woobiquity

cxl. To the end of the earth and back (daily)

Stepping away from it all could not have been more satisfying. It’s not Death Valley, Harkers Island isn’t, or the arctic tundra. It’s not an island so far out in the Pacific that you’d die long before help arrived. But to get here you do have to travel a ways, across dried-up farmlands, trailer park poverty or military training areas (now surreally dotted with door- and window-less Iraqi dwellings). Or else, by coast, to navigate the sand-cursed waters of the Atlantic’s ‘Graveyard’. It’s not for the yacht and amphitheatre set, this place, not by a nautical mile.

Come here to fish, hunt or encounter the Old Testament God and you’ll find what you want, biting, jumping and thumping with bounty. But ‘culture’? The local library, a little ranch-style house (for sale) over on Highway 70, is open three days a week, if that’s what you mean. At Morehead City you might catch a bluegrass concert, but no wine please, we’re ‘family friendly’.

Cultural overload is a dangerous thing. It can dull what the individual concerts, plays and exhibitions were meant to tickle. London’s rife with it, a vast parlor with so many voices that after a while all you hear is the crowd’s thunderous madness. Torturous white noise. So away, for three months, to a quiet place where I might hear my own voice for a change.

The instinct to go, to go as far as you can go, is inherent in humankind. Witness the people in cars and trucks here who drive to the end of the island and park, as close to the barrier islands and, beyond them, the open seas, as you can get without leaving dry land. Bored state patrolmen do it. Sons and daughters do it. Salty dogs do it. (Even educated fleas do it? I’m sure they would if they could.) And there’s nothing to see there but a pencil of land four miles out with a speck of light pulsating above it. This is the end of the earth, the sea level equivalent to climbing a mighty peak.

I did them one better. Down a trail behind the rangers’ station, I found the true end of civilization: a lush, ferny terrain with prehistoric beaches (see photos) where sun-stressed driftwood had melted into eroded canyons of rock and sand. Farther still the pines gave way to a clearing, an expanse of marsh grass that someone had helpfully built a long boardwalk across.

Going there, to the end of the dock, became my daily ritual, its magnetism pulling the bike onward, onward, for no other reason than that it was there, an end and therefore also a beginning. Getting there became happiness. And happiness became creativity. Ideas fluttered around me like butterflies. Oh, actually, those were butterflies. Real butterflies, not the kind that used to flit around in my stomach on the Greenwich to Cannon Street train.

Even in nature, everything has its price, and claiming my sense of calm meant momentarily stealing it from several egrets, a heron, a flock of white ibises, a kingfisher, a couple of pelicans, a few hundred sand crabs, a black snake, a large spider or two, and not to mention, I’m sure, many creatures crawling around unseen in their rich and dangerous habitat.

The lumbering blue crab in the stream at least seemed unperturbed by my presence. When the high lunar tides came to signal the season’s change and flooded the marsh with seawater, thousands of conical snails, each an inch or so in length, cleverly hoisted themselves up blades of grass and waited. Or cleverly I thought, until after several days I peeled one off and found it as dry as Elmer’s in its shell. Those that survived were already covered in mud again, looking very much like oblong rabbit droppings.

I came here with a question. Would I at last call myself a writer, a literary writer, and mean it, or would I finally put the dream down, knowing I’d given it the best my talent and attention span could give? To the extent that I’ve had an answer yet, it came (is this the way with all things profound or is there not some certainty about something somewhere in this world?) in the form of more questions. Would a childhood day involving two boys, a rowboat, a foot-long hotdog, and a reckless highway bike ride translate as fiction? Would a short story about a middle-aged man’s flight from a small town work better as a dream sequence? Should the man be young?

Would letting myself write a bad poem every morning – simply finding a way to bridge two words picked blindly out of a newspaper or book – help me cross over into the zone? Would it unearth themes my subconscious had buried like snails in bog mud?

This morning’s poem was ‘make’ to ‘cult visionary’. And don’t laugh.

Make something

Make something out of nothing:
Take three months. Add a sub-letter,
subtract seven million commuters.
Release lightning bugs, hang a porch
swing, press play on soundtrack:
junebugs, birdies, tree frogs, waves.
Now stare at laptop until boiling.
Simmer until induces extra-kitchenary
ideas for largest knives in drawer.
Ding!, return to seat. Write. Repeat.

