Trans/plant/portation

I was looking at the throngs of people who mashed into DC’s 69 square miles for the inauguration yesterday, getting wistful for a time, and then it hit me that they were in, in fact, the District of Columbia. Those long lines of portable restrooms were there because there aren’t a lot of places to use the bathroom; you wind up buying some diet peach Snapple product that expired in 2003 just so you can be called a “customer” and get a grimy key to a suspicious-looking toilet. I thought about the clusters of RVs that sell fake FBI shirts and crappy plaster Capitol buildings on far more average tourist days than this. They must have done some big time product procurement in advance of the millions of folks visiting. 

In reality, there is no such thing as clean coal banner

DC in general, though, tends toward the dodgy business practices. Consider the following:

1. A woman walking home from work one day is approached by two rough-looking men who have a deal for her: a brand-new Culligan water machine, complete with 6 or 7 10-gallon water jugs. One had been leaning up against a white, unmarked truck, while the other, just to add a little something special to the business exchange, looked nervously around the intersection, presumably to identify any other potential customers. The entire kit and kaboodle was rather undervalued at something like $40. The woman’s inquiry about how to continue water service was met with an “uh, you can just call the company, or something.” Or something indeed.

2. A friend of ours was offered free cable from some random cable guy if only she’d perform her own service on him. “Cable guy” in DC, just to clarify, amounts to a guy in a beat-up Toyota pickup truck with a “No Fear” sticker on the crooked back bumper. This particular cable guy did his very best to live up to the standard, even though the standard is about 2 inches off the ground.

3. Leaving a parking garage one evening, the cashier told us she didn’t have any change. This could have meant that A) she didn’t have any change, B) she didn’t care to give us the change she did have, C) she was saving up for a new iPod. Of course it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility that she round down our ticket cost until she could give us the next bill she did have. We just had to overpay. Okay, that’s not really an example of “discounted” services, but it does show that sometimes in the nation’s capitol, the lines get a little blurred.

4. A popular coffee shop, Murky Coffee, just off the Eastern Market Metro stop, was shut down by the city for not paying its sales tax. By the time officials shuttered the doors, the owner owed more than $400,000. For coffee sales. Didn’t exactly take overnight to rack up that much back tax debt. As one friend put it, “all those times I paid an extra $2 because I had to go to the ATM since they would only take cash? That really pisses me off.” So much for cheap coffee.

5. In response to the revelation, previously covered up by the city, that DC water was laden with lead, city officials started giving out free Brita filters to households. That they didn’t plan much in the way of redoing the plumbing infrastructure — well, let’s not pay attention to that. People got something for nothing. Lead poisoning! Fast forward about 8 years or so and the city stopped short of replacing all of the bad pipe — if you guessed that African-American dense area of Anacostia, you win a prize. The prize is a cheap Culligan water system.

I sure hope the tourists enjoyed DC!

Santa on a plane

Twas the morning of Christmas, and all o’er the land

Was a blanket of white snow, the height of twelve hands.

I brushed off the car with a frustrated grunt

As my fingers went numb and the snow was in lumps.

They clung to the car with the grip of a mule

And I fretted to self that this just wasn’t cool.

We trekked to the airport in the last dark of night

Hoping all would be well with our twosome of flights.

But the plane sat around, all too heavy with ice,

And we missed the connection, now our twosome was thrice.

We saw Spokane and Utah, we spied cities galore,

From Chicago to New York and the cold eastern shore.

With Susanne in her kerchief and I in my cap

There was no settling in for any sort of nap.

What a Christmas to spend in the bland airports four,

But we fin’ly arrived and were traveling no more.

The sibling was nestled all comf in her bed,

Her daughters conversant of sugar plums instead.

We sat in the hot tub and talked of the clatter,

And we knew once again that the chaos did not matter.

I looked to the sky for Santa’s red sleigh,

Saw the stars twinkling at me and thought back on the day.

While Delta was there to annoy us and suck,

The people we love are a source of good luck.

So we rise up and cheer at the end of this night,

Merry Christmas to all and to all a safe flight!

Our wedding photographer sent us the link to our photos from the wedding, so I’m sharing it here.

http://heatherzphotography.com/clients/index.php?gnum=78

You need to put in my Hotmail email address as the user name and Susanne’s last name (with the proper first capital) as the password to see the photos. Until we get the CD of the photos, I can’t copy specific pictures to post up here, so you get all or nothing right now.

Meanwhile, upcoming post on my yogurt-making project and our baking efforts so far.

