Americana Sign Watch:
1. Meteor Crater RV Park - You Can Crash at Our Pad
2. Black Barts Saloon
3. Cool, swirly 1950s lettering on the National Parks signs
Since we’re dragging the rig behind us, Jetsons-style with the fold-up rooms,
home is the same every night, but the front yard changes :) Behind me now is a
railroad track where a steam train chugs past twice a day. While I was waiting
outside to take the picture of the train, a 66-year old man named Don from
Kissimmee, Florida, regaled me with tales of his 40-footer (that's a big rig),
his wife and her battle with breast cancer, his early retirement from the
fishing and gaming commission so he wouldn't have to sit in a rocking chair as
an old man watching the TV and saying, "Gaw, I wish I'd seed that!" when he can
now say, "Hail, I *did* see that!" why Camping World is "a toy store for grown
ups," where to get good deals on diesel, and how you can pop your windshield out
if you crank your levelling gear too hard and twist it, and then you have to put
"50 mile per hour tape on it and ever'thang" (that would be duct tape by the
way). Campers are nothing if not chatty.
One of the advantages of driving cross-country, as opposed to flying, is that
you get a sense of continuity of the land as it changes from lush Kentucky green
to flat Midwestern cornfields, to southwest desert flat flat flat, and then –
suddenly! – hills and forests and rugged red rocks in the red desert sand.
Also, something you notice immediately out here in the Wild Wild West is that
the sky seems to open up around you. It is hard to capture in pictures, because
pictures don’t give you the 180° panorama (or 360° if you’re outside and not
driving in the car) you get in real life of being in the middle of a ball with
the sky scooping around you to take up the top half of the sphere. There was a
perfect Simpsons sky (http://www.tvtome.com/Simpsons/) all the way to the Grand
Canyon .
All the cowboy/frontier motif keeps prompting my internal soundtrack to play old
Mitch Miller songs (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006418K/ref=m_art_li_4/102-9545204-0278500?v=glance&s=music)
that I haven’t thought about in a million years. When was the last time you
started humming My Darling Clementine or the Red River Valley ? You can’t help
yourself out here…. In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine….
The Grand Canyon – what can I say that won’t sound totally trite? It was
stupefying, standing in front of it. I felt a sudden rush of dizziness, and an
overwhelming desire to cry. I don’t know what that was all about – every time we
moved on to a different lookout point, I had the same reaction. The last time I
felt that kind of overwhelming, almost vibrating, external force was when Angela
and I went to Ground Zero in NYC, but at least there I could recognize that what
I was feeling was the aftershocks of enormous loss. Here, it was more of a sense
of awe and a feeling for how small we are and how big the world is. Usually, the
world expands just a few yards out in front of you, giving you the false sense
of seeming big enough to take it all in. In front of the Grand Canyon , you
realize what a little hamster you really are.
The biggest crowds come to gawk and look and cluster around the nearest lookout
points to the south entrance. If you drive a little further out to the Desert
View lookout, you get less crowds and more scenery. What’s peculiar about this
area of the country is that I haven’t seen any American minorities. Every
non-white person I’ve seen has been speaking a foreign language. However, to a
person, they all pose for the same grinny picture against the guard rails at the
Grand Canyon . Here’s ours, of Wes and Keighley. We did the Griswolds' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085995/)
“quick look” gesture too :)
At least one person per lookout area presses his (almost always a his) luck by
getting waaaaaay out there on the edge for their photo op. You’re torn between,
Hey…buddy…buy the postcard…! and yanking him to safety…and just giving him that
final tip he needs for – Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
The Grand Canyon also attracts the classic Grizzly Adams hiker dude with his
days-old beard growth, backpack, jumbo water canteen, and parachute-nylon
short-short-short-shorts (thanks for sharing! Put that away now!)
Almost as cool as the Grand Canyon itself was the IMAX movie, which takes you
places you couldn’t otherwise go (http://www.grandcanyonimaxtheater.com/). The
only way to describe it all is a TJ-style “awesome!” which is only significant
if you’ve ever heard my nephew say it the way he does :)
Coming back from the Grand Canyon , we passed through an alien dust storm that
made the whole landscape in front of us turn into the surface of the moon, all
yellowy haze with the setting sun burning an orangey cigarette hole in the sky.
