Tag: road trips

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High Desert, Open Road

Reno to Buckeye Creek

The ragged wagon train traveled east from Silver Mountain city, two or three families at the limits of patience and purse, turned away from Jacob Marklee’s toll bridge for lack of funds. Instead, they followed a double-rutted track winding down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, a decade’s worth of wooden wheels tamping down and doubling an older single-track trail cleaved by iron-shoed horses and leather-booted trappers and over-weighted prospectors. And it, in turn, surely followed paths worn by thousands of years’ worth of Washoe and Numu peoples and, for millennia before that, mule deer and elk and moose and whatever other giant mammals descended the big mountains in the winter, leaving the sugar pines and junipers to find warmth and water amongst the aspens and cottonwoods and sagebrush of the high desert below.

Or at least this is how I imagine it, as I pump my brakes on the steep descent of Highway 89 from modern-day Markleeville – population 201, an increase of 13 humans (presumably) from a decade earlier – for Highway 395 southbound, paralleling the shallow West Walker River and leading to my next stop in Bridgeport, California. Highways of man and beast have always led to water, and surely always will, no more so than in the arid, mountain deserts of the Great Basin. And as much as I romanticize hearing the imaginary grind of wagon wheels on sedimentary desert rock, of feeling the pull and stress and sweat of oxen through leather reins in my hands, I also know no pioneer ever experienced the liberation of the open road, windows rolled down, left forearm burned, hand surfing the airstream like a backseated-child while the poetry of John Prine serenades through crackling speakers. I drive the switchbacks, the smell of overheated brakes intermixing with residual brushfire smoke and the inimitable aroma of wet sagebrush: There is nothing more nostalgic than the smell of the Nevada desert after a rain. No mind that I’m technically in California; the pull of my youth does not recognize mere political borders.

The last 180-degree bend in the road parallels a miniature altiplano, a broad, flat plain of scrub brush lazily funneling between two sheer, barren ranges, a glacial ghost. I can see for miles, a cloudless blue sky interrupted to the south only by the ever-soaring turkey vulture, an animal with a sense of smell so keen that gas companies unintentionally stumbled upon them as collaborators: Have a leak in your pipeline in the middle of the desert? No worries, look for the congregating buzzards – the chemical additive included in natural gas smells like decomposing flesh to a scavenger. A good reminder, I think, that hidden utility lies in us all. I pull over at the bottom of the hill to ease my brakes and to write a note – the image of “glacial ghosts”, I think, is a good one, and I don’t want to forget it – and see a jackrabbit duck under a sagebrush as an overhead vulture floats by, its shadow diving and climbing on the varied surfaces, a black flag unfurling.

Bridgeport Valley & Sawtooth Range

I follow Highway 395 to Bridgeport, a small town of alfalfa farmers and cattle ranchers and upper-middle class Bay Area alums who have recognized the value of clean streets and starred skies. And, also, the value in relocating to a new community but still in your own state, where the locals are less apt to complain about the “goddam Californians” moving to town and jacking up property values. I take Twin Lakes Road from 395 to Buckeye Creek where I will camp for the night, asphalt splitting in two the Hunewill dude ranch, both sides of the road containing cattle and horses, and tourists sentimental for less contentious times. I slow my truck as two men on horseback, wearing the weathered felt hats of working cowboys, no doubt rakishly handsome and impossibly polite, casually herd a cow and calf towards an open corral, the Sawtooth Range of Yosemite lurking like a Hollywood backdrop. Somewhere – everywhere, perhaps – near the tops of those mountains is my Tree of Life, spring snowmelt that finds its way east down the Sierra Nevadas, through creeks and valleys to the East Walker River, then joining the West, then through my childhood village of Yerington, Nevada, eventually dumping into Walker Lake. If it makes it there. Water in the Nevada desert is more precious than the state’s prolific haul of silver and gold, and the takings of men upriver, for hay and garlic and onions and cattle, has left Walker Lake 180 feet lower than before we non-indigenous decided the looming, people-eating Sierra Nevadas were simply too big to cross, and that this valley right here would do just fine.

