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| Grand Canyon, USA |
We took off today for a drive through New England. First through The Bronx and suburban New York and Connecticut, through towns that first brought the word "suburban living" to the culture: Scarsdale, Westport, Rye, New Rochelle. After that, we were in New England and the greening Spring country closed in and the towns became small, slow, pretty and Colonial.
Ron and Sue D. are renting a house on 2 acres near Guilford. Ron is finishing his Psych. residency at Yale. Sue, formerly Jordan Jr. Hi. Art teacher, is now working and selling her crafts and artwork. They have always been very hip, very judgmental, slow, uncommunicative when we used to see them in LA. I wondered how they would be now. I had always felt uncomfortable, insecure, too conventional for them. I am too loud, too argumentative. They are too structured, too slow for me. I feel as if I am to them as Phyllis is to me.
Sue’s greeting to us was, of course, "cool" and hesitant, and of course made me feel unwelcome, which turned into frost; I tried to be "cool" and it was not me so I sulked. Bea felt as if we had intruded on one of their fights, which tended to be like fights between most uncommunicative couples, periods of cold stares separated by grunts and longer moments of silent avoidance. It went bad from the beginning and we left in the morning, as glad as they were to see us go.
[Note: It came as no surprise when, not very long after, they separated. Bea of course heard all about it from Sue and remained good friends with her. MB 18 June 2002.]
6 May Tuesday Guilford to Cape Cod, Mass.
That experience left me depressed all day and I remained so until we reached Cape Cod. We found a $12 motel in Hyannis and drove to Hyannisport and walked along the beach near the Kennedy homes. It was blue, mild and very consistent with my mood. Driving back we stopped at an antique shop where Bea fell in love with a basket and I with a hat block form, intending to make it into a mirror frame.
We had dinner on broiled Maine lobster and clam chowder, while I tried to remember the words to the song about Old Cape Cod ... We went to see "Shampoo" which was semi-disappointing.
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| Old Ironsides |
The weather held firm—sunny and mild for most of the day. Plymouth was interesting with The Rock and the Mayflower, the wood frame houses on quaint tree lined streets, the kind of slow small town feeling to it all that was comfortably relaxing.
When we got to Boston, I realized the duality of my feelings: a big, modern traffic snarled city, somehow, though it was more familiar—I felt more like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien—than I do in small quaint towns. I do not know why that is, having lived in, near and identified all my life with big cities rather than small towns.
We walked The Freedom Trail for two hours, light-heartedly enjoying the easiness of touring—it was a much easier form of what we have been doing for 10 months. Having solved —of at least survived— the problems of Asia and Europe, an American city was a lark. But it turned cold and we drove to Worcester and stayed at a Holiday Inn, luxuriating in room service dinner, color t.v. and a big, bouncy warm bed for the rest of the night.
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| 1521 East 7th Street, Brooklyn |
This was the most remarkable and enjoyable day in a long time.
The drive from Mass to NY was quick and gave us time to explore Brooklyn, something I have been promising Bea and myself for many years. I was filled with a queer sense of elation driving past my old homes on Colby Court and 7th Street, my high school, and the neighborhoods of my adolescence. I was pleased that they have not changed much over the years and to see that comparing them with the life of my future, the places hold up with a pleasant aura of familiar warmth. Finding my way to the familiar places was a fond confirmation that my foggy memories were real, not just an imagined, falsely constructed dream.
We went to Coney Island and had hot dogs and chow mein rolls at the original Nathan’s, drove to 35th Street searching for the haunts of the first 12 years of my life, to find that the time machine had ground out that memory. My entire neighborhood was no more, replaced by a low cost housing project. Yet even that fact produced an odd feeling of pride at having progressed and grown, of having had roots and being (mostly) proud and comfortable with the memories of my past.
9 May Friday through 11 May Sunday ... Tenafly
We decided to stay here for the weekend and start for DC on Monday. Phyllis has been extremely friendly and cordial, making us feel as if we are not intruding, and not beholden for which we are grateful; we have had hospitality with strings before.
My ambivalence about returning to work and Life continues, but my mind is subtly and slowly adjusting to the change, the idea of what may come becoming more clear and more acceptable. I am pre-experiencing going back to being a lawyer, finding a house to live in, moving in, writing in the evenings, establishing new friendships, renewing old ones on a new basis of equality, confidence and certainty about where we have been and where we want to be. Looking forward to getting on with it.