Let mixture stew until ingredients blend
and set (may take weeks or years,
depending on toughness). When ready,
set out wares for judging. Receive
well-earned sticker: Pulitzer Victim,
Pulp King, Wildean Axiomaniac,
Tin Eared Idiot, Cult Visionary.

cxxxix. Of signs 'ubiquity' is everywhere

O lord i besch u 2 connect me 2 my emails... I'm not getting anything. Are you? (Church sign, Beaufort, NC, last week.)

But seriously, if this doesn't prove that the invisible threads of the wireless internet have taken their place within the full American fabric, nothing would. When will Europe catch up? Travel here has been transformed by it. Now you can follow your whims out on the road and not be stuck sleeping at the next Motel 6 or completely taking your chances with the one meal you'll have in a given city.

Plan as you go. If your hotel doesn't offer a free connection (and almost everywhere we stayed did), you can bet there's a coffeeshop around the corner that does. In Texas you can even connect at freeway rest areas (below). Whatever this has done for the social lives of truckers is their business!

cxxxviii. Of gorgeous sunrises

Yes, I know they're as commonplace as the air, but a good sunrise is still worth a look, especially when it has a spikey yucca shape in the corner that's crying out to have 'KAPOW' written across it. Topsail Beach, North Carolina, yesterday.

cxxxvii. Of good places to stop on the road

Eat drink eat drink drive sleep eat drink drive drive drive. After gasoline, food and rest were always going to be the essential fuels for a three-week road trip looping around the southern half of the United States. But food, drink and good places to sleep also turned out to be the journey’s main delights. It’s not all Econo Lodges and Pizza Huts out there (thanks be to God). Below is a little black book of places you might also enjoy.

Of course, it’s the journey rather than the destination that matters most. So for me the enduring image from this trip will probably not be any of these stops, but of the long, open road in west Texas at dusk, where miles and miles ahead of us a bright light twinkles. It fills the whole of the pinpoint where the road vanishes and could be in either lane or hogging both. Headlights? Mystery Lights? A mirage? Whatever it is, we're coming at it at 80 miles per hour. Whatever it is, we'll reach it eventually.

North Carolina
We stayed at my parents’ house in Stokes County, then on to the Snowbird Mountain Lodge near Robbinsville for astonishing views and a spot of trying to outrun lightning in the inn’s private kayaks. We ate at the restaurant at the inn, where the food was five-star quality (go for the trout) and served by down home staff who out of politeness offered us iced tea rather than wine at the start. Brown bag lunches (included in the room rate) were also fun. [photo: morning lights at the Snowbird]

Tennessee
We stayed at the Talbot Heirs Guesthouse in Memphis, in room 8, which could have been designed by the ladies at Sugarbaker’s (that’s a Designing Women reference in case you didn’t know, and basically a compliment). Talbot Heirs is brilliantly located, just across from The Peabody and two blocks from Beale. We ate at Automatic Slim's, where everything's eclectic, especially the menu. It's Carribean meets Southwestern. The striped bass was mighty good, and the 80s DJ was an interesting touch. [photo: view from Talbot Heirs window]

Arkansas
Time didn’t permit an overnight stay in Little Rock. We ate at Flying Fish, where there’s a whole wall of singing Big Mouth Billy Bass 'trophies' (brought in for adoption by locals) and all manner of catfish combos on the menu. Totally Arkansas, and we loved it.

Oklahoma
We’d braced ourselves for the long, empty drive through Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle, and even had a cooler stocked with luxury cheeses and crackers just in case. In the end, fog filled the whole damned space and the temperatures dropped far too low for picnicking. We stayed at a Hampton Inn in the college town of Norman, Oklahoma. We ate a late meal next door at Charleston's, a regional chain, but it was open, and the food was way above average, energetically served by a young man from the college.

New Mexico
We stayed at The Water Street Inn, a bed and breakfast downtown. Nice place if you’re into B&Bs, and cheaper than the luxury hotels. But next time we’d probably opt for a self-catering casita just out of town. We ate at the very good Ristra with a rowdy group of most cultured people, followed by a drink and some shameless bribes at Vanessie, a piano bar, which yielded a round of ‘name that movie’ from the tired pianist. We also had meals at The Burrito Company (good fish tacos) and Il Vicino (but this was altitude sickness-induced take-out; otherwise we’d have been at Café Pasqual’s).

