Where I live,
There's a lady
Who walks everywhere on her hands
Doesn't trust where her feet want to take her
My drive back to Baton Rouge today was the usual boring. The only major slowdown was rubbernecking for a spectacular accident on I-10 westbound—about a dozen emergency vehicles, an SUV on its side, and what used to be a red Acura Integra ripped and twisted almost beyond recognition.
There was also a trucker who flashed his lights at me. This has happened to me several times in the past month or two of driving—in a few different cars and both alone and with someone else in the car—and I'm having trouble deciding what they're trying to communicate. Is it:
A) "Hey, a chick in a car singing to herself."
B) "There's a cop ahead, slow down."
C) "Hook 'em horns."
D) "Your back right wheel is about to fall off."
E) "Quit swerving like a maniac."
F) "Hey sweet stuff, pull over and give daddy a kiss."
G) A and F
H) D and F
I) E and F
J) None of the above
If anybody has any suggestions, let me know. It'll be useful for when I drive back next weekend to move into my new house (whee!)...
I'm going to go ahead and declare 9pm to 10pm on Tuesday nights reserved for "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" watching parties. This is officially my new favorite reality show. Sorry, "Trading Spaces," but I just think that it's time we see other people.
So I drove to Austin on Thursday and spent Friday and Saturday driving around, calling numbers, seeing houses. I saw some really beautiful $1200 places but the last house I saw yesterday was The One. Okay, it would have actually been The One with capital letters if it had a dishwasher, but it's still the one because it has everything else—hardwoods, central air, ceiling fans, big windows, washer/dryer connections, parking, etc—and all for only $1000 a month. Which is pretty damn good for a house at 38th and Duval. I'm going to give the owners a check for the deposit today, trot on over to Baton Rouge to collect my crap, and come back to move in around the second week of August.
I was so hyper last night that it took me over three hours to fall asleep. "Insomniac Music Theater" was ok for a while, but "Project Greenlight" on HBO proved to not only be more entertaining but also put me to sleep after it ended.
Kathryn and I drove the 13 hours from North Carolina to Louisiana yesterday, pausing briefly to sample the cultural delights of the South at a gas station/Dairy Queen that sold various Alabama, Confederate flag, and Jesus paraphernalia. I came really really close to buying a shot glass that said "The South will rise again!"
So, once again, I find myself in Baton Rouge. Don't worry, Austin, it's just for now, it doesn't mean anything, you know you're the only city for me...
Various parts sore, scraped, and sunburned, Kathryn and I are starting the drive home today. Personally, I'm looking forward to Mississippi. What a lovely state. All those... pine trees.
So the program for the Rural Route Film Festival is online, and while good ol' Skip and I are going to have to step outside and have a few words about the credits, it's still really cool. "World Premiere"! oooOOooo!
Kathryn and I arrived at Suzanne's parents' house on Lake Norman yesterday—we took a boat ride, ate good food, drove through a thunderstorm to go see Pirates of the Caribbean (Johnny Depp acting like a madman... mmmmm...), exchanged drunk stories, slept in, ate yummy breakfast, and are now going to go out on the boat again for some tubing or whatever you call it when the boat pulls you along on some giant inflatable thing and you do your best to hold on.
Parts V-VI: Shenandoah National Park and North Carolina
So we made it to the New Jersey show in time to get lawn seats for the Pearl Jam show, which wasn't as much fun as DC since instead of psycho Ten Club PJ fans we were surrounded by drunk, moshing frat boys who kept yelling either "Ole ole ole ole" or "E-ddie! E-ddie! E-ddie!"... Kathryn and I ignored them and danced like idiots and had fun. They played a bunch of stuff I hadn't heard at the DC show and did three encores, during which Sleater-Kinney (who opened) came out and sang with them.
Tuesday I managed to drive out of NYC without killing anyone and we headed to Shenandoah National Park. We camped across from a group of boyscouts and then spent the next day taking our time on the Skyline Drive, which runs along the tops of the mountains. It would have made for some truly spectacular views, but most of the spectacular was obscured by dense blue smog. Yaaaaay industry!
