Various forms of steam

As of this day, I have achieved the Grand Isthmic Bifecta: I have visited every major United States city that is built on an isthmus! That is, both Seattle and Madison! Congratulations to me!

Today I rode on a train as a result of asking a question I already knew the answer to. Here is how that happened. Last night I was looking for something to do between St. Paul and Madison, and in my Googling I came across something called Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. In an alternate universe, the Forevertron is a device designed to propel Dr. Evermor [sic] into space on magnetic lightning bolts or something; I didn't quite follow that part. In this universe, the Forevertron is the world's largest sculpture made entirely out of scrap metal. It looks awesome. It is every steampunk novel or RPG you have ever seen, done, or eaten, like Jules Verne and Ludwig von Beethoven collaborated on a lunar rover. It is also surrounded by other scrap metal sculptures, from gigantic to tiny, of insects and birds and little tiny protestors and such. These sculptures are clearly the life's work of the couple responsible for them, and there will be ample pics eventually.

But that's not what I was trying to tell you about. I was trying to tell you about this train ride. The thing about the Forevertron is that it's located in a junkyard with no physical address in the deep rural wilds of North Freedom, Wisconsin. Nonetheless, I had managed to pull directions off Google Maps and had written them down. You'd think I'd have been happy with that, but when I stopped for lunch on my way to North Freedom I happened to pass a tourist bureau, and on a whim I decided to stop in and ask if they knew how to get to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. This question had gotten me weird looks at the restaurant, and it got me a weird look at the tourist bureau, too. The lady working there had never heard of it but was otherwise very helpful, and I mean that sincerely; once she realized I hadn't just made up a tourist spot she was all over Google and Wikipedia trying to get me an address. I stopped her, since I'd done the same already to no effect, but not before she told me that North Freedom is really known for its railroad museum with hour-long train rides on refurbished cars from the 1910s. A train ride, you say?!? I rushed to North Freedom and arrived just in time for the last railroad expedition of the day. It was fun letting the engineer drive for a change! I also learned that -- at least in those days, no idea if it's still true -- locomotives have both forward and reverse gears. So in theory the locomotive could have pulled us forwards to the quartzite gravel quarry that was our endpoint, then pushed us backwards to bring us back to our starting place. But that's not how you actually do it, because then the engineer couldn't see where he was going on the return trip. Instead, the engineer de-couples the locomotive from the rest of the train, runs the locomotive alone backwards along a set of parallel tracks, passing the cars, then runs it forward on the original track and couples it to the caboose. Then he pulls the cars back to the starting point in reverse gear. At no point does the locomotive make a U-turn -- you can't do that on a train track; the locomotive faces forward the entire trip, even though it's pulling backward for half of it. It's designed so that the engineer has line of sight in the direction of motion either way. This is probably something some of you knew when you were six, but for this suburban boy it was a revelation. So that's how they do it!

Not much to speak of this evening. Had a quiet dinner and ice cream at the University of Madison campus; still need to plot my evil deeds tomorrow morning and hopefully see something else that makes Madison cool before I go join Jono's parents for Thai food and subsequent hospitality in La Grange, a surburb of Chicago. (Spelling matters. If you type in Lagrange, Google Maps will send you upstate.) Sadly, the Forevertron trip left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because I talked to a woman there, a local tourist if there is such a thing, who perceived that I was in a hurry, and I am indeed worried about being in too much of a hurry. I mean, just one day in the Twin Cities? You could spend a week there and just scratch the surface. I tell myself you pass through a lot of towns on a cross-country road trip and (without a ton of time and money) you can't delve into all of them. The trip's already taken longer than I expected it to. But in some sense I am hurrying, and I don't like that, because who knows how long it will be until I'm in North Freedom, Wisconsin again, you know? It's like speed dating. You're just getting to know the town, and then whoosh, it's gone, time for the next one. Fortunately, Chicago is a city that I already know at least a little bit from my four years in college there. I know some of the good restaurants and intend to reacquaint myself with them, while also enjoying the companionship of semi-familiar faces for the first time since Seattle. Two nights in a city I already sort of know means less hurrying. Onward, upward, and southeastward -- but not too quickly!

Emo but in a good way

Bullet points today because of time management issues in connection with the slowth of Holiday Inn's Internet combined with my own slate of activities!

- I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota tonight. The drive from Sioux Falls was not arduous and doesn't want to stick in my memory. Driving is like dreaming. Sometimes you think of neat creative ideas, or you notice something and say "I want to remember that," but when you wake up it's gone. I should make more careful use of Kino for moments like that.