Texas
We stayed at two excellent motels-cum-hotels, The Thunderbird Hotel in Marfa and The Hotel San Jose in Austin, plus one night at the Austin Motel, which despite (or because of?) the cheaper prices and bohemian location on S. Congress Street had interiors that looked like someone had gone to a low-rent furniture store and bought everything in sight, right down to the tacky decorative vases. In Marfa, we ate at Jett’s at the Hotel Paisano. Even if it was the only place open on a Monday night, the food was good. No Elizabeth Taylor sightings though. We had breakfast at The Brown Recluse, a coffeehouse and used book shop in an old bungalow, where we overheard various arty conversations about experimental crochet and vinyl record collections. And we had coffee at The Marfa Book Company, a place that would be as much at home in San Francisco as it is in this strange desert town. In Austin, we ate at Guero's Taco Bar (pretty good fish tacos), South Congress Café (trendy interior and friendly staff but disappointing food), Shady Grove (a real experience and terrific food, under a giant pecan tree) and twice at Magnolia Café (one of the best diners in America; the blackened catfish salad was perfection). We also did copious dog and people watching at Jo’s. [photo: poolside at The Thunderbird Hotel]

Louisiana
We stayed at the Pierre Coulon Guesthouse in New Orleans. It’s literally a guesthouse at the back of Rick and Stephen’s restored Creole cottage, and it overlooks a lush tropical courtyard. Most comfortable. A bargain too. We ate at Snug Harbor (good food, but the jazz room is tops), the Praline Connection (family soul food recipes, but the kitchen must be suffering post-Katrina) and Coop's Place (satisfyingly grotty interior, delicious cajun food). [photo: Pierre Coulon banana trees]

Mississippi
Being a big fan of The Oxford American magazine (although it’s now based in Arkansas), I’d looked forward to Oxford as a potential highlight of the trip. But a long, dangerous drive in the rain and a strange stop in the dark at a desolate gas station, where two men and a sheriff watched us nervously throughout our refueling, didn’t shed the best light on Mississippi (besides which, I couldn’t stop thinking about Matthew Shepard). We stayed at The Inn at Ole Miss on the University of Mississippi campus, where we were asked several times what had brought us there. We ate at Bottletree Bakery, for breakfast, and despite the limited options for the wheat intolerant (yes, I know, it’s a bakery – but nothing else was open!) the folk art, chatty locals and uniqueness of the low-cut counter won us over.

Alabama
Rain rather than stars fell on Alabama while we were there, and who knew the roads could stretch for so long without so much as a truck stop. By the time we reached Lee's Restaurant, somewhere on Highway 78, we were ravenous. The retirees at the next table mentioned Wal-Mart twice in their short conversation (as in, “I went down to Wal-Mart and picked up one of them things you keep CDs in”). In the fluorescent-lit glass counter under the cash register a sign said “things left on tables”, which were: a key on a rough length of wire and about eight pairs of eyeglasses, including some tinted, 1980s ladies’ bifocals.

Georgia
We stayed at The Glenn Hotel in downtown Altanta. It was a bubble of modernity and style on a rainy night in Georgia. We ate at B.E.D., the Glenn’s restaurant and the third in an upscale chain after New York and Miami. We opted for the conventionality of a table rather than lounging like Caligula on one of the mattresses. The food was good, but the waitress was especially sweet and the model-hostess who seated us had the longest legs I have ever seen. We had breakfast at Ria’s Bluebird Café, where the style is alternative, the food is prepared with extraordinary adeptness and the view is of an old cemetery. The perfect end note.

cxxxvi. Of curiosities in shop windows

I guess the looters didn't have much use for old junk like this. I snapped this image because I wanted time later to contemplate the implications of a display of black-face busts in a New Orleans window. But the more I look at it the more convinced I am that these are not black faces at all. In fact, isn't that Queen Elizabeth II (and companion)?

cxxxv. New Orleans after the storm

Nothing you’ve read about New Orleans is true, and this will be no exception.