Seven years ago I was in the habit of getting to work at about 7:30, happy enough that I’d gotten an outside office with a window and a fairly reliable Starbucks to keep me charged through the day. We also had a brand new T3 line for all of our servers, and in the days before iTunes, still had ways of sharing music with each other in the workplace. Bethesda, Maryland, was a great spot to work, just two blocks from the Metro and in walking distance of more than 200 restaurants, most of them pretty good or better. We had a whole floor of a building on the main drag in town, with narrow hallways to fit in more offices. The owners had a thing against cubicles, which after 18 months of working in one now, I appreciate better.

The things I remember about that day are seemingly random at first, but they stitch together for me in my brain like a quilt made of scrap fabrics, and they have meaning in relation to each other. The first thing that happened is that our phones started ringing, up and down the halls. And if you tried to pick up a phone for the rest of the day, you couldn’t get a line out, because we’d hit our maximum limit of phones in use, which was something like 70 lines. And we only had 95 people in the office.

Then someone poked their head into my office, asking if I knew what had just happened. A plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City. Didn’t they have better flight plans than that? I went to CNN to see what was going on, and was astounded that there were no pictures and very little black text on the page. Gone was their usual layout. I thought we were having a problem with our T3 and then it dawned on me that it wasn’t the connection, it was all they were posting. Before I knew what happened, another plane hit the other tower, and then all hell broke loose. 

We were being attacked? Here? It was pretty incomprehensible. How many planes were out there? Nobody knew. We learned little bits of accurate information in a sea of junk — the Sears tower was hit in Chicago, there were bombs planted in DC, nobody knew how many rogue planes could hit at any moment. I don’t remember anymore if we learned about the crash in Pennsylvania or the Pentagon first, but the moment it hit the Pentagon, everything changed for me again. I lived two miles from the Pentagon.

At this point people had taken the lone television we had and plugged it in, setting it up in the middle of the conference room. We stood and sat, watching it, seeing the Towers burning, hearing the chaos in NYC, and then the chaos in Virginia. I saw helicopters flying over the area, and recognized my neighborhood on the screen. I began to realize that many of my colleagues had spouses who were unaccounted for, or that they couldn’t reach, or who were under lockdown. One of my favorite coworkers had a parter in the Department of Justice, and she hadn’t heard from him all day — he’d been taking his workout in the gym, and got locked inside, stuck there for hours until a guard found him and let him out. But other people had partners who worked at the Pentagon.

It was clear work wasn’t happening at the office, but we didn’t really know what else to do. Did we try to go home? The Metro wasn’t running normally, certainly. The first Tower fell. I cried, looking at the dust as it howled through New York streets. How many people had been inside the building? 30,000, some were saying. The Pentagon held 50,000 workers.

The second Tower fell and we all decided to go home, thinking if our spouses or friends were looking for us, maybe they’d come home too, and uh, well, there wasn’t anything else to do and we were all operating on shock at that point. Two coworkers who had Metroed in asked if I’d drive them — they were about 5 miles from my home. Sure, I said.

It took three hours to get all of us home. And that was when it really hit me just how in the middle of this we were. This was not some abstraction, not just horrifying pictures on television. I walked outside and it was right there. I smelled the burning of the Pentagon as we sat on Washington Boulevard, creeping slowly towards the buildings we lived in that no longer felt like home — because home feels comfortable and safe, or at least it’s supposed to. We were directionless and in mourning for people we knew, people who could have been hurt, people we didn’t know who had died or were missing.

I didn’t hear a commercial jet again for months because they’d shut down National Airport. I did hear the fighter jets patrolling the sky though, every couple of hours, rattling the windows of my apartment whenever they were overhead. I saw the Guardsmen out with assault rifles pointed at the ground, and the instant proliferation of American flags on most of the cars on the road. Driving past the burning Pentagon added an extra 45 minutes to my commute for the next few weeks.

My Mom was moving to Connecticut to be closer to my sister, so I also drove past Ground Zero in NYC, and smelled that fire, too. And just when I thought I was going to adjust to the checkpoint Charlies in DC, the constant chanting of “USA, USA,” and the horrifying levels of patriotism that thinly veiled a real thirst for Middle Eastern blood, we were taken aback again by the anthrax mailings to hit DC, and the sniper attacks in the DC metro area.

The sniper shit was awful — my football league canceled games, and I started measuring my life in terms of how recently I’d been to a shooting location or how close I could have come to being shot myself. That was my Home Depot, that bus route was near where I worked, and the ineffective DC police force had no idea what it was doing in hunting down the suspects.

So to people who lived in the heartland of the country back then, I’m sure it was harrowing and scary. To people who lived where the bombs hit — some of us still feel the attack in our bones. And that makes me all the sadder that the events of that day and that fall have been used so opportunistically to move us into war, to become a justification for taking away our liberties, for creating the most dysfunctional government agency overnight that doesn’t necessarily make us any safer. I love my country, and I particularly love the people in my country who reached out a hand when everything seemed so very fragile and tentative. I hope we can all continue to count on that strength under duress. And remember that this isn’t a day for patriots — it’s a day for us average, common people, to remember and be grateful for our ordinary lives.

me and cake

We got up at the crack of dawn today–I actually saw the sunrise at Susanne’s parents’ house, which was gorgeous. As I am unable, I didn’t run down the stairs to grab my camera, but it was red and full over the tree line, and from the top of the hill where the house sits, it cast a pale ochre gleam across a half-sky of puffy clouds, battling the bright blue of the sky of the retreating night sky.

