American Road Trip

Not surprisingly, my “life in the woods” was far less literal than Thoreau’s, involving little isolation and only fitful removal from my neighbors.  Still, there was sufficient labor (more intellectual than physical) to keep me away from this particular place (my sadly static URL) for more than half a year.  But unlike Henry David, I will display no false modesty about obtruding my affairs so much on the notice of my readers.  After all, why go to all this trouble if not to obtrude?  Isn’t obtruding a condition of life in the 21^st century (at least in the developed world)?  Indeed, it is my greatest hope that I will successfully obtrude, at least on a weekly basis, on the notice of my readers, whoever and how few they may be.

In the meantime, I relinquish the possibility of recouping my life in the woods with the same careful attention to daily minutiae and regular philosophizing found in Walden’s 200+ pages.  Ongoing labors (and perhaps an insufficient dedication to transcendentalism) simply do not permit it.  Nonetheless, some accounting is required.

Let this poor animation suffice: Since January, on AmericanRoadTripNYC, a new YouTube channel.

When I was growing up our cars were transportation, not lust.  According to family lore, when my father was a soon-to-be-married young man he used his savings to buy a plot of land instead of a 1958 MG. The family cars that followed were unusual by the standards of 1960s America, but they were hardly objects of desire.

I don’t remember much about the Anglia, except that it was some sort of British Ford.  Two Peugeots came after, not counting the gold Buick company car that came with my father’s organization-man lifestyle in the early 70s.

The first Peugeot was a 404 with a 4-speed column shifter that cried out for driving gloves.  That car was burgundy with a matte finish and it had tailfins the way France had rock and roll, kind of groovy but a pale imitation of the real thing.

The second Peugeot was more conventional: a four-door sedan with a floor-mounted shifter and a sloped but squared-off rear; it was notable only for its paint job: a subtle metallic color called Cascade Green.   It only looked green in the right light, and even then what your eye perceived was just a hint of sea foam—imagine Scope mouthwash diluted with five parts water.

The first car that was really mine, and that really caught my fancy, was a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.

Bought at least a decade before “pre-owned” entered the lexicon, this faded yellow bug was a stripped down model, not a superbug.  It had a flat windshield and four-on-the-floor with an AM radio and so much body rust underneath that the driver’s seat sagged towards the ground.  Without a piece of cardboard on the floor, I could look down and see the blacktop, in a close approximation of Fred Flintstone’s motoring style.  Though this induced vertigo at high speeds, driving the interstates of the northeast, between Philadelphia and Northampton, was always thrilling.

Once, I left the yellow bug at school over winter break and returned at the start of the spring semester to find it buried under two feet of snow.  I dug my way in with a broom and had to use a hairdryer on the frozen lock.  I put the key in the ignition and, just like the scene in Sleeper where Woody Allen finds a 200-year-old VW in a cave, the air-cooled engine turned over on the first try.

Sadly, my bug died soon after, though with great flare.  In a catastrophic engine failure, it spewed oil all over the eastbound lanes of the Mass Pike on a final road trip to Boston just after final exams at the end of my senior year.  I don’t remember ever having sex in the back seat of that bug (though I did stuff a queen size futon in it once), but thinking about it produces the same sort of romantic haze that accompanies so many male automotive reveries.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that Volkswagen was my real introduction to serious design, and all the social and political baggage that comes with it.

Perfected by Ferdinand Porsche and Erwin Komenda with the financial backing of the Third Reich, the body of the Type 1 Volkswagen was an unmistakable product of late 30s styling.  It had much in common with Carl Breer’s Chrysler Airflow and Hans Ledwinka and Paul Jaray’s Tatra T77.

Like them, the VW was an early attempt to create a car body that was aerodynamically efficient, or at least looked like it was. Because the VW’s bulbous body became so familiar, so iconic, in the second half of the twentieth century, folks stopped noticing its streamlined details a long time ago.

But they were there when the first production VW hit the streets in 1938 and they were still there when the last Type 1 rolled off the assembly line in 2003, nearly twenty-two million inverted teardrops, contoured fenders, and chrome speedlines later.

I’ve been thinking about VWs because I spent the holidays in Mexico, including a night in the city of Puebla, where the last Type 1 was built, in a factory that opened in 1954 after German immigrants to Estado Puebla lobbied Wolfsburg to begin Mexican production.

Aside from talavera tile and mole, VWs must be Puebla’s most culturally significant export.

That original plant is still in operation: modernized and re-tooled, it’s the only factory that produces the much-hyped, though ultimately underwhelming, new Beetle. (The debut of the Concept 1 prototype in 1994 occasioned my first and only purchase of Car & Driver and Road & Track.)

Touring Puebla at the end of 2009, it seemed clear that building beetles, like being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was making a serious contribution to Puebla’s economic prosperity.

While wandering through a gentrifying indigenous neighborhood outside Puebla’s centro histórico, I discovered the familiar VW logo on all the street signs, corporate PR in the service of a barrio’s rebranding campaign.

Mostly, though, it’s the bugs themselves that make the biggest impression, whether in sleek black or tricked up for a fiesta.

Everyone knows that VWs are legion in Mexico but it was still a wonderment to see so many of them, especially in the capital where their broad metallic curves make a fine roving counterpoint to the churrigueresque ornament that’s as ubiquitous on the buildings as the bugs are in the streets.

I’m not sure if it was Christmas, or nationalism, or just standard color options, but there were green, red, and white bugs everywhere I turned.

And I can honestly say that they filled me with as much joy as freshly baked roscas de reyes (also green, white, and red) and freshly fried churros.

That last bit might be a slight exaggeration because those were damn good churros.  I’m sure it is no coincidence that they were served up at churrería as old as the VW itself.

El Moro opened in 1935 and, unlike Volkswagen, its proprietors have had the good sense to leave well enough alone.  The churro, like the bug, is perfect in its original form.

It may seem odd to still be writing about Maine nearly four months after my return from Vactionland, but the Pine Tree State has a way of staying with you.  While this is due mostly to the essential quality of the place (see Genius Loci in Acadia), the quantity of made in Maine products that accompanied my return home must also be taken into account.  Some years, it’s potatoes.  They’re the state’s largest crop and the varieties that come down from Aroostook County are astonishing.   But this year, perhaps because I’d been to Idaho in the spring, and had even stopped off at the Idaho Potato Museum in the town of Blackfoot, the spuds of Maine spud held no allure.

Thus, this year, it was blueberries, the wild, low-bush variety that grow on 60,000 Down East acres. According to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world, which explains why they turn up almost as often as lobsters on tourist tchotckes.

Though vanccinium angustifolium are charmingly picturesque, I prefer mine to be comestible rather than graphic.  They taste best when warmed by the sun on a granite topped mountain in Acadia, where the act of picking them after a vigorous hike on a rusticator’s trail is shamefully enjoyable—a little agricultural labor for the bourgeois-at leisure Slow Food set, sort of like Marie Antoinette in the Hameau at Versailles.

By the time I’ve picked enough for a couple of pies, stooping over and crouching down have lost their appeal, and no small order of rest is required.

But the desire for wild blueberries remains as acute as the pain in my lower back and it becomes only stronger once the car is pointed south.  So this year I decided to return with a complete inventory.  Blueberry Ale from the Atlantic Brewing Company in Bar Harbor is much like a traditional lambic.

Back River blueberry gin from the Sweetgrass Distillery in Union makes an excellent martini if you prefer  strong botanicals, as I do.  The blueberries are a fine compliment to the juniper.

These blueberry beverages are immensely satisfying, but I feared they were too far removed from the thing itself.  So this year I also returned home with ten pounds of fresh blueberries purchased from an elderly couple running a farm stand out of their garage somewhere on U.S. 1 south of Ellsworth.

My friend Charles, who lives in Portland and can be accurately described as the King of Pancakes, had assured me that you can stick a box of blues in the freezer and scoop them out as needed, all winter long.  I believed him, but I had to weigh my desire for blueberries against pragmatics. When you don’t have the luxury of a single-family-detached-house-sized kitchen, a 10-pound box of blueberries requires a serious piece of freezer real estate.

It would mean displacing 4 pounds of vegetarian suet and 6 pounds of Smith College pecans, not to mention a couple of bottles of vodka.  Were the contents of that 14 x 10 x 4 box going to be worth the space?

Yes.  On a cold morning in December at the start of winter, a warm muffin filled with wild Maine blueberries is a very good thing.

Still, this commitment to blueberries was not without consequences.  A subsequent purchase of fifty pounds of grass-fed, pastured beef from some friends in Duchess County necessitated off-site storage in a basement freezer in el Barrio.

I’m still searching for a recipe for beef and blueberry stew.  Suggestions welcome.

On an island off the coast of the North American mainland, near the narrows of Somes Sound, across from Norembega Mountain, between Fernald Point and Clark Point, a few steps from the Atlantic, in Southwest Harbor, Maine (at 44.278º North and 68.311º West, to be precise), one is easily, happily, and phenomenologically seduced by the spirit of the place.

The sight of the mountains and forests, the smell of evergreen and seaweed, the feel of the shells and the rocks, the taste and the sound of the ocean.  These are why summer people come to the Maine coast, and certainly why they’ve been coming to Mount Desert Island since the first rusticators arrived in the decades after the Civil War.

By train, steamer, and ferry from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, they arrived eager to consume the same landscape that Thomas Cole and Frederic Church captured in their oils and watercolors.  Beginning with their village improvement societies and ending with their successful effort to create the first national park east of the Mississippi, the rusticators shaped Mount Desert Island as surely as nature and geography.

The earliest white settlers on the island, who arrived mainly after 1759 when the English drove the French out of Acadia, lived with and from the land and the water.  They were the first to harvest the island’s natural resources and to make Maine “Maine.”

But it was the rusticators who understood how to exploit the genius loci for their pleasure, profit, and eventually for the public good, as is still evident in what they built across the island–mountain trails and town paths, scenic drives and carriage roads, inns and resorts, piers and houses.  These were built for the seasonal tourists, but they became the essence of the place.

The cottage I’m renting in Southwest Harbor is called “the Legacy” because it’s been passed down a generation or two since it was built in the 1940s, but it could just as easily refer to the Acadia passed down by the Eliots and the Rockefellers.

Though the pitch of the roof and the knowing placement of the picture windows nod to mid-century architectural taste (the next house down the coast, by contrast, is an over-scaled Dutch Colonial from the 20s), the granite fireplace, pine-framed rooms, and cedar shake exterior evoke the rustic rusticity of the rusticator’s image of Down East Maine.

But placeness here, as everywhere, means more than building materials and manicured wilderness; it also involves food culture and traditions.  The rusticators, like their island hosts and the native Wabanaki before them, were locavores avant la lettre.  Fresh haddock, cod, oysters, clams, mussels, and, of course, lobsters.

Though dining in the rough was more a necessity than a choice in the 19^th century, it has considerable appeal even in the 21^st, at least where lobster is concerned since the whole point of eating at a pound is that, at least in theory, you are guaranteed the freshest bottom feeders possible.

Even if the pound functions as a dealer/middleman, there’s the added value of the picturesque–the harbor, fishing boats, stacked pots and buoys, picnic tables, gulls, mosquitoes, Teva sandals, Life is Good t-shirts, etc.

This year I bought steamers and cherry stones from a guy called Rat who was selling them out of an old refrigerator in a cluttered garage next to a mildly ramshackle house in Bar Harbor.  I was attracted by his sign, especially his use of “safe shellfish” as a descriptor.

While it is true that many areas on the island are closed to digging because of paralytic shellfish poisoning, the need to advertise bivalve safety is both amusing and depressing, sort of like service stations advertising “clean restrooms.”

For the record, I ate two dozen of Rat’s clams for dinner with no ill effects though steaming them in an entire bottle of vernacchia di San Gimignano might have killed whatever toxins lingered in those mollusk filters.

Rat told me that he used to sell his clams to Pectic Seafood before it moved off the island.  I knew Pectic.  It was in a little trailer of a building right next to the house where its owners lived, up a quarry road well off the main highway in Mt. Desert.  When the sons took over the business they closed this location and opened a big store close to the Wal-Mart sprawl of Route 3 in Ellsworth.

While the economics of year-round traffic probably drove this decision, Rat and I both understood that something had been lost in the relocation.  He declared the original Pectic a real “mom-and-pop operation,” the sort of place that appealed to the summer people he described as “those folks in Northeast Harbor with their Philadelphia accents.”  His place, by his own admission, was a little too rough for their tastes, but not for mine apparently, though I wasn’t sure if it was the New York plates on my car or my lack of a Main Line lockjaw that met with Rat’s approval.

When I told Rat that I liked his sign on Route 102 he laughed that I was about the only person who did.  The Japanese tourists told him he needed neon; the village improvement types told him he needed nicer lettering.  The authenticity of place is in the eye of the beholder.

Next: genius loci accinium angustifolium; or, where the wild blueberries grow

In the summer of 1609 Henry Hudson and a crew of twenty Dutch and English sailors entered what is now New York Bay and sailed their sloop, the Half Moon, up the wide river that today bears the explorer’s name.  Four hundred years later, I jumped in the river after them.

Hudson was looking for an uncharted passage to China.  I was looking for a buoy-marked passage to 79^th Street.  He had to keep an eye out for potentially dangerous natives.  I had to keep an eye out for potentially dangerous flotsam.  Several of Hudson’s men were assaulted by the Algonquin.  I didn’t encounter so much as a discarded condom.  It took Hudson all day to sail from the bay to the tip of the island.  It took me twenty-five minutes to swim from Cherry Walk to the Boat Basin.

History has not recorded what Hudson was thinking as he passed the island’s western shore.  I was thinking about its transformation from deciduous forest to concrete jungle, from sandy beaches and salt marshes to sea walls, highways, monuments and towers.  Well, that and how to avoid getting kicked in the face by the swimmer in front of me.

Still, one’s perspective of the city changes from the water.  Only on the water do you get a sense of the true extent of New York’s aquatic self, 578 miles of coastline slung out over three large islands and a spit of the North American mainland.  Only in the water do you get a sense of the true extent of New York’s post-industrial self, a vast recreational waterscape in place of what was once a hardworking waterfront.

Moving swiftly through the current, surrounded by kayaks and pleasure craft, you realize how thoroughly the city of homo faber has become the city of homo ludens.  And this might explain why there were nearly 4,000 other people in the water on the day I did in the New York City Triathlon.

Until the middle of the 20^th century, swimming in the NYC-stretch of the Hudson was a normal summer activity.  While the city lacked the lifeguard beaches found in the Palisades on the New Jersey side of the river, from the 1870s to the 1940s it had a series of floating baths that moved around on pontoons to the apparent delight of swimmers up and down the west side of Manhattan.

A perfect example of nature tamed, the baths were filled with the half-salt/half-fresh water of the river itself while protecting swimmers from the river’s considerable tides, currents, and depths.  The last of the floating baths were moored at West 96^th Street, near where I started my swim.  The triathlon’s temporary pier, with its steel decking and banners, seemed like a fitting, if less paternalistic, heir.

When the floating baths were finally decommissioned at the start of WWII, the water quality of the Hudson was seriously degraded by sewage and industrial waste, most notoriously PCBs, and this pollution continued until long after the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.  By then the Hudson’s heyday as a working waterfront was long over and the city settled into a gloomy state of fluvial disregard.

This isn’t really surprising: between the highway and the rotting piers was an urban no man’s land that had appeal only for those reveling in the sweet moment of liberation between Stonewall and AIDS (and joyously documented in Gay Sex in the 70s).

Even Riverside Park had seen better days.  Though Robert Moses rebuilt this “wasteland” in the 1930s, covering the New York Central tracks to give pedestrians, and of course automobiles, access to the waterfront, by the 1970s the esplanade was so decrepit and crime-ridden that when Riverside Park turned up as the setting for a climactic gang battle between the Baseball Furies and the Warriors, Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic starts to seem like cinema verité.

Thirty years later, there’s a café where the Warriors bested their enemies.  It’s only open until 11 pm but most nights in the summer the crowd lingers until much later, finishing their beers and hanging out with their dogs.

It’s the same up and down the waterfront, which is now part of a city-wide greenway.  The rebuilt piers have lounge chairs and wifi; the industrial detritus is landmarked and turned into art; the esplanade is planted with the same species of trees and grasses that Henry Hudson would have seen back in 1609.

Past is somehow prologue walking the river in 2009: the Machine Age Manhatta of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s film meets the primeval Mannahatta of Eric Sanderson’s digital reconstruction.  And the Hudson River is cleaner than it’s been in a century; so come on in, the water’s fine.