- Before leaving Sioux Falls I visited their butterfly garden! Hundreds of tropical butterflies flapping everywhere, absolutely beautiful, like flying flowers. They only live a couple of weeks, so the greenhouse is constantly importing more of them. My camera's batteries gave out, so I didn't get as many pictures as I might have liked, but fortunately I brought a cigarette lighter/AC adapter and charged the camera in the car.

- Before checking in at St. Paul I drove through Minneapolis. Gorgeous skyline! I stopped in at the Smitten Kitten, a somewhat netfamous adult toy store notable for their friendliness, professionalism, and sponsorship of the Sex Is Fun podcast. It's nice to be planning a visit to a city and have an "aha!" moment when you remember a place there that you never expected to be able to actually visit. The store's much smaller than I imagined, but the staff lived up to their reputation! And it turned out I even got 10% off the book I bought by mentioning the podcast.

- Later I returned to Minneapolis to the Acme Comedy Club for an hour and a half of fun times. This was at my brother's suggestion; he said he vaguely remembered going to a comedy club in Minneapolis, and that sounded like a fantastic idea to me. Some gems of jokes in there. Their headliner was very much an SMBC-style comedian, for those who know what SMBC is; basically, very good at saying something mundane to rather funny, and then saying something else that casts what he previously said in a completely new and utterly hilarious light. Simple example: "I hit a blue jay with my car yesterday. [Cue "awww" from audience.] Yeah, it's very sad. He may never play baseball again." His name was Emo Philips, and apparently I should have heard of him; he could have been George Carlin. Just now in the process of writing I Wikied him and was shocked to discover that he is a well-known comedian who actually is 53, as he claimed; he looked to me like a very talented thirty-year-old in a gray wig who was using a "slightly senile old man" persona as part of his schtick. Actually, he said he'd let his hair go gray for a movie. He wanted to get in cheaper.

Well, past my bedtime! Tomorrow I expect to be in Madison, Wisconsin; I was hoping to stay with my cousin Susan, but sadly on this day of all days she's going to be in Chicago, where I'm going to be the following night. D'oh! So Days Inn it is...

Days like this, part 1

Happily ensconced in a cozy Days Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, I sit down to write a blog entry and realize there's so much to record about my trip so far that I'm already (after just three days) having trouble holding it all in my head! Why haven't I written a nice long entry sooner, then? Part of it is that I've been effing tired from all the driving; I'm still getting used to feeling my buns fall asleep as I spend seven consecutive hours behind the wheel punctuated only by a gas stop. But today, while I'm tired, I feel better, and moreover I have my own private room. This last matters. I've loved staying with my hosts -- people who know the area, can take me to the good restaurants (or cook up something delicious themselves!), can chat with me after a long and lonely stretch of road -- but one's own room is comforting in a different way and engenders a different kind of consciousness that's more conducive to writing.

Now, how to write? There's a certain irony about roadbound travelogue in that driving is the common and dominating feature of my days, yet there's not much to say about it. I've been on the interstate since Eustis and so I can't share quaint rural towns' oddities as observed from the car. (I think I'm going to take the back ways through Kansas in a couple days.) The most interesting thing about the driving has been the changing landscape. South Florida, for those of you who've never been there, is flat like a board. I'm not used to driving on hills. The pita-bread terrain of north Florida and Georgia was a novelty, but it wasn't until the long march through Tennessee where I-24 is flanked by sheer cliffs as it jags in all three dimensions that I realized how much hills matter in driving. Cruise control does not always work on hills, and the gas pedal doesn't work normally either. Fortunately, Blackbird is tolerant of my learning curve; she is a fantastic car. Later, after a breathtaking series of interchanges in Nashville that would have been nigh-unmanageable without GPS, the skies opened. As the rain poured down I wondered how people in the Rocky Mountains get around during a storm. Nice thing about that is, I can just ask my friend in Denver when I get there in a few days.

While my eyes scan the road, my ears are kept busy with music, NPR, or random local radio stations. I listened in fascination to a Georgian call-in show aimed at conservative housewives; the hostess spent fifteen minutes promoting a website billed as a Craigslist for conservatives, which helps make sure you don't accidentally do business with a liberal. Not that she's a liberal-hater, exactly. She was just using conservatism as an index for cleanliness and conscientiousness, and I have to admit that if I was going to hire a lifeguard from Craigslist sight-unseen, I'd be reassured to know he was a Mormon. Talk radio: a window into culture, including our own.