10 May: The weather is very beautiful these days, the way May is supposed to be. Bea and I went for a long walk around the winding streets, critically viewing the homes we passed: this one has a nice look to it, welcoming; that one is too formal; the other one has pretty flowers and trees ... house shopping, which in this area is not exactly antiquing, and surely not a flea market.
Poor Pammy. We played catch and she was doing very well, smiling and feeling good about herself. Then Wendy joined in the game, her self-assurance overwhelming Pam’s fragile confidence. The result was that Pam suffered miserably, pouted and sadly went off to be by herself.
11 May: Fredi came out to visit today. After the vitriol Phyllis has been spewing all week about her mother-in-law, it was interesting and a bit fatiguing to watch the two of them together. Fredi is a tiring proposition under any conditions, but the tension between she and Phyllis was terrific. Bea couldn’t tear herself away.
Bart and I spent most of the time avoiding the fireworks, watching NBA playoffs.
Tomorrow we start our trek across the USA.
12 May Monday ... Tenafly to Washington, DC
We finally left today and fairly quickly crossed 5 states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. The countryside was green, lush, forested and beautiful, comparable to many in Europe, and enhanced by the decent weather. The highway was fast and expensive as the autoroute, autostrada, autopista ... etc.
The northern suburbs of Washington with brick colonial houses and graceful shade trees gave way to the slum tenements of the city core and soon we were among the maze of federal buildings, monuments and symbols of all our institutions. There they were—all the familiar landmarks that give us both a goofy sort of thrill: Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, White House, Capitol Dome.
We drove through and finally came to a gas station across from the Watergate where an attendant told us his opinion of the mess and more important, how to get across the bridge to Arlington.
13 May Tuesday ... Washington
Last night we found a motel near a Fiat dealer and put the car in for servicing. At 1 p.m. we picked it up and drove into DC. We drove up Constitution Ave. to the Capitol and walked around the building—saw Father Drinan walking through.
A thunder storm moved in and we drove to the Lincoln Memorial via Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the White House. We walked to the Washington Monument along The Mall in the rain and back trying to count the number of such long walks in the rain we have taken together. We couldn’t even count them. Across the bridge to Arlington to the cemetery which we toured, feeling quite melancholy at the Kennedy site, especially.
Later, we had dinner and went back to the motel room to prepare for the long haul to come. It was a beautiful day which made me realize how much we have seen this year ... so many things I never really thought I would ever get to see in my life, which is telescoped in my mind these days, with all the events folding over in there like the trip tic book we have, maps and names and sounds, smells, sights, images crushing each other in a jumble, from Brooklyn to Kyoto to Kathmandu to Korinth ... and now to Kansas ... or Oz?
14 May Wednesday ... Washington D.C. to Zanesville, Ohio
Last night we called Ron & Laura at 2 a.m. and wound up arranging to meet them in Las Vegas for the Memorial Day weekend.
In the morning we began the drive west. Again over 5 states, almost 400 miles. If we keep up this rate Bea says, we will be in Hawaii by the time we are supposed to be in Vegas! It turned out to be a long hard day’s work, but pleasant still. The countryside unraveled evergreen, gracefully sloping hills, farms and grazing land.
The sky stayed powder blue all day and the sun drilled the highway. It was hot, not unbearably hot but hotter than I expected from the midwest in mid May.
We stopped at a motel, had dinner in the next door diner and a Dairy Queen, romped in the nearby playground until sunset. We are enjoying these American motel rooms, so luxurious by comparison to their counterparts in other parts of the world, though we are not paying very much by any standard. At least they are quiet, cozy, clean, all have plenty of towels and hot water, clean bathrooms and showers. We enjoyed messing up the sheets, fell asleep in our arms.
15 May Thursday ... Zanesville to Dayton to Terre Haute, Indiana
A little tension today. The car began protesting all the work by holding its breath and threatening to refuse to go. We coaxed 15 miles to Dayton— the "Birthplace of Aviation" where the Wright boys made a crucial mistake for humanity by forsaking their bicycle shop for the invention of the airplane. Maybe the car wanted to see the town. A guy at the local Fiat dealer fixed it without charge and we went back on the road.
We passed through large farms and green grazing land that continued endlessly over flat and gently rolling hilly land. As the day wore on we tired and bickered with each other until finally we found a motel and collapsed in a heap.
The car again gave us misery. This time we took it to a dealer in Terre Haute who raised the specter of a possibly expensive carburetor job but we got away with a few bucks and the continued worry that the problem was not really solved, merely delayed. It is contributing to the tension between us because the anxiety about the car brings on uncertainty and decisions, each of us suggesting possible solutions, neither confident of the ideas or aware of what aggravation may be coming.
We went through Indiana, some of southern Illinois and across the Mississippi into St. Louis to see the Gateway Arch. [For once Bea did not say, "It is no Arc de Triomphe; she too was coming home.] The detour took us into a one hour traffic jam and was expensive in terms of energy which is waning rapidly. When the road again opened up we were very tired. An hour later we found a luxurious motel room in Columbia and that eased some of the pressure.
17 May Saturday ... Columbia to Hays, Kansas
Another one of those days that are better forgotten but are quite impossible to. The car continues to give nightmares.
We stopped in Independence, ate lunch and I pretended to be an auto mechanic and manged to get the car going well enough to get us across the Kansas prairie. More farm and grazing land, flat and green, horizon to horizon. And more. And more.
We were able to get a feeling for what it must have been like when the pioneers came through in the last century. My only conclusion is that they were either very desperate or were crazy to have done it. If they were not crazy when they started, the slow motion months over the endless prairie under the endless blue sky, white hot sun must have made them nuts.
We barely made it without oxen and wagons. We drove with the anxiety of whether our car would continue to go 60 or 70 mph; they went a couple of miles a day, if lucky and we had no Indians to worry about.
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| Bea in four states |
[This page was written in ink, with blots, smears and stains all over it, the product of a leaky fountain pen, one I bought in Hong Kong, made in China. 15 June 2002.]
The appearance of this page is an indication of the run of misfortune that has befallen us recently. The car trouble continues to mystify us in its temperamental nature. For a while no problem. And other things begin to go wrong. My watch (my Omega, with the Italian day window, got stuck on ‘Sab" until I tapped it into "Dom". Now I unscrew the cap of my pen and ink comes pouring out onto this page. Then again if I could be sure there was some mystical connection, I would gladly sacrifice the pen on an altar of flames to keep the car working.
The countryside was a miracle of beauty—plains rising 2000 feet to the dry scrub of Colorado grazing land and Colorado Springs at the foot of Pike’s Peak is a cool clear town.
But Vegas is ahead and with my luck we will probably make it just so that this mystical cloud that follows us will make sure I lose all my money. Maybe I’ll bet the car and win a bus.
19 May Monday ... Colorado Springs
I woke up to the alarm at 8 so that I could take the car to the dealer early. By 10:30, the problem was partially solved and I went to a bookstore to buy a Thorp. That made me feel better about going to Vegas.
By mid-afternoon it became obvious that the car was going to continue to haunt us. So I finally but the bullet, put it back in for work that has more of a chance of solving rather than delaying the problem.
20 May Tuesday ... Colorado Springs to Montrose, Colorado
I took the car back this morning without much confidence that the problem was solved. By 1 we were on our intrepid way—eyes glued to the road, the mountain greenery and the dashboard dials, ears fixed to the drone of engine, waiting for the certain to come "sputter".
The sputter never came but the fatigue of waiting for it wore us out.
We stopped in Montrose, a small town with motels and a Kentucky Colonel. We had some of the latter and a room in the former and spent the evening practicing Thorp’s system for winning at "21" our hearts already in Vegas.
At midnight we trotted out to a pay phone and called Ron, who told us the reservations at a hotel were impossible to attain, so he made tentative ones in a motel.
[That was okay with us. We thought of previous trips to Vegas. When we first went it was with a group of our friends. Bea was paired with her later to be first husband; there was Barbara, David and me. We had all studied "the system" for untold hours, driven all night to gamble continuously for two days, and drive back without sleeping at all. We did win. Later, when we were together, Bea and I went, a couple of times with Ron & Laura and other friends, and still always won, not a lot but consistently the Thorp way. Now we really looked forward to the craziness. MB 15 June 2002.]
21 May Wednesday ... Colorado Springs to Grand Canyon, Arizona
This day turned out to be an exercise in awe at geographical and geological superlatives. We drove through a blizzard in the Rockies, the scenery matching the prettiest we recalled from Switzerland and Germany (though probably not Greece), the hazards of driving blinded by snow, on snow, ice-covered roads, far greater than Europe’s worst.
