American Road Trip

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.

I returned to New York at the end of May, 75 days and nearly 18,000 miles after I left in March.  That was 37 days and 1300 miles ago.  I had every intention of writing a brilliant conclusion for the Great American Road Trip, but la vie quotidienne got in the way–deadlines, engagements, distractions, enthusiasms.  Or maybe everyday life didn’t get in the way as much as it merged seamlessly with the road trip, like the Clubman pulling into an interstate egress lane without decelerating.

Loyal readers will, I hope, forgive that minor poetic lapse, but to prevent any further metaphorical indulgence I am moved to give Kerouac the (nearly) final word:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.”

Substitute the fourteenth floor of a pre-war high-rise for Jack’s brokendown river pier and a dozen close companions for his singular Neal Cassady, and you know how I feel right now, looking out the window at New Jersey.

Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road on eight long pieces of trace, taped together to form a scroll.

I typed the first draft of my on the road on a six year old pc, the touch screen of an iPhone, and the non-mechanical shutter of a digital camera.  What I’ve got is not as materially satisfying as 119 feet of trace, but 12 GB of zeros and ones at least possess some small measure of virtual heft.

Taken together and sorted categorically (but arranged here numerically), all those bytes yield the following information (thorough if not exhaustive):

17,794 miles; 8,639 photos; 500 gallons of gas; 131 postcards; 75 days; 36 oysters; 35 buffaloes; 33 royal medjool dates; 30 states; 29 plays of Rufus Wainwright singing “King of the Road”; 28 friends; 28 museums; 23 modernized storefronts; 21 Vignelli NPS brochures; 20 hotels;

14 pieces of pie; 13 national parks; 11 airports; 10 state capitals; 9 Saarinen buildings; 9 historic houses; 8 burgers; 7 traffic jams; 7 sequined jumpsuits; 6 national monuments; 6 times across the Continental Divide; 6 Sullivan buildings; 6 college campuses; 5 barbeque meals;

5 shopping malls; 4 snow storms; 4 nights camping; 4 martinis; 4 t-shirts; 4 colossal statues; 3 national memorials; 3 monuments of land art; 3 cell towers disguised as local flora; 2 Morphosis buildings; 2 Herzog & deMeuron buildings; 2 missions; 2 speeding tickets; 2 car washes;

2 bottles of whiskey; 2 bears; 2 dairies; 2 ancient earthworks; 2 trips to Las Vegas; 2 scholarly archives; 1 TV show taping; 1 drive across the Hoover Dam; 1 Big Boy; 1 oil change; 1 national preserve; 1 national heritage area; 1 national grassland; 1 national historic site; 1 tiki bar; 1 hot springs; 1 moose; 1 tipi, 1 John Deere belt buckle.

What is not accounted for here will undoubtedly turn up later as I continue to contemplate the American culture I found in the buildings and landscapes and people and food I discovered on the road.  Of course, as Soviet writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov put it after they concluded a two-month coast-to-coast drive in 1935: “The fact that you discovered America means nothing.  The important thing is that America discovers you.”

Power walking, it turns out, is one of the hallmarks of the American civilization.  I had seen plenty of it in Los Angeles: folks in groups of two and three, arms swinging with their strides while making their way slowly but determinedly through the hills of Griffith Park.  I hadn’t paid much attention to these people maybe because I was too busy gasping for breath while attempting to run through the hills of Griffith Park, or maybe because their approach to urban fitness was so familiar as to be unremarkable.

Once I left the coast, the power walkers gave way to hikers, rock climbers, and mountain bikers, at least from my admittedly narrow vantage point.  In Moab, in southern Utah, the wildness of the geologic landscape precludes anything but extreme physical activity.

In Salt Lake City, in northern Utah, the streets are scaled to the turning radius of a team of mules and a pack wagon, producing a grid with blocks 1/8 mile in length and decidedly unwelcoming to pedestrians.

There were highly organized power walkers in Colorado Springs, but they turned out to be cadets marching in formation through “the terrazzo” at the heart of the Air Force Academy.

Military discipline has never seemed as seductive as on that campus, designed by Walter Netsch and SOM in the mid-50s.  I kept thinking of a line from an old Joe Jackson song: “you can wear the uniform and I can play along.”

At any rate, I started to notice the the power walkers again as I got closer to the middle of the country.  With 2.5 million square feet, the Mall of America near Minneapolis is so large that even most the casual shopper is transformed into a power walker.

It takes a certain amount of exertion to get all the way from Nordstrom’s to Bloomingdales to Camp Snoopy, even without a grade change.

At a bridge between the parking garage and the mall, an advertisement for BlueCross and BlueShield of Minnesota acknowledged this fact.  The Gruen effect becomes a cultural condition.

Once I crossed the Mississippi the power walkers emerged in force.  At the John Deere World Headquarters in Moline, Illinois they were doing laps in the visitor pavilion of the Saarinen-designed campus (1964) at the very beginning of the work day.

I wondered why they weren’t outside since Hideo Sasaki’s landscape is full of mature shade trees and winding paths.  Perhaps they liked the building too much to leave.

When I was in downtown Moline the cashier at the John Deere gift store asked me if I had been out to the HQ and told me that her mother “had the privilege of working in that beautiful place for nearly twenty years.”  So maybe those John Deere power walkers were diehard modernists, you never know.

Nearly 300 miles down the river from Moline, and right across the river from St. Louis, I stopped off to see the remains of the civilization at Cahokia (950-1200 AD).   The Monks Mound, at the heart of the grand plaza, is the largest earthwork in the Americas.  It rises to a height of 100 feet and its base covers fourteen acres.  When I got there in the early evening it was still quite hot so I walked slowly up the stairs on the south face stopping at each terrace to admire the view and wipe the perspiration from my face.