Okay, enough of that. We hit the road at 7:30 am and motored our way through to Kalamazoo and then the Michigan-Indiana state line. It was at this point that I realized that though there still are jerky drivers in the Midwest, they don’t come as fast and furious as they do in DC. It’s kind of like the easiest level of Frogger versus the later levels when the logs are all short and the otters are out in force. 

The drive was pretty uneventful; we stopped for gas a couple of times, and I saw a strange sight next to the station, a big pink elephant. Like the kind you’re supposed to see when you’ve kicked back a few too many.

Pink elephant statue in Elgin, IN

We also saw that it was on a small road called “Elephant Trail,” which confusingly ended in a field (the field you see behind it). Trying to Google it I see there’s a large elephant monument in Elgin, Ontario, so I wonder if this has anything to do with that. Not too sure, since I’m now out of my neck of the country.

We had lunch in Illinois, in some random suburb of Chicago, in a building that looked like the bastard child of Denny’s and your friendly neighborhood orthodontist’s office. Denny’s in layout and menu, and Dr. Elkin in decoration and color choices. Hey, Dr. Elkin was my orthodontist at the Brace Place in New Jersey, and it looked just the same, okay? One buffalo chicken sandwich and California chicken croissant (which means it had two slabs of avocado on it) later, we were back on the road.

We entered Wisconsin and were suddenly confronted with billboard after billboard hocking cheese curds. No similar signs for whey, nor any mention of the availability of tuffets. I really think the tuffet lobbyists and marketers need to get off their lazy asses and stop the monopoly of ottomans. Further, descendants of the Ottoman empire who are out there reading this, how are you possibly okay with people thinking your greatest achievement is the footrest? That’s not the lasting legacy I’d be interested in, is all I’m saying.

So yes, cheese curds. We drove by cow herd after cow herd, standing, sitting, basking as it were, in their glory of cud chewing expertise. Brown Jersey cows, black and white cows, we’ve seen cows from New York through Wisconsin, but we hadn’t seen the barrage of “Lindsey’s cheese curds,” “Blue Hen cheese curds,” “Black Jack’s cheese curds,” all a mere highway exit away. It reminded me of driving through South Carolina seeing the plethora of signs for fireworks. Or Indiana, for that matter. I had no idea Indiana was the South Carolina of the Midwest, but there you have it.

As if the pressure to procure cheese curds wasn’t enough, I also noticed something strange. Somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin all the people of color suddenly disappeared. Now they were just abstract concepts; a legend that humans come in more than pasty white and ruddy white. Even stranger, the white people themselves started to look different. Men were no longer avoidant of mustaches, or plaid pants. Women’s hair fashions got bigger and bigger, almost in some kind of direct correlation with the size of their sunglasses. I started to feel alienated, and it slowly dawned on me: these are not my people. I can only hope that these folks–and I’m sure they’re all LOVELY people–are not like the ones I’ll meet in Walla Walla. Please, God.

We left the rural highway and made our way past Eau Claire and into Minneapolis/St. Paul, where we had a lively dinner with Susanne’s former coworkers at our hotel restaurant. We managed 750 miles today! We’ll head out early again tomorrow to go into Saskatchewan where I shall attempt to track down my mother’s farm, where she grew up. Presumably it has not moved in the last 50 years, so if it’s still standing, I can catch it. I’ll be sure to post pictures. Speaking of pictures, I’ll end with these from the wilds of Wisconsin:

Wisconsin field

Welcome to Wisconsin sign

to grandmother’s house in rural Michigan we go! And so we arrived last night, Susanne tired from driving all day (yes, we’re splitting the driving duties), and me still not feeling like I’d really left home. Most of where we’ve gone I’ve been before, save the remarkable pit stop in Niagara. I wonder if the rest of the drive is going to feel different for me. Whenever I’ve made a transition of any kind, I’ve always had to look back to note when something significant shifted or when I started a new chapter, I never seem to capture the change mid-stream or as it happens. I wonder if that’s perhaps part of what transition is all about: you can know a change is coming, but in the midst of it, you’re too close to actually experience it, and it’s only after it’s over that you can contemplate what is now different in your life.
Susanne’s mom and dad threw us a very lovely wedding reception party for all of the Michigan folks who couldn’t make it out to the wedding last month (a mere 4 weeks ago, I’ll note). We had another very nice cake in our colors–light blue and chocolate brown–though I’m sad to say that the top of our actual wedding cake suffered a very sad fate in the car on the first few days of our trip. The ice we put in the cooler melted, of course, and the cake that I thought was wedged nicely in the cooler defrosted a bit, softened, and slid down to sit in the cold water. Totally ruined, unfortunately. So I’ll never get to actually eat the non-chocolate portion of the very lovely confection. It just wasn’t meant to be. I’ll have to order another one sometime when we’re in Baltimore!
We received some lovely cards from people today, and one hysterically funny present: two obnoxiously bright orange Almont Raiders t-shirts from the local high school. How wonderful that neon orange looks so flattering on us! Oh, wait.
I may take a bath in the jacuzzi tub here, and it occurs to me that we should have done a “hot tubs across America” theme. Maybe for our next trip.
Tomorrow we leave very early for a 12-hour stretch from Detroit to Minneapolis, then to a late supper with Susanne’s old St. Paul crew. I’ll have pictures of the past couple days when I update tomorrow night.

I’ve only got a dial-up connection here at Susanne’s folks’ house, so no pictures in this post today, but no worries, I’ll get those caughts up Sunday night. Hopefully my way with words will paint the picture adequately enough.

It took some time yesterday night, after pulling into the garish yet luxurious casino to figure out that we actually wanted to get out of our hotel room and take a walk around the hotel. Stretching my legs, even with my bum knee, was too rife with promise to stay put, and the shoddy WiFi connection too frustrating to endure. (Actually, I think the Hampton Inn chain has had the best free WiFi of any hotel I’ve visited.)

It had been a long time since I’d been anywhere near a casino, unless you count the two times I was in the Las Vegas airport in 2005, and I wouldn’t call a bank of slot machines a “casino” per se. But I certainly clocked in my time as a kid when we made regular trips to Atlantic City–even though most of my time was spent in the video game arcades, or having lunch on a comp ticket, I still walked through on occassion with my parents, even bumping into Ivana Trump once. Literally. I still think about suing her for damages sometimes. Damn statutes of limitations!

This walk was no different. I had forgotten the way that cigarette smoke clings to one’s clothes, hair, and skin like an old man at the end of visiting hours in the nursing home, all desperate to be attached to something, any passing swatch of fabric. You have to hit every inch of yourself with soap in the shower because all of the gaps will still reek of lit tobacco. It’s so entirely unappealing to me. The sounds of the slots are almost deafening in their intensity, and irritating in their insistancy that you pay attention to this machine, no that machine, no that other shiny sparkling machine. There were only a few blackjack tables, one roulette wheel (always the worst odds in the house), and one craps table. Though many of the one-armed bandits will give you a pull for twenty-five cents you now must use a bill of some denomination to play. Trickery! I suppose I could assuage myself that at least some of what I would plunk in would benefit the residents of the reservation, but although I feel for their troubled history, I also have no real interest in gambling. And looking around at the people who were sparsely populating the facilty, they seemed to have no passion in it, either.

Despite these depressing surroundings, we were excited to be on our way and making progress. I personally was excited to see the falls the next day. We satisfied ourselves with some late night sweet potato fries–the bar was closed at midnight, which I found unbelievable–and turned in.

This morning the air was crisp like fall, but I wasn’t sure how long it would hold out. I got a groggy Dr. B in the shower and we made our way to the Niagara Falls park where after 3,289 steps (my knee loved every second of the climbing) we lurched onto the Maid of the Mist III, donned our souvenir parkas, and boated gaily forward–into a stinky haze of seagull excrement and whatever the Great Lakes had thrown over the side of the precipice. Seriously, it was incredible! The American side of the falls, while 20m taller than the Canadian side, cascaded more gracefully and quietly, so turning into the horseshoe  falls in Canada was breathtaking. The falls pounded away in a wide, encompassing curtain of froth and fury, twinkling near the top in the early morning sun like strings of blue-green crystals, then seeming angry in the middle as water morphed into foam, and finally thundering at the bottom, the loudest bass I’d ever heard outside the 9:30 Club in DC. Hell, it was louder than the 9:30 Club. It was wet and wild and I enjoyed thoroughly every second of it. We got some German tourists to take our picture. We climbed back into the car, making our way into Canada, across Ontario (they have more farms than I realized), and back into the US. Coming across the Rainbow Bridge took an hour — I never thought I’d curse a bridge more than I’ve hexed the Delaware Memorial Bridge or the GW Bridge, but now I have — and then we arrived at the ‘rents. Reception to follow at 2 tomorrow. More pictures to come.

I miss you all. We just tripped 1,006 miles getting here. Feels longer already, and I still feel like I’m just going on some crazy extended vacation.

This blog will go live in August when we start our cross-country road trip. . . .