A year after Katrina’s and Rita’s waters devastated the city in what is now locally referred to understatedly, charmingly as ‘the storm’, is the city an apocalyptic war zone with an explosive murder rate and a stagnant reconstruction effort? A place abandoned by politicians, where bodies have been left to rot in attics and the light from a single FEMA trailer may be the only sign of life for miles? A post-urban sprawl where even the police can’t get a telephone connection or find their way through the morass of gunfire and time-lapse catastrophe to reach a crime scene, because the street signs are gone and anyway the streets themselves have yet to be reclaimed from the shifting aftermath of meaninglessness?

Or is New Orleans at heart the same resilient, historic, quirky party town it always was, just with a refreshingly thinned-out tourist population, where the drinks still flow, the gas lamps still burn 24 hours a day and the red beans on Monday will still atone any sins since Friday?

Now that I’ve been back to New Orleans I’m no more sure where the truth lies (pun unintended but apt) than before. All of the above may be true, or none of it.

I can tell you that I pushed aside healthy banana leaves in the quiet, old Creole district of Faubourg Marigny one September Saturday night and emerged onto Frenchmen Street, where in the dark, decrepit doorway of The Spotted Cat a woman danced, people drank and laughed, a band played catchy gypsy music.

That at Snug Harbor jazz club later that night, the standing-room-only audience held a conversation with the visiting trio. Not the respectful, figurative conversation of the London concert hall but the spontaneous uh-huhs and yeahs of the home turf, of the sanctuary.

That ‘Help Wanted’ signs hang in almost every café window. That at 5pm the traffic backs up for half a mile on St. Charles Avenue, granting ogglers long, fair views of jogging Tulane students. That Bourbon Street is as bawdy and loud as it ever was, with more of a police presence than I remember and good-sized crowds in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, the revelers perhaps as regional now as once they were global.

But those are details, each as suspect as it is real. Because New Orleans is a city built on myth, charms, wild illusions, so that disaster could only have flared these passions further, shrouding more thickly both the legends and the hard truths of a municipality already, intentionally lost within the steamy, obscuring mists of bar-room perspiration and heavy Gulf air.

Has New Orleans been split in two? One side safe on the high ground, the other invited to drown and keep on drowning? That’s a question that will mystify social scientists and ignite classroom discussions for decades yet, just as now it lights up the letters pages of Louisiana newspapers. The best available answer must be yes and no. Because the city you’d see from the balcony of a French Quarter inn and the city you might long for or mourn from a government-funded apartment in Houston must look very different indeed. Because even the artistically-orientated, relatively well-off people who live in the Faubourg Marigny are probably finding that their meals out don’t taste as good as they did before the evacuation, aren’t served with the same aplomb or aren’t served at all because the available staff have to take a break sometime. You could view New Orleans as the first grand-scale experiement on just how long America's emerging creative class could possibly survive without the service class, or to examine, under the most extreme conditions, whether there’s really any difference between the two.

I stand in front of a boarded-up restaurant on Decatur Street. It still bears a name that I recognize from The Times-Picayune’s ‘Top 100 Places to Eat’, published earlier this year and, interestingly, including not only the old favorites that managed to reopen but also a dozen ‘new’ places. A notice on the window says they’ve moved uptown. Was that before or after Katrina? Because of the flood or in spite of it? The same questions could be asked of several household restorations we saw in districts that didn't otherwise seem to be part of the long reconstruction. New Orleans, more than most cities, has been in a state of managed decay and perpetual rebirth for hundreds of years. In some ways the disaster only brought that process into wider, accelerated and more than usually confounding view.

This impossibility of discerning what's happening why, of understanding the dreams and intentions within a single city block, whether they were interrupted or seeded by the tragedy, makes me wonder how much the published histories will never know about this place. The history of New Orleans, like history everywhere, will be nothing more than the stories that got repeated the most, than the scraps of documentation that somehow survived the flood. Forget about the whole truth and nothing but.

This, however, is a truth I can vouch for: anyone who says New Orleans might as well be given to the seas has never laid eyes on the place, before or after the storm, or else has a soul that’s just a fossilized lump in the gut, like a ball that never dropped.