The campsite Wednesday night was also gorgeous—wooded, with built-up tent sites and heavenly bathrooms (you forget how easy it is to be spoiled by national parks as opposed to state parks). Total wildlife count for Shenandoah: four bears, three bunnies, and about two dozen deer. We also ran into a couple from Jennings, Louisiana—our first LA plate for the trip.
Today we took the interstate most of the way through Virginia and then hopped back on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the drive into North Carolina to Boone. We saw our second LA plate on the Blue Ridge—going about ten miles below the speed limit, with a "Choose Life" specialty plate and a Baton Rouge car dealership insignia.
Pictures from Kathryn's trip to Connecticut and our journey from NYC to NC are here. Acadia National Park is still here.
I arrived safely in NYC after decent plane rides and walking 12 blocks through Harlem with Lissa and not getting hassled once, only blessed by some guy sitting on a stoop. On the plane ride to Memphis I sat next to Kelly Ardoin, who graduated from SJA a year behind me and is now studying architecture in Brooklyn. We reminisced about Sr. Adelaide and how great it is not to be there anymore.
The current plans are to head to the Garden State for the Pearl Jam show tomorrow night and then take it from there. Hooooo-ee!
I'm flying back to NYC around 3pm this afternoon to resume my and Kathryn's trip... We'll make a possible New Jersey detour for another Pearl Jam show then head down the Blue Ridge Parkway to see mountains and North Carolina friends.
The Baton Rouge detour wasn't as bad as expected—it was actually kinda nice to see all of my mom's siblings and most of my cousins. But it will be nice to be in the car again and then headed back to Austin... though I'm going to insist that we take some random road trips this fall, if only because I simply will not have time for it ; )
In the meantime, check this freaky shit out. The frog's my favorite.
The plane rides from Baton Rouge to DC were fairly uneventful, notable only for the very large black woman sitting next to me on the first flight, reading xeroxed and highlighted articles on how Satan was trying to conquer her mind, and a sighting of a Hooters Air jet pulling in at BWI. Kathryn met me at the airport and we set out to find something interesting to do in Baltimore. We failed miserably. So after an hour or so of walking sweatily around the touristy boardwalk area we headed for DC.
I forget whether we were trying to get somewhere in particular or what, but we took a kind of unintentional "driving tour" of the city before heading to a Barnes & Noble to look for helpful touristy magazines. We met up with Kathryn's friend Carissa at the mall to get the keys to her apartment, purchasing some very lovely hats while we were there. Carissa's apartment was great—something I'd love to find in Austin, complete with wood floors and "character"—and her bunny Zoe, who has free reign of the apartment, provided entertainment in the form of nose-twitching. It rained that night—we had the windows open to compensate for the lack of central air—and it was a strange heavy, constant rain that lasted for what seemed like hours, with great crashing thunder and a cool breeze. The next day we went to the Washington Zoo, where the main attraction is a pair of pandas who, when we visited, were sprawled out in obscene and seemingly comatose positions, fast asleep. The zoo itself, though apparently in the midst of scandals (red pandas dying after eating rat poison left in their cages, I think), at least visually redeemed zoos for me; my main zoo experiences have been at the Baton Rouge Zoo, with its hot concrete walkways and bleak enclosures, but this one was very pleasant to walk through and even get lost in, as we managed to do.
Then came the Pearl Jam concert, at a pavilion out in the middle of nowhere Virginia. I bought a hideously expensive beer and we found our hideously fantastic seats—row R in the middle orchestra section, which became row P when we switched with two guys who wanted to sit with their friends. The Buzzcocks opened—aging, mostly incoherent British guys who could still rock the fuck out, and LOUD—then Pearl Jam came on and kept the entire (huge) crowd on their feet for two and a half hours. It's always fun to see a great band play live, but seeing them up close and in the middle of the psycho fan section is even better—the band would start the first few notes of a classic off of Ten and the guys in front of us would literally jump up and down in pure glee, hugging each other and giving high fives. Afterwards, everyone filed out of the pavilion, grinning like idiots, to find themselves stuck in one of the most spectacular parking lot traffic jams I've ever seen. It beat anything at The Backyard I've ever been stuck in, which is saying a lot. We didn't even move for probably an hour, during which time I was kicking myself for not having my video camera—guys playing the guitar and bongos on their tailgate, the people next to us having a rave in their car, a guy with a megaphone wandering the parking lot asking if anyone had any beer left, and always the unending lines of cars emphatically not moving an inch. Naturally, once we got out of there we promptly got lost in rural Virginia, wandering for half an hour or so before making it back to the interstate.