I arrive at Buckeye Creek campground and am alone. The post-Fourth of July crowd is gone by Tuesday morning, though the detritus remains, waste overflowing bear-proof bins. I park my truck far from the sight and smell of the trash and restrooms – I’d make a poor gas-leak inspecting buzzard – and sit down on a rock. Then I listen: the ticking of my cooling-down truck engine. A slight breeze from an indecisive direction. White noise from the creek below me. A chirp. No, a peep. Condensed. Or abbreviated, like a short exhale from a squeaky toy. From my periphery I see the source, an athletic flash of movement from a camouflaged chipmunk, an animal so invariably small and cute that I am sure they must all die in adolescence. At first there is one. It is curious, and brave, though that is perhaps boosted by the startling quickness of this animal; I try to take pictures with my cell phone but it moves so fast the image is blurred beyond recognition.

Do not be lulled. They’re meateaters.

I unwisely throw an almond in its direction, and before the chipmunk can claim it two more appear from the edges of my campsite. They barrel into the first chipmunk, the three of them rolling around like a cartoon dustup, a victor emerging to take the nut into its hands, as big as a football to a child. And now there are more. Perhaps ten of them; they dart into and out of my vision one at a time, distracting me, sniffing at my backpack, the wheels of my truck, the picnic bench. I feel one brush against my bare left foot as I watch another in the opposite direction; they are probing me, testing my defenses like Zulu warriors at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and I hope I am Lt. Bromhead in this reenactment and not Private Williams.

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Life on the Lincoln Highway/The Fourth Street Project

Carl Graham Fisher, the astigmatic speed-freak credited with envisioning the first trans-continental road – the Lincoln Highway – may not have ever stepped foot in Nevada, but his life mirrors the boom-or-bust history of the Silver State. Born in Indiana, Fisher’s father left him when he was young, causing Fisher to quit school early to help support his family. He proved adept at the task, and revealed himself to be a remarkable inventor, investor, and showman. By the age of 50 he was worth over $100 million and famous for his promotional stunts, which involved, among other things, dropping a car from a hot air balloon and then racing it back to town (the dropped car was engine-less; he drove a prepositioned, perfectly good car back); riding a bicycle off the roof of a building; and enlisting a baby elephant, frocked in a Fisher-project sandwich board, to caddy for a vacationing President-elect Warren G. Harding. Like the history of Nevada, Fisher’s fortunes rose and fell, and he was destitute near the end of his life, surely the result of the Great Depression, but probably the result of his whims as well. His then ex-wife, whom he met and married when he was engaged to another, said he was all speed and that his millions were simply incidental – “he just liked to see the dirt fly.”

In 1913 the thirty-nine year old Fisher conceived of the Lincoln Highway, eventually labeled Highway 40 and now known as Interstate 80, and though through much of the country her asphalt is laid within a few miles of Fisher’s original trace, for 8.6 miles in Reno the Lincoln Highway still resides, incognito, as Fourth Street. All of American History moves east to west, and so it does here as well: the oldest stretch of the original Lincoln Highway begins somewhere around the very modern Rail City Carwash; her terminus a parking lot in Verdi on the other side of railroad tracks with an elevated view of an abandoned, vandalized trailer and a short walk through a sandy field to the Truckee River. Here I find two fly fishermen, retired, going home to Santa Cruz with nothing more than a nibble or two. The older man tells me that he remembers driving Highway 40 as a kid, staring out the window from the backseat of his father’s car at the desert, then the motels and bars, then more desert. I tell him the buildings probably haven’t changed much but keep to myself my suspicions that the road seems to be about as lucky as he is. Fourth Street, I think, could use a nibble. Or two.