Each time I paused I was lapped by a fast walker flexing barbells with each step.  With her white sweatpants and orange t-shirt, she looked marvelous against the green grass and the blue sky, but it was her re-purposing of the ancient monument that I appreciated the most.

Looking at the St. Louis Arch from the top of the mound, I thought of Lewis and Clark and the opening of the west.  Cahokia used to be the frontier; now it’s a para-fitness course.

POST-SCRIPT: In the middle of writing this, I spotted more power walkers.  Up with the sun, they were making their way through a sidewalk-less subdivision in central Ohio, taking advantage of the coolness of the morning.  I stopped counting at 22.

I stopped for lunch in Edwards, Colorado the other day.  I was looking for a decent hamburger; I found the future of America.

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Edwards, on the outskirts of the ski resort of Vail, is not quite a town.  In fact, at first glance, it appears to be little more than a handful of strip malls clustered about a spur road to I-70.  On second glance, it still appears to be little more than a handful of strip malls clustered about a spur road to I-70.

Apparently, though, it’s got enough of a population to be categorized as a “census-designated place.”  Of course, if the only thing that makes a place a place is the fact that the census-takers are out there counting bodies, that doesn’t sound like much of a place to me.  If Gertrude Stein thought there was “no there” in Oakland, California she had clearly never visited Edwards, Colorado.

At least, that’s what I thought before I had lunch.  We were trying to find a place called Larkburger on a street called Edwards Village Boulevard.  Naturally, we were looking for both a village and a boulevard; the environs of Larkburger had neither.

What it did have were all the trappings of a lifestyle center, one of those retail/leisure environments catering to upscale consumers.

As we walked around marveling at the added expense of amenities like wide sidewalks, stylish street furniture, legible signage, bike racks, and one or two thoughtful design details on the buildings, I realized that the Corner at Edwards also had something else: something that kind of, sort of, maybe, looked like the beginning of something that kind of, sort of, maybe could be called community.

Most of the buildings in the Corner had two stories and in Riverwalk, the development across the road, some of the buildings lining its “Main Street” had three stories.  These were not frontier false fronts (though Riverwalk had plenty of execrable Victorian falseness overall) they were real, occupiable spaces with just the sort of tenancy that made sense: lawyers, dentists, accountants, insurance agencies and even residences.

Somehow these additional stories were transformative; they created an aura of density and urbanism.  Admittedly, it was more accurately a simulacrum of density and urbanism, but the effect was nearly the same.  Combined with the restaurants, markets, drycleaners and even a first-run movie theater (the developers MUST be subsidizing this place), it was possible to do exactly what the sign said: Live-Work-Play.

I’m not sure if it is funny or depressing that, as my companion dryly observed, people need multi-use explained to them.  Of course, if you assume that those people are members of the generations of Americans raised in single-use suburbs, perhaps gentle didacticism is to be expected.

And for those readers who are wondering, that was a vanilla shake I drank at lunch, not New Urbanist Kool-Aid.

I left Los Angeles on April 29th to begin my long, meandering, journey towards the Atlantic.  Meandering is key here because my planned route involves several deviations from a single-minded east-bound trajectory.  Since I’ve long embraced deviance, these excursions didn’t seem like a big deal.  What are a few hundred extra miles when the trip is going to clock in at 15,000?

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For weeks, my most recent road trip companion had been describing my east bound journey this way: “you’re going backwards.”  My backwardness took us to the Canyonlands and the Spiral Jetty so there’s not really much to complain about.

It also took us to what has to be the whitest place on the planet, northern Utah.  In Brigham City, we ate what has to be the whitest pie on the planet, banana cream.

This slice was the epitome of pale food: the crust was baked, but not browned in the slightest; the custard lacked a defining color; the slightly unripe banana slices were yellow mainly by contrast; the whipped cream was as white as, well, milk.  The pie tasted of comforting blandness, not bad, just a little dull.

I know there are some who will refuse to acknowledge that I am homeward-bound until the Clubman is heading down that metaphorical sunrise highway, and I apologize to all of you for delaying my return to the City.  I’ve heard the place isn’t the same without me, but I beg your indulgence for a few more weeks and can assure you that my extra time on the road will produce a series of worthy anecdotes.

Just yesterday, for example, I was eating lunch while sitting in the plaza of the Salt Lake City Library, designed by Moshe Safdie.  (I left my camera battery in the hotel; this is a Flickr photo).

It was a pleasant enough spot; the sun was shining and my sandwich and root beer were tasty.  For a while there was a homeless guy keeping me company, but otherwise the plaza was empty even though the library was open.

I ate half my sandwich contentedly and then twisted off the cap from my long-necked soda bottle.  Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a cop appeared.  With a blond brush cut, mesh cap, bulging arms, and pimples, he looked like a member of a junior swat team.  He walked directly to my table and leaned in to take a close look at my soda, lifting his mirrored sunglasses to read the label.  “Root beer, very good,” he stated as he straightened up and briskly walked away.

I looked around the empty plaza and realized how many surveillance cameras there were.  Had the cop really been monitoring my activity?  Had he been waiting until I opened my bottle in order to catch me flagrantly drinking a carbonated beverage in a public place?  Had he seen me jay-walk when I crossed the street to get to the plaza?  Was he reading the emails I was sending from my phone?  This is why very clean places filled with very white people make me nervous.

For the first time on my road trip I felt homesick for New York.