Part II: Up to Acadia National Park, Maine
The next day we slept in, made a stop for provisions, and set off around noon to see how far towards Maine we could get, congratulating ourselves on only sticking with our itinerary for two days. Travel in the northeast is quite an experience for someone used to travel in the south and southwest. For one, everything's much smaller up there, which doesn't sound all that remarkable until you find that you can cover five states in under three and a half hours—whereas you could drive twice that and maybe get out of Texas. Also, there are toll roads. Everywhere. For someone used to driving on crappy—but free—highways in the south, pausing every ten miles to throw coins in a bucket is a bit odd. We stayed at a state park on the Connecticut coast that was filthy with small children on bikes but was also a short walk from the beach and populated with tiny brown bunnies. We got an early start the next morning and headed for Acadia National Park in an attempt to beat the 4th of July crowd to the campsites. We made it, but only after a, uh, slightly long drive along Route 1—it was a beautiful drive but involved an inordinate amount of stop and go traffic in small towns along the way. We entertained by passing and being passed by a red Mini (#8 for the trip)—we were sure he'd beat us to Acadia and take the last site, but as it turned out we made it there first and freaked him out by pointing and laughing and then trying to explain that we'd seen him the entire way there. We stayed at Site 69 (of course), one of the heavily-wooded walk-in sites, where we made good use of the bug spray. Ten hours in the car + a beautiful place + Abita Purple Haze made for some very giggly, giddy Kathryn and Clare:
"Well, Santa Claus better not come, cause I left my camera in the car... I was gonna saw Jesus, but I figured Santa Claus was more probable." (Kathryn);
"Oh, well, now I know not to sit on any tractor seats while wearing shorts." (Clare) - "I think she got it from her boyfriend, Clare..." (Kathryn: she had just described a Seinfeld episode where a character's boyfriend tells her she got gonorrhea from a tractor seat);
"Obscenity laws my ass." (Clare)
We also got kinda hysterical over powdered donuts and the bug that drowned in my beer.
We spent the next few days getting up early to beat at least some of the crowds while exploring the island: Acadia National Park takes up maybe half the area of Mount Desert Island, about halfway up the coast of Maine. The entire island is gorgeous, with lush forest undergrowth, hilly mountains, freshwater lakes, and a stunning shoreline—rocky all the way around and often consisting of cliffs dropping straight down to the waves. We stopped at both the ocean beach and the lake beaches (both of which were absurdly crowded by mid-day), and did basic touristy things like drive the park loop road (which we did a few more times than intended after Kathryn left her shoes sitting in the parking lot of a certain picnic area) and go up to the top of Cadillac Mountain—this is the peak that's one of the first to see the morning sun, but we thought better of trying to witness that event when we realized that sunrise was at 5:40am. We hiked a few trails, which got us away from most of the crowds; one hike, called Perpendicular Trail, rose about 900 feet in well under a mile, most of it on fantastic granite steps leading up the side of the mountain. As we were starting the hike we were passed by a beautiful, athletic couple who probably jogged the entire way up, but as we were slowly huffing our way to the top we came across hikers from the other end of the spectrum: middle-aged parents and their daughter, who was maybe eleven or so and slightly overweight. She was sitting down on a tree root, complaining that her head itched—obviously tired of climbing and unwilling to go any farther. Her parents were standing around her, trying to get her to keep going in what was perhaps not the most positive of ways:
Mother: Get up!
Father: Up!
Mother: Now WALK!
Father: WALK!!
Daughter: (wail)
I don't think I've ever seen a better example of how NOT to instill in your child a love and appreciation for the great outdoors.