Then we slowly descended through green moist grazing land until we found ourselves surrounded by the red mesas, green and red brush and clay of the high desert.
We crossed the Ute and Navajo Reservations, stopping to shop for rugs and other goods, then across interminable miles of arid, desolate wastes with the beauty of ruined but proud and noble civilizations. Crumbling and subjugated but still awesome and dignified grandeur.
Then the spectacular display of the Grand Canyon under the cloudy blue sky.
A motel room and dinner and the cold closed in with the always following snow, again our companion like the ghosts of the roads past.
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| Whoooops!!!! |
It was nice to be able to sleep late this morning but by 9:30 I was ready to get up and go. And I was not sure how far I wanted to go—maybe to Vegas where the siren call was screaming at me. But Bea showed few signs of life for another hour and a half so I read Thorp and won vicariously.
When we finally were up simultaneously it was too late to check out. Snow flurries began to fall from quickly shifting clouds and after eating, we toured the canyon’s south rim.
From the watchtower we were treated to the impressive paradox of the canyon. It appears so quiet and solid and timeless, but it is really constantly changing, always turbulently tearing itself down and building up—but so slowly that the change appears to our impatient senses to be static.
It seems lifeless, dull, and forbidding to human life, yet it is brilliantly colorful, throbbing with animal life and with the ghosts of past lives far back into the Earth’s history. In fact, in the layers of its rock, man is an insignificant mark near the top, so stupid and small that for 300 years, he looked at the canyon and saw nothing but an obstacle to his narrow-minded view of progress.
Maybe the very bigness and stillness of the canyon is what makes it so intimidating to look at. It bespeaks of great forces which make people feel small and of minor impact by comparison.
23 May Friday through 26 May Monday ... Grand Canyon to Las Vegas to Canoga Park.
26 May: Well, it is over, the dreams and illusions in one explosion of fantasy.
We drove Friday from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the best of nature’s random design to the worst of man’s planned irrationality.
By Sunday, we were beaten down, and ready to find our own, new life.
On the way to Vegas we drove through some of the most beautiful yet desolate land we have yet seen. The Kaibob Forest led quickly to high desert scrub which continued for many flat miles. Finally we came through Hoover Dam—actually over the dam itself, and came into Vegas.
The place has held me in expectant thrall since Ron brought up the idea. The lure of danger, the thrill of the possibility of winning and the risk of losing great sums of money was irresistible. The feeling is somewhat akin to the exploratory urge to travel that propelled us on our trip.
In a sense, the danger of losing money is more threatening to me. I have lived most of my life with a conservative fear of money and with reverence for it, much stronger emotions than my interests in history, art or other intellectual pursuits.
Of course, after our two days of almost non-stop gambling ... and losing ... much of the urge has gone. In fact, I was relieved to find that my losses of $300 meant so little to me: a slight frustration, regret, a dull flatness, in fact sensation at the end was really an absence of any feeling, a numbness that left me with little desire to ever return there.
On the other hand, I felt myself cleansed and ready, eager to get back and begin Real Life.
When we got back to the Valley and Ron’s house I felt a momentary melancholy on seeing Fred and Ginger, who of course, failed to recognize us—these are cats, not dogs. Bea was at first crushed. These animals were the first pets she ever really had in which she had invested love (her parents had only permitted her to have a parakeet). She had felt guilty for almost every minute of the entire year for abandoning the pets to their uncertain life in Ron & Laura’s house, where other animals ruled the territory. R&L’s letters detailing the miseries of the occupation for them as well as for F&G, had made the guilts all but unbearable. Now we both realized that patient nurturing might earn the right to reclaim their affection but that they might be permanently damaged by the experience. The emotional attachment had been severed.
Dom&Mimi came over, as did my Mom and Dad. We drove to Bea’s parents and I spoke to Gerry Chaleff about the Office.
The net feeling we shared, that is Bea and I, was that we were somehow separated from all the others, hovering above them, not superior but "better" in some indefinable way, practically free from the entanglements of it, still feeling independent from the trap. We had gone for the year without the company of our friends and family, had left them behind and in a real sense we felt as if we had grown up; we still loved and cherished them, but together we were our own "unit" apart from the others.
We were like battle veterans who return to their home town feeling that it is very small, and to families and friends who they still love but who cannot hope to understand them now that they have been altered so much.
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