The flat, empty, cactus-y parts of Arizona remind me of Snoopy’s (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/)
brother, Spike, who was supposed to be from Needles, Arizona . I looked it up on
the map, and sure enough, the place exists – way out there on the state border.
We stopped to get our kicks on the historic remaining stretch of Route 66 at the
Route 66 Diner, where they billed themselves as such an authentic 50s diner that
you could “come in – step back 50 years – you’re a teenager again! The 50s like
you remember it!” but there wasn’t a soul in the place that was over 40 – Wes
and I were the senior citizens. The décor was faux 1950s memorabilia – Route 66
signs, James Dean posters, waitresses wearing Pink Ladies shirts. Our waitress,
whose name was Carol, had tightly curled under bangs in the Original Barbie
style, back when she had the severe ponytail and the overdone eyeliner. Dinner
came with wax beans (when was the last time you saw wax beans??), with bendy
straws for our drinks and utensils served in paper sacks.
Classic Americana TV: This is the crap I have been watching lately.
More than I ever wanted to see of “Jackass: The Movie” where grown men take
turns hurting themselves, de-pantsing each other, and filming it. I watched guys
hang from trees in their underwear, fling themselves onto concrete, purposefully
give themselves papercuts in the webs of their fingers, and run around in panda
outfits kung fu fighting and getting their asses kicked. I watched most of it
from between my fingers in front of my eyes (tell me when it’s over!) while Wes
laughed hysterically.
Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. This is the female version of #1 above, with female stupidity being the entertainment hook. Can that girl really be that dumb? This week on Newlyweds: watch Jessica invite her friend Casey to live with her and her husband, lay around and giggle with huge amusement at her own perceived cuteness, and make fun of Nick. Scary! What was even scarier was that *after* Newlyweds went off, a show devoted to Jessica’s younger sister Ashlee came on, and she was even dumber! I sat there in horror, thinking, Oh my God, Jessica is the *smart* one in the family…!
American Chopper (http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/amchopper/amchopper.html) If you haven’t seen this, you really have to. Watch these guys build custom motorcycles, just so you can see the incredibly bad tempered father bitch and yell at his employees. It’s a train wreck every week, you can’t not watch.
Country Music Countdown, where the songs are things like “Save A Horse, Ride
a Cowboy!” while Gene Autry turns, rotisserie-style, in his grave.
On the serious side, there have been some challenges to staying online so I can
keep working (yes, I am working! Okay, not at this very moment, but I have been
putting in the time). Even though some of the projects I am working on are
research/writing based, it is nearly impossible to have all the resources I need
to get things done if I’m not connected to the internet *all the time*.
If nothing else, I need to stay on top of email and answer the work-related
messages…which means I have to *at the very least* download email every day so I
can delete all the messages from all those people out there who really really
*really* want me to increase my penis/ball size, get a cheaper mortgage, and
stop paying so much for ink jet cartridges and xerox toner, to at least *GET TO*
the work-related email.
I haven’t been writing about *work* because it’s boring for most people, but a
couple of people have asked, so here’s how I’m doing it. I have three levels of
internet connection at my disposal, depending on where we’re parked. The fastest
is when we stay somewhere that has something called Hotspotzz (http://www.hotspotzz.com)
which lets me use my 802.11 wi-fi card and get near-cable-modem speed internet.
If I don’t have that, if I’m in T-Mobile’s coverage area (http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/),
I have a wireless modem card in my laptop that lets me connect, even while
driving down the road. Failing *that* I have regular telephone-line modem
connection, which is almost universally available.
There are days, like a couple days ago, where I do things like use Wes’ cell
phone to conference call with some coworkers at HCC for an hour and a half,
while connected to the HCC server with the wi-fi and making changes to the
intranet web site as we talked. From their end, it’s not any different from
their end from when I’m physically at home in Columbia , MD with my cable modem
connection. But don’t be fooled by the seemingly holographic Marie – the only
way telecommuting really works is if you keep a variety of options available to
constantly maintain your internet connection. That’s the key – can people
communicate with you? Can you communicate with them? Can you share files? I’m
wondering if, by the time Keighley is an adult, whether all of this Technology
Pioneer stuff will just be the status quo. I hope so.
/boring work info OFF
I didn’t realize, having a Jessica Simpson moment myself, that you can’t get to
Utah without going *around* the big ol’ hole in the ground, so we are going via
Nevada, so tomorrow it’s Viva Las Vegas….(cue up Elvis on the mental jukebox…)
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds….