Endings and transitions

With the road trip over, Lover's Lanes is going to update a lot less frequently. I did collect one love story that I hope to get typed up soon, but Blackbird has taken her last cross-country flight for a while. It's back to LiveJournal for a while with me! But first, this trip deserves an epilogue.

The night before I set out, I wrote this: "I don't know what's going to happen -- whether this will be one of the best or worst times of my life, or what kind of meaning it will turn out to have, or if it might turn out to have no meaning. I don't know. But that's the point."

Now that I do know what happened -- well, more or less -- I have the benefit of hindsight. These weeks fell squarely into the "best times" category. Viewed episodically, most of my time on the road ranged from average to fantastic. I had my share of hours, evenings, and even days of relative depression, but with so little of the mundane world to get in the way, I found it easier to transmute sadness into lessons and even pride. ("So I'm feeling threatened by Winnemucca, Nevada? Wow, that means I must be in Winnemucca, Nevada. What the hell kind of craziness made this possible? Wait, I got here by myself? Maybe I do have what it takes to step into a casino, then...")

Meaning is a trickier question. I can say Lover's Lanes was meaningless, or that it taught me about the importance of self-reliance or friendship or motion, or that it made me more of an American or an adult or a man. But the proof of any of those "meanings" is in the pudding. If I now return to my old routines with my old attitudes, Lover's Lanes was just an unusual vacation. And maybe that would be fine with someone else. But it's not fine with me.

The day before yesterday I applied to the University of South Florida's library science degree program. If they accept me, then next year I'll begin working towards an MLS. I've talked to a number of librarians and haven't heard one yet say "this is an awful job," or "I made some bad choices," or even "meh, it's a living." Is this the right job for me? Could it even be a career? I don't have the first idea, but I do know that by the end of the year I will have been in the business of tutoring for about as long as I was in college, and that alarms me. Tutoring was an experiment, an important and lucrative one, but it's an experiment that got out of hand. It's time to recork that particular test tube and try the next one. It's a big lab, after all, and time flies!

Lover's Index

Nights on road: 46
Miles driven (approx): 9,900
Maximum altitude (ft): 10,600
Maximum depth (ft): 1,120
Pictures snapped: 867
Hot girls cuddled with: 2
Distinct cities slept in: 29
Distinct states and provinces passed through: 24
Distinct countries visited: 3, counting the West Coast
Cars ridden in: 7
Mechanical breakdowns overcome: 0
Emotional breakdowns overcome: a few
Cats petted: 7
Birds hoisted: 6
Foxes bought: 1
Hotels stayed at: 15
Bank account impact: none of your business
iPod usage (hrs, approx): 100
Audiobooks consumed: 4
Blog entries through July: 102
Word count through July: 55,536
Cost of a book self-published through Lulu.com: $5.76
Old friends seen: 14
New friends made: 11
Cities I can see myself living in: 6
Cities I would never go back to: 0

Nagareru mama, sekai wo hashiru

I'm ho-ome!

And it's an extraordinarily complex feeling. One of the most textured I've experienced. It doesn't quite fit into the rubric of happy or sad, relieved or disappointed, though all of those are facets of the feeling. A few things I want to write down before I shower, because showers are second only to good nights' sleeps in tempering our emotions, and I don't want to temper this one before I record it.

I'm relieved, of course. I've lived in this house all my life; I grew up in the room where I'm typing this post. This is not a hotel or someone else's house. I don't have to set up my laptop and fiddle with wireless networks. I don't have to find out whether the water is potable. I don't have to appraise the bathtub or curtains for adequacy. I don't have to fold out a bed or toss out the sleeping bag, nor test the mattress to see if it's safe to fall onto. I don't have to find an unobtrusive corner to empty my pockets on. I don't have to figure out where "gratitude" lies on the continuum from passive to active with respect to my current host. (Well, maybe a little.) The space I'm in is made for me to live in, and that is a relief.

I'm baffled, because although I spent forty-six nights on the road -- which felt like twice as long, three times, to the point where I can hardly remember what I was doing the last time I was in Fort Myers and look around my room with perplexity at what all these things are doing here -- the memory of the journey is already fading away like a dream. This old familiar place, so dense with memories itself, is drawing me back into that life and away from this one. Could it really have happened? Can I really have driven from here to Vancouver and back? It seems more likely I made it all up and spent the last forty-six nights zoning out on the Internet like usual. And with that thought comes a sense of great loss which I hope washes away in the shower, because it's so important to me not to forget what I did and all it meant.