At this point in the entry I'm conscious that this is getting a little long. I have a lot more to say and no knowledge of when I'll have another writing opportunity like this, so I'm going to plow right along but split this post into a few parts. This way, if you don't want to read the whole update, you can stop here and come back tomorrow! But first, check out the double rainbow my friend in Eustis and I spotted outside her house...

Conceived with passion by unknown artists

And here she is. These wheels will take me to Seattle and back, beginning June 13 and ending whenever I feel like coming home. The car is a 2009 Mazda3 i Touring, as yet unnamed. The process of laying my hands on her was everything car shopping is supposed to be: stressful, time-consuming, probing, a little sketchy. But in the end, thanks to Edmunds.com and a little help from my dad, I found the right car for Lover's Lanes and beyond. She is lovely inside and out, with excellent handling, comfortable seats, and the ability to drive four hundred miles on the interstate without stopping (which is more endurance than I've got!) The two of us will be making a beeline across America for San Francisco using I-70, arriving after about twelve days' travel. There I'll attend a friend's wedding celebration, then drive up the coast to Seattle, and thence meander home, perhaps hitting New York on the way. It's really happening, and it's really awesome.

Disappearing railroad blues

Happy April! I don't have any pranks for you today, though I'm tempted to announce that I'll make my trip using BMW's new Magnetic Tow Technology, advertised today here. If this were real it would be a sweet way to ride.

And speaking of riding, I need to figure out soon whether I'm going to go by car or train. I was leaning towards going by train, but then it occurred to me that because I'd be riding in short hops, each leg would be no more than a day trip. I'd still be overnighting more or less entirely at hotels, so the train fare doesn't replace a hotel stay. No money saved on food, either, because the dining car charges unless you've made an exorbitantly upgraded reservation, which is only worth doing on long rides. I don't have to make car payments, but I do have to pay for rentals if I want to get anywhere within the cities I visit. The train looked appealing when I thought it was going to be more convenient and less expensive; I'm not sure how I feel now that it looks more convenient and more expensive.

The two biggest advantages of trains remain what they were: not having to focus on moving for long stretches at a time, and having a ready-made place to look for interviewees where we're all on equal terms. These should not be essential but are really tempting. I'm unfortunately aware that the higher the bar I set for myself, the greater the probability that I'm going to lose my nerve and abandon the whole project, consigning myself to spending June through August tutoring the odd few students who want tutoring during the summer, like I did last year and the year before that. I'd rather not do that again. But what price am I willing to pay, in dollars and romance, to lower the bar?

Further training

I called Amtrak about half an hour before their daily northbound train from Orlando was due to leave this afternoon, and there were still seats available. So much for the idea that I'd have to book well in advance! Interestingly, though, it turns out that daily train leaves for different destinations on different days. Today it was going to Washington, but tomorrow it goes all the way to New York. You can put it down to the recession and reduced freight on the tracks -- or at least, that's what one article my awesome friend sent me would attribute it to -- but it makes travel both more complicated and in some ways more interesting. There's something glamorous about hopping on the next train out of town no matter where it happens to be going. Waking up, checking the schedule -- oh, today there's a train to Phoenix, awesome! -- and off we go. Of course, I have no idea what it's like in cities other than Orlando, where they keep a station manned thirteen hours a day for the sake of the one or two trains that come through. Amtrak is a totally different animal in the northeast, and I imagine its transcontinental trains are more frequent than once a day too. Chicago in particular is a hub for them. That station is open eighteen hours a day, with a train coming in just about every hour. Good thing, too. You can't go coast to coast on Amtrak without passing through Chicago or New Orleans. If I go by train I'm not going to get away without visiting Chicago, probably more than once.

My goal for tomorrow is to visit a local AT&T store and ask them about the network card I mentioned yesterday. One way or another, I also hope to conduct an interview this weekend!

Chugging along

I didn't get much done over the weekend. I'm still standing at the divergence of two roads, or more accurately one road and one pair of rails. I did speak to one of Best Buy's computer people about the laptop, though! He said there's no real danger to my computer in connecting to whatever network is available wherever I happen to end up, so I don't have to invest in a security suite beyond the usual. He also brought my attention to what is called a LaptopConnect card, which in principle enables your computer to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the country using AT&T's wireless network. If I go by train this is probably indispensable, since I doubt Amtrak cars come with ISPs. Based on my research online, you ought to think of this card as a cell phone for your computer; as with a cell phone, the card is approximately free after the mail-in rebate, but then you have to buy a contract to make it work. There's sort of a multiplicity of contracts available, and the price scheme doesn't seem to be available over the Internet. I need to go to an AT&T store to find out whether this is affordable.