Three hours earlier I am the first breakfast customer of the day at Los Compadres; on the way out I watch as an industrial sized garbage dumpster births an old woman. We lock eyes and she, sheepishly and after a pause, says “I was talking to the bird.” I ask if it answered; she smiles and continues her day. I momentarily consider following her rather than Carl Fisher’s aspirations, but instead walk across the street to inspect the artwork on the Desert Sunset bar. The owner, huge and tank-topped and holding back a pit bull with a giant metal chain the size used to tow cars, emerges from the motel next door. He’s gregarious and proud of his business, and we talk about the other hotels on Highway 40.

A sign on the door at Shorty’s tells me that ROADHOUSE TOM’S COATRUN Has Moved to the Wonder Bar; I contemplate their frivolous use of capital letters but quickly resolve it in Shorty’s favor, as I have a weakness for the semi-colon and who am I to judge. An Indian – the sub-continent type, not the native – at the desk of the Hi Way 40 Motel lets me park for free while I take pictures; the woman at the In-Town Motel does as well, reluctantly and only after scolding me for texting while I was turning into her parking lot (guilty). I am sized up by a prostitute near the bus station; I discuss the tragic beauty of the mosaic entryway of the N.C.O. Railroad Depot, soiled by urine and spray paint, with a man sporting a neck tattoo and who I think is going to ask me for money but instead just stands and stares with me; I pause from picture taking at Abby’s Hwy 40 to let a man, severely overweight, pass by in his wheelchair. He moves not by pushing the wheels with his hands, but by shuffling his feet slowly forward, one never fully extending beyond the other. For three blocks I am enchanted by a middle-aged Hispanic man’s custom bicycle. It has thick wheels and extended handle bars and a beautiful silver eagle mounted on the head stem. The bike is painted the colors of the Mexican flag, and I tell the rider – booted, cuffed denim jeans, snapped-to-the-top black satin jacket with matching slicked back hair and dark sunglasses – that his bike is badass. He says thank you.

The west end of Fourth Street is no more optimistic, but the fornlorn seems to have dispersed a bit. There is an artist’s motel, seemingly in business but without a car or person in the parking lot; a brief stretch of industrial, the kind built big and cheap and windowless and populated with gymnastic centers and beer distributors; then a huge, abandoned wooden riverfront resort complex, fence locked and without any indication of what it once was. Then, nothing. A stretch of road with high desert and retaining wall on the right and a rolling river with trees in foliage the colors of fading sunshine and leaking chlorophyll on the left. This, I think, is what must have driven Carl Fisher’s dream, and the dream of Highway 40 and is maybe even what drives someone’s dream on the other end of Fourth Street. Maybe the dreams of a woman who talks to birds.

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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Call to Macchiato


Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/March 16, 2007

It’s 5:15 am and I’m woken by the call to prayer being blasted outside my window. Though spoken in Amharic – a language uniquely Ethiopian – it sounds remarkably similar to a Native American chant as I fade in and out of sleep. My Malarone-inspired dreams take me out of Addis Ababa and back to the Nevada desert where I sit and watch a tribal counsel quickly go from group chant to an argument over one guy’s Marine Corps jacket. This dream is only slightly less bizarre than the one I had the night before where Lisa Bonet and I were firmly entrenched in a life of domestic wedded bliss. But that’s for another time – the call to prayer has gotten louder – and so I’m awake for my first full day in Addis Ababa.

This is the poorest country I’ve ever been to. At 6:45 a.m. our part of the city was already awake and moving, and the early sun filtered through the mix of dust and pollution gave a look of a war-torn country. Beggars are everywhere, matched in numbers by the homeless lined in neat rows along the sidewalk, still sleeping. There are piles of garbage scavenged over by mangy dogs, and sewage drains double, apparently, as toilets. But the city is alive and well, and it has all the characteristics of fast-paced city life. There are 7 million people in Addis and its suburbs, and it seems like most of them are out walking. The taxis are mini-busses, and they pull over toward the sidewalk at designated stops, slowing enough to allow the guy hanging out the window to scream the destination to no one in particular. You can hear them coming and going, bus after bus driving down the road with a man standing outside the passenger window like your dog letting his ears flap in the breeze. The streets are lined with stores, shop after shop selling car batteries, then shop after shop selling rebar, then shop after shop selling tires – it continues on and on. My instinct says they need a mini-mall, but then there would be no reason to ever leave your own neighborhood, thusly losing your connection with the rest of the city.

Ethiopia is the home of coffee, and they serve the best macchiatos I’ve ever had. Mark and I had four of them (for less than a dollar) while we stood outside on the street, watching daily life go by. I left my video camera running and almost every child that walked by made a face or smiled. This country has over four million orphans, and many of them seem to be on the street (part of this trip is to help some orphanages, so more on that later). We had dinner at the “expensive” western restaurant, which had average food but was remarkably nice and definitely western, replete with the ubiquitous older white male escorting the younger, really really hot brown girl (I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been).

One story before I end: At dinner I met a friend of Mark’s, an Ethiopian woman who runs one of the orphanages. She’s actually from the northern part of Ethiopia, an area named Tigray, and left this country when she was eleven years old due to a civil war. She and her cousins (one parent died, and the other stayed behind) walked to Sudan (she doesn’t remember the distance, only that it took a few months) and then lived in Khartoum with an uncle and several other relatives in a single dirt-floored room. In Sudan, she was treated as a second-class citizen until she left, at 17, to go to Boston. She had never been to America, spoke no English, and had experienced neither electricity nor running water – let alone boarded an airplane and flown across the world. She taught herself English, did well enough in school to get a scholarship to a university where she ran track, and came back here to Ethiopia to help the children of this country. It’s an incredible story, but it’s commonplace here (at least up to the fly to America part).

More later – I wanted to send some quick thoughts – but it’s 5:45 here and time for a macchiato.

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Sudanese Refugees Got No Game

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/ March 20, 2007

Can you get AIDS if you rub your eyes after you’ve handled a snot-nosed HIV-positive two year old? And is there irony in orphaned Ethiopian girls wearing t-shirts with the words FEELGIRL emblazoned across the front? Today was powerful, so I have to lead with sarcasm while I absorb it all.

My days overseas usually start with a hangover, but today started with a trip to Mother Theresa’s AIDS orphanage in Addis Ababa, where Sister Maria (she didn’t even know the words to “How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria”, the silly nun) has taken care of thousands of kids over the last ten years. She, her support staff and 400 kids – all HIV positive, with a few having full blown AIDS – live in an incredibly clean compound where the kids receive schooling, lots of attention, and medical care (they now get ARVs, and only four children died last year). Sister Maria runs the place like, well, a Catholic nun, and I witnessed her order three loan officers, there to check her books, to “not leave without making a donation.” We visited two other orphanages of varying quality, and were served macchiatos at each – I think I had seven today, and am clearly subsidizing my beer intake by sucking down as much caffeine as possible. The children are polite and well behaved, and seem much like kids anywhere, with the exception of the very young ones – they practically attacked me and the other males in the group. Orphanage staff is almost exclusively female, and toddlers, it seems, sometimes want to be held by men. I spend most of the day conflicted. Conflicted because I’m white; conflicted because I am, relatively, loaded; conflicted because I’m a foreigner (“forengee“); conflicted because trips like the one I’m on are almost always faith-based (“Jesus lovers,” I call them (me?), though the Ethiopians spell Jesus with a “G.” My name, of course, is Gay); conflicted because I’m not a Jesus-lover. The people with whom I’m traveling are incredibly kind, motivated, and genuinely concerned about these kids, and are clearly moved by a higher power. But I remember what Townes Van Zandt said about being a guitar player: if you truly want to be one, then that’s all you can be. You have to be willing to give up money, security, livelihood, a job – all the cholesterol in your life preventing you from mastering a blues scale.

So if you truly want to live your life for Jesus, then shouldn’t you do nothing else but live it? We roll into the orphanage, hold some kids, drop off some soccer balls, then roll back out for a post hand-sanitized macchiato. Does it really matter? Does it make a difference? Mull it over along with me.