I'm disgruntled, because my parents are both exhausted and couldn't give me the king's welcome that on some level I wanted. Mom is recovering from acute appendicitis and the ensuing surgery; she just got home from the hospital yesterday and is hardly walking, much less jumping up and down with excitement. Dad has been doing all the legwork involved in ferrying Mom and Grandma (who developed a carcinoma on her nose) to and from various doctors and doing all the chores that the ladies couldn't attend to, all on a bum foot with a six-month case of tendinitis and an artificial hip that needs replacing. For them, my being home is one more in a series of stressful events; they took it pretty much in stride, because they didn't have the energy to do anything else. And the whole place feels somehow bleached, like it was left in the sun too long and faded away into dotage while I was gone. I'm not sure the person I was yesterday fits into the place I'm in today. See also: Heraclitus, river of.

And perhaps above all I'm wondering where my closure is. You would think that finishing a journey would leave you with a sense of accomplishment, a tome to close and file in your mind's library. But no, I still feel like I might have to leave for another town tomorrow. Maybe it's just force of habit at this point, thinking "where next?" and "what now?" as I have most nights for the last month and a half. But I have the sinking feeling that it's not that: that I'm not feeling closure because I haven't left the trip closed. The roads may have come full circle, but the journey is not over and never will be until, perhaps, I die or go mad. There is so much left to do. I have an appointment with my shrink tomorrow; I need to get Blackbird's oil changed; my suitcases need unpacking; I need to call about our stove being broken; and I have a list of people banging down my door for tutoring now that I'm back in town, which will lead to further journeys, these down roads I've already wandered and am not really looking forward to treading yet again. I'm coming to the conclusion that no matter how many times one asks "Am I done yet?", the answer is always "No." Sometimes I'm in the mood to find that beautiful.

A last hurrah

My drive today took me back to Eustis, north of Orlando. For only the second time this trip, I revisited a town -- the first was Seattle -- and for the second time I spent the evening hanging out with Alex (my Floridian friend from the Utena forum, who again is not to be confused with my brother Alex in Charlotte, my college friend Alexis in Seattle, or my new friend Aleksa in Chicago).

The drive, as so often happens, was not very interesting. It was marked by my final admission of defeat in the struggle to keep Zhuge Liang attached to the dashboard. (For those of you who read only periodically, Zhuge Liang is my GPS; I am not keeping an actual Chinese tactician attached to my dashboard. Or anything else, for that matter, but I'm getting to that.) The sticky disc the GPS came with gave out way back at Lake Tahoe. I'd been using double-sided tape to keep it mounted, replacing the tape periodically as the sun's heat melted the adhesive, but as both the GPS and the dash became increasingly marked up, the tape became less and less useful. Finally, I believe in Indianapolis, I decided to try Velcro. This turned out not to be such a great idea; the Velcro did not stick any better than the tape had, but its residue is much harder to remove. So with only a couple days to go, I threw up my hands and have been riding with Zhuge Liang perched in the front seat with my foxes. Sometimes you have to know when to say when.

Anyway, as I was trying to say, interstate driving is boring, especially in the South, where the road is flanked by generic trees and you can tell this is not an actual forest: you're not seeing landscape, just landscaping. So I listened to some NPR, cued up my favorite traveling songs, and sang along to lunch in Jacksonville and at last to Alex's house in Eustis. Here, after other nocturnal activities -- the 1984 edition of Trivial Pursuit at Olivia's Cafe (where it turns out Edgar Cayce is the right answer to every question), dinner at the Mason Jar, and watching Perfect Blue, to name a few -- we went out on Alex's porch to look for lacewings. We didn't find any, but we did discover the praying mantis. I mean that in the same sense that Columbus discovered America -- it may not have been new to other people, but it was new to him -- and the emotional content was the same as if we had never known such a thing existed. We oohed and aahed as she showed off her spindly, frightening arms as if posing for a textbook photo (which Alex's mother indeed tried to take). Eventually she marched off into the bushes, wagging her butt at us, leaving us to look instead for the large toads and tree frogs that densely populate Alex's yard and, apparently, her grill.

Tomorrow the two of us will drive into Orlando to meet Andrea, another forum friend. We'll tour some gardens and go to some kind of tea and coffee market that Andrea says is brilliant, and then, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I will get in the car one last time and point it towards home. Tonight's is my 100th post to Lover's Lanes. In the spirit of adventure and shooting for beyond the horizon, my post from home concluding this long journey will be #101!

Through the monsoon

Woke up, finished Haruhi, said goodbye to Alex -- who I hope very much to see again soon -- and left Charlotte for Savannah at about noon today. The drive was uneventful. I could not have guessed what was going to happen that evening.

I checked in at Savannah just after four and went exploring. I wanted to know how this town became famous for its beauty. I quickly found my own answer: it's the proliferation of Spanish moss hanging from every tree like Christmas streamers. Driving down a main boulevard is like taking a walk in the woods. After a stop at a used bookstore, I continued my sojourns with a trip east on US-80. You see, all this time I've been telling a fib. I've been calling this a coast-to-coast journey, and since I started on the Gulf Coast that is technically true, but that's not what people usually mean when they say "coast-to-coast." To really earn that title I had to see the Atlantic Ocean. I resolved that Savannah would be the place, and I chose right. To find the ocean I took the highway all the way out to Tybee Island, across bridges spanning the less solid parts of the swamp. Looking out over the railings of those bridges, I saw dark clouds gathering, and in the stormwrought half-twilight the bright grass and dark water clashed joyously. My heart beat faster.

My visit to the Tybee Island beach was quick and professional. I took pictures of the seagulls swarming a woman who was feeding them bread, then strode to the water to sample it. I can report that the Atlantic at Savannah is less salty than the Pacific at San Francisco and much less salty than the Great Salt Lake, and has a thinner consistency than either. These tasks done, my journey had spanned all the coasts. I turned around to go back to town...

...and ran smack into some Weather. In the hour I'd been gone, Savannah had begun taking what might loosely be called an urban bath, if you drop hairdryers into the bathtub a lot. I've driven through slightly worse rain on the interstates, but never through flash floods, and never through a storm so vicious and full of crackling electricity. The lightning was nonstop and deafening even from inside the car. One bolt struck a transformer on the opposite side of the road, which exploded like a shotgun and spat sparks into the air. My emergency flashers flaring a few feet into the evening, plumes of water overwhelming my tires and windshield, lightning crashing for moments on end into some unlucky tree not very far away, I thought: This is going to make a fantastic blog post.

If I asked you to guess what sort of restaurant I went to, you would be unable to match the truth for aptness. My eatery was the Pirates' House, a tavern which grew up around a shack built by James Oglethorpe's men in 1734 when Georgia was first colonized; by 1753 it was a functioning seafarers' inn. What I'm trying to say here is that this restaurant comes by its piracy motif legitimately, and that I am not the first to seek shelter from a storm within its walls. I chatted with the waitress (no, this is not usual weather for Savannah; yes, the cornbread is fantastic) and asked for the house specialty, fried chicken. The fried chicken was not only tender and delicious, but also -- bear with me, guys -- covered with a thick sauce of honey and pecans. I ate half a chicken as the thunder rattled the walls and nearby couples complained about the roof leaking.

By the time I had finished the storm had abated some, and the night had gone from invisible to pearly and luminous. Marveling at the astonishing light, I fought the storm one more time on my way back to the hotel. I believe I came all this way to be blinded by the sun's reflection in the Savannah pavement as it conquered the clouds, its inverse twin casting my shadow on the dashboard. And fuck me if, pulling into the Microtel at the end of this brief but eventful evening, I didn't see a double rainbow -- for the second time in my life, and the second time in the last two months -- arcing across the opalescent clouds, from one pot of gold to another.

Pics and it happened

Charlotte has been a nice, cozy dream. I've been holed up with Alex playing D&D and watching anime and doing other things that don't photograph well. So this seems like the moment for another photo post!


Among my first views of Yellowstone National Park!


Mule deer like this buck are everywhere in Yellowstone. This particular specimen was grazing right next to the visitors' center. Attention whore!


Ground squirrels!!! They're a lot like the normal kind, but without the tails. These two live near the petrified tree, which makes me wonder if they eat petrified acorns.

But what of sweeping Yellowstone geological panoramas, you ask? Well, this is a start! It's hard to capture scenic beauty, because I've come to the conclusion that "scenic" means "uninteractive and remote," but this is one of the better landscapes that came out of that expedition.


Caterpillars or worms of some sort, crawling all over the handrail of a boardwalk in west Yellowstone. The other tourists were all grossed the fuck out. I was just wondering what they metamorphose into.


BUFFALO! This bison came close enough to the pullout that I could have touched him. I didn't. He looks very sad in this picture, but in real life he looks like a decaying zombie bison.