Tomorrow I'm going to call the Amtrak station in Orlando -- the closest full-service station to Fort Myers -- and ask them how far in advance you typically have to book in order to ride. If the answer is more than two or three days the train option is problematic. Amtrak's website seems to think that I could leave from Orlando tomorrow if I felt like it, and it says full bedrooms are sold out on that particular train, which suggests that if there were no space available in coach the website would know that and wouldn't let me book. I don't intend to travel the whole distance coach, of course; if one is going to travel for days at a time, at some point one would like a bed and some privacy. I may have to make do with coach for some stretches, though, because upgrades to a modest "Viewliner Roomette" cost more than the entire fare. A lot more. You can ride coach from Orlando to Seattle for $336, but if you want to avoid coach on all three of the trains involved, it's more like $1700. Not bad for what I'm planning -- if I made a beeline to Seattle by car, stopping only to eat and sleep in the nearest budget inn, I wouldn't get away with much less than that -- but entirely uneconomical for an average passenger. To be fair, though, there's a lot of difference between a seat in coach and a roomette, especially considering that the roomette comes with meals included plus various room amenities like A/C, an electrical outlet for the lappy, and an in-room sink and toilet. (You still have to use the communal showers; to avoid that you'd need a full bedroom, which runs an extra grand or so over the course of the trip.)

Of course, I won't be making a beeline for Seattle, no matter what mode of transportation I settle on. The trip will be made in shorter hops, hopefully with a few days spent at the cities that serve as my waypoints. If I go by train, I'll probably take coach on shorter trips and enjoy a roomette for longer ones.

Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance

...Or, I could go by train.

A dear friend of mine wrote me on Wednesday to suggest this option. Cross-country journeys don't have to be taken in a car. Amtrak is faster, safer, and cheaper. It liberates me from spending hours behind the wheel and worrying about where to sleep and eat. Perhaps most importantly, on a train people expect to chat with strangers. It's a more natural context than a laundromat to approach someone, tell them about this cool project you're doing, and ask them to tell you a story.

On the other hand, this convenience comes at the expense of breadth and autonomy. I sure won't be stopping in every city I pass through; I'll have to rely on the city to serve up new people with new stories. Which raises the question: is it still a cross-country journey if you get on at Tampa and off at San Francisco without visiting the towns in between? You're still visiting with some of the people from those towns, distinguishing a train journey from an airplane trip, so the answer might be a qualified yes, but you sure don't get to immerse yourself in local culture. No visits to Spring Hill College or the Grand Canyon; all you get is the changing landscape out the window. You also lose a ton of control over your route, since coast-to-coast trips invariably go through Chicago. In theory you can get around some of these disadvantages by booking trips with multiple legs. This gets expensive fast but is probably still cheaper than going by car. I wonder how far in advance you have to book. Can I take it one leg at a time, or do I have to plan a complete itinerary while sitting at home in one corner of a country that boasts 3.8 million square miles?

These thoughts were running through my mind when I opened up a collection of W.H. Auden's poetry that night. Flipping through at random, I happened on one of my favorite Auden poems, The More Loving One. I smiled and went on to the next poem -- and what should it be about but the comparative virtues of driving and riding a train! I am completely serious. It was one of those coincidences that just floors you, like God has appeared beside your bed amidst a chorus of angels to send you a portent. I read the poem, A Permanent Way, three or four times looking for this sign from Heaven. ...Yeah, it turns out Auden is ambivalent. Damn you, Auden! This is the problem with your poetry: you're too much like me!

What do you think, gang? Compared to going by car, would going by train be cooler? less cool? or cool in a different way?

Civic duty

Fifteen minutes ago I liked the name "Honda Civic" almost as little as "Honda Fit." Civic is such a stuffy word. It makes you think of the drab buildings where they hold traffic court. Or paying your taxes. It is not a good name for a car.

But then -- soaking in the spa and staring at the moon, which cliched as it sounds is when I get all my craziest ideas -- I thought about the root of the word. Civic is from civilization. Civilization is just a bunch of people and the relationships between them. My journey is about one particular type of those relationships, so my journey is intimately tied to civilization.

And that in turn got me thinking about Freud. That son of a bitch wrote a little book called "Civilization and Its Discontents" decades ago. I read it last year. Part of his idea, this half-crazy genius of the psyche, is that what's most basic in us are the creative and destructive impulses, and that part of the creative impulse is the libido. So we all want to go out there and find someone to focus our libido on. The problem is that we need food and water and other stuff, and if we try to take care of all of that on our own we don't have much time left for sex/cuddling. We form civilizations to help make it easier to satisfy our biological needs so we can devote the remainder of our time to our libidinal ones. But now there's a new problem: civilization requires upkeep (we go to work), which requires time, which again is time we're not spending having sex/cuddling. What's more, that damn destructive impulse keeps threatening to tear everything down. So civilization requires us to restrain our destructive impulse, which is where Freud got the idea of the superego. And that superego polices all kinds of things, including our attitudes towards our own relationships.