I skipped the last stop of the day, a tour of the “Institute for the Destitute and Dying,” opting instead for a walk with a friend through the alleys of the Kaliti neighborhood. Kids literally run the streets, most in flip-flops, some barefoot, the older ones in better shoes and school uniforms. I saw a Britney Spears poster; an ad for Tupac’s latest (I think, I’ve lost track); tailors sitting outside, running old-school Singers; VW mini-vans and motorcycles flying through the streets (I’ve cursed exactly once on this trip – I swear – and it was when a motorcycle swerved to pretend to hit me. I yelled out “fucker,” which I immediately regretted after realizing the number of little kids constantly following us). We stopped at a gate reading Jesuit Refugee Service Center, and as it opened to let a car enter, I witnessed the most delightful image I’ve seen thus far – Sudanese refugees playing basketball. They were tall, lanky, incredibly dark, and awful at hoops. I mimed my 20% accurate set shot, and a young kid named Ricard waved us in. Matt and I spent the next hour at 7700 feet running up and down a concrete court with bent, net-less hoops; me on a belly full of pizza and macchiato trying to set picks on 6’8″ 130-pound Sudanese teenagers running from who knows what.

Africa is growing on me.

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Thank You for Being a Goofy White Guy

Somewhere between Gulu and Jinja, Uganda/March 29, 2007

 I haven’t shaved in two weeks, I’m wearing my underwear inside-out for the third day in a row, and today is, at last, Africa hot. I’m in Uganda on the road from Gulu to Jinja and feeling totally irrelevant. I wish I could sufficiently describe to you the contrasts I’ve experienced since I wrote you last. This place is a cold-water blast of visual, emotional, and tactile sensations unlike anything I imagined. Bats as big as place mats, some charred and crispy, hanging from electrical wires like tangled kites; dirt-poor people always dressed immaculately; stern faces on Rwandan farmers that light up when you wave to them; kids in strikingly bright colored school uniforms, almost exclusively barefoot (especially in the country); and some of the coolest greetings you’ll ever see. Ethiopians shake hands and then touch their right shoulders together. Rwandans wave with two hands, raised up about shoulder level, smiles as big as their faces. Ugandans shake hands like I will when I meet Charles Barkley: first the standard white guy handshake, hold it briefly, then switch to the overhand so only thumbs are interlocked – again, hold it briefly – then back to the standard white guy shake. Eye contact throughout is mandatory.

I came here expecting to have my life changed, but it didn’t take long to realize that expectation was based on naivety and 30-minute clips from the National Geographic Channel. Africa is everything you imagine it might be and nothing like you think. In Rwanda I visited a church where in 1994 over 5,000 civilians – mostly women and children – were massacred by grenades, rifles, machetes, arrows and stones, all victims of a genocide that killed over 800,000 people in about 90 days. They came to the church seeking shelter, and when threatened refused to leave. Now their skulls are stacked neatly in rows in the rear of the church, while most of the remaining bones are thrown together into a giant pile under a dirty tarp. Just a few miles up the road from the church, in a huge grassy open meadow at the foot of an active volcano, we played soccer with about 100 orphans. They slipped in cow shit and laughed like any child should, calling us “barbaro” (it means “buffalo;” they apparently found our aggressive style of play a bit excessive) and even more hilarious, “freak.” A teenager named Fierce who was anything but scored after executing a sweet juke, to the delight of everyone, causing the other 99 to break into song.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful than Rwanda, made all the more shocking when you remember this is the environment that produced “short sleeves” – cutting off arms above the elbows – and “long sleeves” – cutting off arms at the wrist. The government is still prosecuting participants in the genocide, using “gacaca” (ga-cha-cha) courts to allow the victims to determine the sentences of those who plead or are found guilty. Remarkably, most are given lengthy community service sentences rather than jail time. Could you look at someone every day, knowing they stole your car? What if instead they hacked off your brother’s limbs? Or killed your parents? Somehow this country seems to be moving on.