Yellowstone is of course known for its thermal springs. Here's one of them, practically unmarked, beside the road.


And here is a more famous geothermal feature: Old Faithful in mid-eruption! I have a picture of the geyser at full mast, but it's on its side and this picture does a better job showing what the geyser actually looks like.


Last Yellowstone picture. See the horizontal line in the center of the photo? That's where incinerated forest ends and live forest begins. The transition is that stark. Controlled burns, I guess?


Obligatory Mount Rushmore photo! TR looks left out back there.


And on the way back from Mount Rushmore, I stopped at the Reptile Gardens, which host an impressive collection of gross creatures. These are death's-head cockroaches.


This snake's name has been lost because I was careless about snapping the nameplates, but isn't he pretty? Don't you just want to give him a big hug?


The Reptile Gardens had a bird exhibition, too. Action Wildlife Photographer makes his return in this startling picture of a bald eagle striving for liberty against its oppressive and probably British captor!


The Reptile Gardens cost rather a lot to run.


The Badlands were to my mind much more dramatic than Yellowstone, but they were equally hard to photograph. They're like a mountain range in miniature!


The Badlands are not at all uniform in height, shape, or composition. Every turnout offers a different view!


A pic from the Sioux Falls butterfly garden. These two were kind enough to let me get close. One butterfly landed on me and gave me a kiss!


And in other insectoid news, here is the sculpture that welcomes you to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. Made entirely out of scrap metal, this waspish monstrosity is a sight to see.


And here is the Forevertron itself! Towering over visitors in its steampunk glory and studded with strange machines and decrepit spiral staircases, it begs to be climbed on! But you're not allowed! >.<


A velociraptor menaces visitors to the dinosaur exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo in La Grange, outside Chicago. His head, arms, and tail move periodically to startle tourists. I can't imagine why these things needed to hunt in packs.


Aleksa was terrified and fascinated by the dinosaurs. She spent that walk clinging to me and cringing whenever an animatronic reptile looked at her the wrong way. But she enjoyed herself, and I did too, partly vicariously thanks to Aleksa!


Polar bear!!! Wait, polar bear? Yes, Brookfield has two polar bears. This one was one of the more active animals at the zoo; he showboated for us a little, lumbering around the front of his cage. His back is dyed green because of the chlorine in his wading pool. I have mixed feelings about that.


And at the other temperature extreme, camels! Two humps means these guys are Bactrian camels. I'm not sure whether you sit on a hump or straddle the space between them.


At Indiana University at Bloomington, the Lilly Library collection of rare books displays this lock of Sylvia Plath's hair alongside a couple poems she wrote. Who got a hold of a lock of Sylvia Plath's hair, why, and at what point did they decide it should be put on display for the edification of the public?


John James Jingleheimer Audubon's illustrated book of birds is as large as a toddler's mattress when opened, though because not many original copies remain I don't suggest you actually use it as such. Every week they turn the page, and this week was grackles!


The proper orientation of this photo of Ogle Lake, east of Bloomington, is left as an exercise to the reader.


And at last, here I am ensconced with Ruth and Robert in Indianapolis after a Haruhi Suzumiya marathon. I'm on the right. It's late in the evening and we're all a little tired, but an Utena forum member threatened to perform certain acts on us that don't bear repetition in a family blog if we didn't post pics, so here we are! Stay away from my butt!

I haven't taken many photos since Indianapolis, and I haven't uploaded the ones I have. I may get to make one more photo post before drawing this blog to a close. Tomorrow night, God willing, I'll be in Savannah, the next night in Orlando, and the following night... well, I'll be back in a place I've been away from for both too long and just the right amount of time.

Winning the Charlottery

I've spent the last two nights with my brother Alex here in Charlotte -- not to be confused with my hostess Alex in Eustis, nor my hostess Alexis in Seattle -- and we have had multifarious Fun Thymes! Fortunately for the length of this entry, most of these Fun Thymes have been of a catching-up and sharing-cool-things nature that don't really need recapitulation here, except to say that I have infected Alex with the Haruhi Suzumiya meme I got from Ruth and Robert. I am an anime proliferation vector! But we've done other things, too. Most novel: rock climbing! I've never been rock climbing before, but on Wednesday I scaled a 25-foot wall and on Thursday a 30-foot wall at the National Whitewater Center. Guys, rock climbing is hard! My fingertips have muscles I didn't know about, and they hurt!

What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.

I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!