In addition to making campfires (or smoke, as the case may be), cooking fresh veggies one night, eating s'mores, and drinking local beer, Kathryn and I went to the ranger talks every night at 9pm. These were well worth the bugs and hard benches. The talks varied in style—children acting out the three major types of rock, led by Ranger Curt; a slideshow narrated by a nervous, stuttering ranger who looked and sounded a lot like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski; and a boring history lecture interspersed with sing-a-longs, presented by an aging husband and wife team—the content for the first three talks was essentially the same—either the history or the geology of Acadia National Park (fyi, it was originally part of a volcanic island which was torn apart by shifting continental plates: the other half of the original island is on the coast of Morocco!). We even saw the same beaver picture three days in a row—they apparently have a limited slide collection. The same, that is, except for the last one: Ranger Stephanie and "Baby, It's a Wild World," which, while ostensibly on the subject of animal reproduction, allowed her to both begin with an abbreviated version of the Dating Game involving three poor guys from the audience and also work in at least half a dozen references to urine and/or feces. She got the highest rating from me, even if for nothing other than playing recordings of a porcupine mating call.
We completed our Maine tourist experience by eating fresh lobster and paying $2 for a 5lb bag of ice, so on Monday we were on the road at 7am, headed for NYC. Pictures from our stay at Acadia are available here, courtesy Kathryn: the ones from before Acadia are inexplicably stuck on her memory card, so we'll work on getting those up later. Also, a lot of these badly need captions (though I think I managed to mention most of what they show)... so I'll try to get those up soon. For once I'm not the one behind the camera all the time, so that's why they're mostly of me doing various dumb things, rather than Kathryn doing various dumb things. That's something else I'll work on ;)
Part III: New York part 1 and Louisiana interlude
The drive to New York was long but at times pretty; there's a parkway running from Connecticut into New York that has trees on the median in addition to along either side of the road, which makes for an attractive highway. It was also tolerable due to the fact that everyone in the northeast drives at no less than 80mph and there are practically no cops. We saw a few people pulled over for speeding and only a couple of accidents—though one was pretty spectacular, with the rear left side of a sedan crushed in and a wheel with what looked like part of the axle completely detached from the car. We only got lost a few times and weren't really stuck in traffic until, naturally, NYC. Things got interesting then for other reasons, too. Lissa, Kathryn's friend who we were staying with, lives in Harlem. Sixth Avenue and 137th Street: Harlem. (This is not something I mentioned to my parents.) Parking near her apartment and then walking to the metro station so we could go downtown to pick up apartment keys from Lissa, I had, for the first time in my life, some inkling of what it must be like to be black in a white world. Because walking down Sixth Avenue above Central Park, we were the only white people in sight. I'm afraid that it's hard to describe without sounding racist or simply naive, but it was a truly strange experience, only compounded by the fact in NYC my defenses are already way up. So we practiced our confident/sour New York faces and made it to the metro, where the color of the crowd slowly shifted until we emerged at 59th street among tourists and skinny white girls with Banana Republic bags. It was pouring down rain when we returned to the apartment, where we proved to be too incompetent to get the door open for about fifteen minutes but eventually made it in to showers and—praise the gods—internet access.
That's when I found out some unexpected good news, as well as the bad news that has brought me back to Louisiana for a few days. The good news was that HUMP, the short group documentary project I did this spring in my Intro to Digital Doc class, was accepted to the Rural Route Film Festival, which will be held in NYC July 22-23. I don't know much about the festival or what the other films will be like, but I think it's pretty damn cool all the same. I'm trying to decide if it's worth the $200-300 dollars to go back up there for a few days... anybody want to take a trip to New York? :)
The bad news was that my grandfather died early Monday morning. He had been diagnosed with cancer last October, so we knew it was coming, but the end happened faster than anyone expected. So I got on a plane Tuesday morning and came to Baton Rouge. The funeral was Wednesday morning in Abbeville, and I'll go back up to New York on Sunday to continue the trip with Kathryn.
I want to write about it—it was my first experience with the death of someone that close to me—but I think I'll wait a bit. There are so many thoughts to try to organize, so many things that are very hard to express clearly. Besides, I'm not sure if I want to subject everyone to things so dark. We'll see. All I'll say right now is that it wasn't as traumatic as I expected—it was sad, of course, but everyone managed to make jokes throughout (which my grandfather would have appreciated) and southern Louisiana hospitality/mourning rituals provided plenty of company and food, a combination that has a way of carrying people through things like this.
