhere else, but the next 72 hours do their best to dampen my spirit. I am flying on the cheap – free military rotators to Germany, and maybe Kosovo if I am lucky enough to time them right – and I am getting what I pay for. An eight and a half hour flight on a C-17, sitting upright on cargo-strap jump seats and facing south the entire time while my plane flies east; seven hours of German rigidity while I unsuccessfully attempt to get a cash advance on my credit card, sans a pin number; connecting commercial flights in Frankfurt and Zürich, where my lack of sleep and irritability get the best of me and I quickly tire of the uniformly cheap leather-jacketed, hair-metal band coiffured European youth. My imagination, too, kicks in, and I suspect they are all heavies for second-rate Russian mobsters. I don’t fear pleather-wearing western european youth, but I do Russian mobsters, second-rate or otherwise, and I put my nose back into my book.
Finally: a two am arrival in Thessolinki, Greece. The town was named for Alexander’s half-sister, and he himself was born near here, prior to making almost all the known world his own. Here too, I start my own adventure, mine north and west for ten days rather than east for ten years. There are still arguments as to what incessant need drove Alexander to leave his home in Macedon, where he stood to inherit a kingdom and a lifetime of luxury. Perhaps it was a determination to prove himself worthy to his father, King Phillip II; perhaps a need to justify his mother’s explanation of his birth as the product of the midnight visit of a God serpent. Regardless, I find common ground in the need to explore, the need to experience life in order to justify it, the need for anonymity in an effort to somehow improve upon the familiar.
Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo
Thessaloniki, Greece
Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially. I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there. Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station. He smiles and gives half a head nod. I am not confident.
“Train station?,” I ask again. He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod. I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?” Again, same response. Eff it; it’s late and I am tired. I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.
For the first ten minutes, I am alone. But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show. There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty. Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag. It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next. The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness. Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.
It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder. It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open. Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.
“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows. He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”
“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson. “This is Macedonia.”
Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth. Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve. The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it. I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.
“Yugoslavia?,” I ask. He answers yes.
And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”
“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses. “Yugoslavia.”
I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”
I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers. I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew. I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs. I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else. A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights. There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”
Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years. He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars. A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.” He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is. I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267. He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American. I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry. Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me. I am on my way.
**************
I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia. The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains. An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje. It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in. But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.
I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats. I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun. A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it. He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process. He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority. I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out. At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.
Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi. He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years. I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city. He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually. This is, I think, a good beginning.