The point is that civilization, for Freud, is all about relationships. Civilization is why we can devote time to our relationships, and it's also the principal reason relationships are so complicated. Which touches me, in spite of Freud's pedantry about the whole thing. And I bet a lot of the stories I hear on this trip will have as much to do with the civilization their characters live in as with the characters themselves.

So now I am thrilled that I may be making my journey in a Honda Civic and hope my own superego agrees that it's the right car for the trip.

Carsick

Today I visited three auto dealerships in hopes of refining my options. First thing I decided was that I'm not buying American. I know, you're supposed to drive a Chevy or a Buick or at least a Ford for an all-American road trip, but I just can't bring myself to spend that much money on a pile of metal that was not all that good a car even before their parent companies started talking about bankruptcy.

So instead I went to Kia and VW and Honda. I really liked the Kia Spectra. Sweet car. Classy and sleek. I felt nice in it, and it's pretty cheap to buy new. Sadly, word on the street is that Kia has a tendency to break down, and I want no part of that. Then I went to VW, where the salesman led me to the Rabbit. Another nice-looking car, and it's got my favorite name of the three cars I sat in today. Worse mileage than the Spectra, though, and someone needs to send a memo to VW management to hire salespeople who can give me a ballpark monthly payment in under twenty minutes of calculation; it turned out the Rabbit is a bit too rich for my blood, and the Jetta even more so.

That left Honda. They let me test-drive a used Civic. I would almost feel bad buying a Civic (or a Toyota Corolla or even a Scion) because it seems like everyone and their auntie is driving one these days, but apparently there's a reason for that: the Civic gets 36 mpg on the highway and Honda has a great support network. The car drove like a car should drive; it had this calm energy, no drama, just motion. I probably can't afford a Civic new, but I might be able to lease one or buy used.

This is all probably too much car talk for a blog that's supposed to be about love stories, isn't it? I want to be singing poetry at you and instead I'm drowning you in pragmatics. So I'll leave you with something called Flight by Louis Jenkins that pretty much sums up how I feel about the trip.

Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour de force, really. There's a lot of running and flapping involved and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching, waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows? You might just make it.

All you need is love. Love and a car

People do walking tours of America. Did you know that? People literally walk from coast to coast. I guess they do endurance training for months before they leave and have camping gear strapped to their backs for the nights they don't end up near a town. One guy walked from L.A. to Boston to "discover America." Apparently he actually made it. Then a couple walked from Oregon to New Hampshire in order to prove that Ron Paul was awesome. They made it too, though mysteriously Ron Paul still lost the election. People who walk from coast to coast are hardcore.

By contrast, I can jog a mile, but I am pretty badly winded afterwards and have to sit down. Therefore, I will need a car.

Now yes, on some level it is tempting to get a pimpmobile, but red 'vettes are really more suited for making love than for studying it. So what I need is something inexpensive but reliable, something that can drive ten thousand miles without breaking down, something with good gas mileage -- but at the same time, something that looks, feels, and sounds like a car you make a trans-American journey in.

Take the Honda Fit. The Fit is cheap, foreign, and gets 30 mpg. Nice. But it is called the Honda Fit. The Honda Fit, guys. "Hi, I'm driving across America collecting love stories, and I was wondering if you would --" "What kind of car you drive?" "A, um, a Honda Fit." "Good luck."

If you picked ten words at random out of the dictionary, nine of them would be better names for cars than the Fit. The Honda Mantis. The Honda Wake. Fuck, I'd take the Honda Scooter over the Honda Fit. They should let me name cars.

Now take the Nissan Versa. That's a name you can get behind. Vaguely combative but at the same time suggests poetry. Looks pretty nice, too. But it's sort of small and I'm six foot two. I am going to be spending a lot of time in this car.

I had a friend suggest the Volkswagen Jetta. Apparently they make them with diesel engines, which means my mpg would be off the charts good. I don't know how that impacts the price of the car, though; tutoring for three years has left me with a bank account, but not enough of one to blow all of it on a car, and I would like to buy or lease new to be sure of reliability.

Fortunately, I'm not leaving soon and have plenty of time to tour car lots and figure out what's what. Anyone have any success stories -- or cautionary tales -- to share?