In Uganda I visited an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camp where I witnessed first-hand evidence supporting the stat that about 85% of all of Northern Uganda lives in these camps, and that Uganda is the youngest country in the world – they have an average age of 16. Because of a 20-year war between a rebel group (the Lord’s Resistance Army) and the government, hundreds of thousands of farmers have been displaced from their land, living instead in small, circular huts.

Parentless children are the most visible effect of the war. Most of the adults have been either killed or displaced by AIDS and/or the war, and as a result the kids are stacked into schools and orphanages (and the IDP camps) like cordwood. They seem far happier than anything I’ve seen in America. There are many westerners here doing many great things, but if you have time, check out www.invisiblechildren.com – it will sadden, humble, and inspire you. Because the LRA was essentially abducting children from their homes during the night and forcing them to fight and kill in the rebel army, thousands of kids started walking from their homes at dusk to come together to sleep in the city. They arrived at night, thousands of them, some having walked several miles just to avoid being abducted. They slept together, arms and legs intertwined like piles and piles of puppies, and then walked back home the next morning to either work or go to school. Three twenty-somethings from California captured their story on film and started a movement to get the kids back into the regular folds of society. Today they are helping to run a boarding school that houses over 1400 hundred students, about 80% of which are orphans. Until a new dorm is completed, girls live 50 to a room – there are over 400 of them living in two buildings, each about 150’ by 50’. Though they see white people – or “muzungu,” which essentially translates to “running around in circles” – on a daily basis, they rarely see white children, and a six-year old blonde girl on our trip was given minor celebrity status. Goofy white guys, apparently, cause less of a stir. People in Uganda say “thank you” an awful lot – thank you for walking today, thank you for wearing shoes, thank you for cleaning up your part of the sidewalk. I tried a “thank you for doing your homework,” but was met only with giggles and points.

My initial worries about being the sole agnostic amongst a sea of believers were totally unfounded, and I had some amazing conversations about the places we occupy in this world. On top of that, it turns out trying to introduce Jesus to Africa is a lot like trying to introduce soccer to South America – it’s already here, in full form. If anything, it was almost an afterthought. Far more interesting is some of the great t-shirts I’ve seen: “Jesus First, Then Comes Soccer”; “The Man” (arrow pointing upwards), “The Legend” (arrow pointing downwards); “Ann Arbor is a Whore” (couldn’t tell if it was a Michigan State or Ohio State shirt); and my favorite, “Grandma To Be” (on about a 25 year old dude).

So that’s it. No dramatic ending, other than I rafted Class V rapids on the Nile today – no crocs, but lots of spills. Hope to see you sometime soon.

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The Little Sister Interlude

Chicago, Illinois/August 9, 2001

My fourteen year-old sister occupies the passenger seat next to me. My traveling companion for the next nine days, she is five feet eight inches of legs and eyeballs, one hundred per cent self-assuredness. My plan is to mold her, to show her parts of the country she has never seen, to show her the things she can have if she continues to do the things she is doing. I will show her cities, art, monuments, untamed wilderness. I will show her baseball. I will show her things that come with an education, with sophistication, with worldliness. I will impress her with my knowledge of all things not small-town Nevada. I will prepare her for life.

We drive out of Denver, and I am already a little cautious. A college friend has spoken of strippers and Amsterdam hash bars. I want her to be worldly, but this is too much! Does she know what a stripper is? Does she know they are all “working their way through college,” but that none have actually ever graduated? Does she know many have suffered abuse of some sort during their childhood, and that their own children are also likely to be affected? I want to tell her these things, but then I wonder if she’ll ask me how much money they make. She has been asking me this question with regards to my friends and their professions. If she asks, I must answer honestly. She is mature, going into high school, and she deserves the truth.