This may also be true: if you’ve been thinking about getting into catering as a waiter or chef, the chance of a lifetime is waiting for you in New Orleans. Whatever your prior experience, by sundown tomorrow you could probably be working in one of the world’s top restaurants, joining the accumulating masses who will heave New Orleans atop their shoulders into the direction of whatever it’s becoming.

To quote a variation on the popular Dr. Bob artwork that’s as ubiquitous in these parts as sweet tea and lemon, as seen behind the bar at Coop’s Place in the French Quarter: ‘Rebuild Or Leave!’ With regret, we chose the latter.

photos (top) storefront window, French Quarter (above) closed barber shop in the Faubourg Marigny

cxxxiv. Of motels that are the new hotels

Like all great ideas, its time has come. Route 66 may be ancient history, its motor court accommodations and art deco service stations returning to dust, but America still has plenty of classic motels that haven’t yet breathed their last. Therein lies a tremendous opportunity, both for entrepreneurs and for travelers.

The owners of Hotel San Jose in Austin and The Thunderbird Hotel in Marfa, are leading the way. Both properties are former tourist motels, places where minimalism and functionalism – a comfortable bed, a clean bathroom – were always the reason for being. With their relaunch, now they’ve also got style.

So much style that if you didn’t know the San Jose’s history you might think you’d walked into a place that had never been anything but a miniature resort, where gravel paths get swept daily and mid-century antiques harmonize with straight-lined, Modernist tables. Not a font is out of place. Even the bricks that prop the gates open have aesthetic value. It’s both as timeless and cool as a hotel could be, and yet it’s somehow also relaxed and without pretence.

Our waitress at Jett’s said Marfa is the kind of town you could drive right through and think there was nothing to it, completely missing the many galleries, bohemian houses and bars. In fact, we did drive right past the Thunderbird. But what a find. The clean lines of the classic motor court are completely in tact, around a desert swimming pool, but every last detail has individuality and style, right down to the hand-painted handicapped parking sign.

If every town in America had one of these I know where I’d stay every time.

photos (top) view from room 23 at The Thunderbird Hotel, model: Wilhelm (above) behind Jo's, the Hotel San Jose's ultra-cool outdoor cofeehouse, model: Austin local

cxxxiii. Of writers all over the place(s)

Common Ground: Around Britain in 30 Writers is published this week in London, and if you don't mind me saying so, you should buy it (unless, of course, you're on my Christmas list, in which case maybe you should hold off until early 2007. So many books in the world etc etc).

In addition to an essay by yours truly on T.S. Eliot and the City of London (a kind of miniature, British-based Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but with more bankers' lights and no cars or drugs), the book also features ruminations, jubilations and consecrations by writers as esteemed as Ali Smith, Niall Griffiths and, my editor on the project, John Simmons, each exploring the, erm, common ground shared with an admired novelist, playwright, songwriter or poet.

Everyone involved with Common Ground is associated with the writers group 26. If you're a writer in the UK, you should be a member too. Oh, and if you're more of a try-before-I-buy type of person you can read Ali Smith's contribution here.

cxxxii. Of humor in the retail arts

Sign in the window at Magnolia Cafe, Austin, Texas, today. They don't really mean it though. It's diner food with pizzaz. The Baton Rouge Salad with blackened catfish was superb. Mmm-hm!

cxxxi. Postcards from Texas

We stop for gas. With its bright, polished branding, the Shell station could be anywhere. But there, at the edge of the parking lot, a brown 1980s Cadillac rests. And near it, a purple, old-fashioned trailer covered in used tires dons haphazard and fading signage about truck repair services. A plain, sheet metal structure modestly serves as the 'Mustang Superette', beyond which a long train of rusting cars passes, sounding its one-note lament. Three white Border Patrol vehicles caravan past, and as we drive off only one word seems to fit the surrounding landscape: scrub. Actually, no, 'scrap' is just as apt. Junked cars dot the land, a couple of ranch horses practically forced to eat around them.

Yes, we are in southwest Texas. The drive from filling up at Fort Hancock to bedding down in arty, secluded Marfa turns out to be the most awe-inspiring of our trip so far -- 75 miles per hour through fabulous, yucca-studded nothingness, with the train's engine light losing ground in the rearview mirror and all my qualms about driving through Texas going the way of the falcon's wings -- I still slammed the brakes in disbelief when we sped past this.