“A good Las Vegas stripper,” I would answer, “can make six figures, and working just half the year. However, benefits are pretty much non-existent. Unless, of course, you’re looking for good coke.” Six figures for a half year’s work, and free drugs? This sounds pretty good to me. I opt not to broach the stripper and Amsterdam issue. I instead worry about her becoming a stripper. I worry about her going to college and having a bad sexual experience. I worry about her getting accidentally pregnant and ruining her young life. This is a valid concern. My family breeds like it’s free sex at a polygamy festival. I want to ensure my little sister is aware of the breeding process. I want her to know that contraception is spelled with a “tra” in the middle of it. I want her to be prepared.“So Erin,” I ask, “whadda ya hear about the fallopian tube?” She shrieks. She brings her legs up to her chest, leans away from me, curls into a fetal position. Her hands cover her ears. “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” she says. I suspect she doesn’t want to talk about this. “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS,” she says. She is fourteen. We drive on.

At Mt. Rushmore, we take a gondola ride to an elevated view of the monument. From our perspective, only three presidents are visible. “I thought there were four,” she says. I tell her they take one down every other month to give it a good cleaning. She eyes me suspiciously. At the foot of the monument itself, she sees that there actually are four. “Ha!” She says. “I told you. What are their names?” I can see she doesn’t know. “The left one,” I say, “is Samuel L. Jackson. Then John Elway, Will Ferrell, and George W. Bush.” She does not believe me. “You’re such a liar!” she says. “The one with the beard is Abraham Lincoln.” She is fourteen.

We drive through the great expanse that is South Dakota. I want her to look around, to absorb the Great Plains and all of its history. I want her to know the misfortune of the millions of Native Americans at the hands of white settlers and the United States Army. I want her to know about the great bison herds. I continue to point things out to her. Laura Ingall Wilder’s childhood home. The Badlands. The acres and acres of wheat and corn. At each of my observations, she gives me a token “uh-huh,” barely looking up from her Nintendo Game-boy. I am exasperated. “Erin,” I finally say. “I want to know what you think about all of this. Look around you! This is America! What do you say?” She stares at me, inquisitively. Reflectively. “I think,” she says, “you pick your nose almost as much as Kimberley.” She is, I remind myself, fourteen.

In a restaurant in South Dakota, a young male takes our order. After he leaves, Erin states that she believes he is gay. “Erin!” I furrow my brow and drop my voice an octave. “Why do you think that?” “Because,” she says, “he has a lisp. And his finger nails are long and polished.” I begin: “Do you know anyone who is gay? Have you ever met a gay man?” She admits she has not. “Then you are basing your opinion on stereotypes acquired from television and movies,” I state. “You are basing your opinion on misperception, and your generalization perpetuates the incorrect and unfair portrayal of gay men. Until you have solid knowledge based on first-hand experiences acquired over time, you are only showing your ignorance by making such a statement.” She is sufficiently embarrassed. I have shown her the path to open-mindedness.

In Chicago, we go to a party given for a friend and her peers, graduates of a PhD program for clinical psychology. The host of the party is also my friend’s mentor and supervisor. My friend tells us her mentor is sort of peculiar, but very nice and entertaining. He is also, she says, gay. He greets us at the door. Erin stands behind me, obviously curious to meet her first gay man. Bernie is slender, with slightly balding hair slicked down on top of his head. He has a pencil-thin mustache, and wears a gray polo tucked into his belted black slacks. His shoes are highly polished. His partner is an Austrian named Hans. Bernie’s fingernails are long and polished, and Bernie has, of course, a lisp. It is all Erin can do to contain herself. She is throwing me kidney shots, each one a connecting “I told you so!” She does not punch like a fourteen year-old.

Our trip together is over. Erin begins high school on Monday. She is on the dance team, she is in Honors English Composition, she is her freshman class president. Still, I find myself worrying about her. We drive together to the airport, silently. I hope that she has had a good time, that she has learned something new, that she has seen what can be hers if she keeps doing the things she is doing. In the end, however, it is I that am taught. It is I that am impressed. It is I that worry that I annoyed her too much, that I embarrassed her. I think she is a superstar, and I tell her so. She looks me in the eye, pauses, and says “thank you.” Clearly, confidently, appreciatively.

I miss her already.