DAY 20: Home

DELAND, FL | MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2010 – I am up early, five am, just sitting here in a canvas fold-out chair on a second-story sleeping porch, in the blackness of morning. The rain must have stopped finally. The trees are dripping. Everything is super saturated and like an old house with creaks, is dripping.

Two lights I can’t see are revealing a bit of a driveway and the street, Adelle St. The pavement is a dull greenish glimmer. I see it as a cutout of dim light, through the silhouetted trunks of live oaks and palm fronds.

I am home again. Another place I no longer live but carry with me. Maine, where in many ways the roadtrip began, was my first home, is the soil I grew up on, where some of my bloodline goes back ten generations to the 1600s, to 1637 on Richmond Island.

Home. Adrienne and I are staying with an old friend of mine in a house he is caretaking for. A two minute walk would take me through the back yard of an old neighbor, to the cottage that is still mine, that I spent years fixing up, bringing back to life from a fire. But it’s rented out now. Later we’ll go by. The tools we’re here for, to ferry back to Seattle for work, are in the garage, hanging from nails on the unfinished walls. Saws and rope, monkey wrenches, clippers, old skates and license plates - all of it nestled between heartpine studs, and between studs with eaten away ends, married to fresher studs that touch down to the sill plates.

Florida reared up suddenly after all the days on the road. I haven’t even mentioned in any detail the time we spent in Maine with my parents, with Josh and Dorian and their two girls in Manhattan, my older sister and her family in DC.

A person begins by imagining a story. Then he begins by telling it as best he can. Holding up the tiny told against everything unspoken, it becomes clear that the story is silhouette. Everything undone. Done, experienced. But not yet accounted for. Not yet woven in.

Sitting here on this porch, I am picturing again all the faces of the people we have met so far along the way. Those faces, photographs of them, could be the story alone. It is so difficult just to ask: Can I take your picture? But I was taught once to ask that, and have asked plenty of times. But not the pencil-thin impish waitress at the 24-hour diner Waffle House the other day. I didn’t ask her, not any time she passed by, telling Adrienne and I quick odd stories in her drawl - lonely, stoic, bright. Not my older sister, in all our five and a half days at her house, eating, talking, running, laughing. Not my brother, back in Maine. Not the motel owner at Woodbine, who was making casa dias, India-style he said. The motel entry, as I came in from the night asking about a room, was thick with garlic and ginger smell, and other spices I could never name.

The story is always unfinished, a fraction, stones from a beach. Everyone knows this.

After Savannah, full, healed, we made a beeline for Florida. And still it came faster than we expected. We got on the highway. And I haven’t driven highways, not really, not with any regularity for two years. For two years I’ve been bicycling to work and to school, out at night.

So, the people on the highways, they drove like animals. An eighteen wheeler forced a car nearly off the road before the truck driver looked down from his cab thru one of eight mirrors and noticed and veered back into his lane. Cars hurtled by us, cutting between cars with no room for anything unexpected. Construction barrels went on forever, narrowing the path to two lanes between concrete dividers. No room for miles for a car to break down and pull over out of this rush that amounted to savings of seconds at best, maybe a half-hour over an entire day. Strange how things change. That high speed lane is no longer mine, seems ugly and empty. I remember driving that way, keeping the needle pinned to 9.5 mph over the speed limit at all costs, chasing it for thousands of miles.

Coming into DeLand, by back road again, on Route 11 up in DeLeon Springs, we passed all the valencias, the last oranges of the season, still on the tree. The same trees are already in bloom again, too, bearing tiny white flowers among the oranges and the greasy dark leaves, for next year’s fruit. I couldn’t actually see the flowers. But their nectar poured in through Yellow Truck’s vents.

We talked yesterday, Adrienne and me and Dave, at the kitchen table for hours, talking and leafing through books Dave had in a cardboard box. Rockwell Kent. Helen Levitt. Horizon. The American Farmhouse. So on and so on. I made coffee with the coffeemaker Adrienne and I brought with us on the road. We laughed and talked and by 10 Adrienne and I were in bed. Adrienne pulled the door to the sleeping porch ajar, so the sound of the rain came in.

             Adrienne and I outside Woodbine, GA, closing in on DeLand

 

DAY 18: Redemption

SAVANNAH, GA | SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2010 – After the maudlin cant of our last few posts, it was a giant relief to arrive in Savannah. The city is amazing. Serene and hip. A strange, comforting combination. The way that the Southern element, the grace and ease and tranquility, has segued into a totally unexpected version of current. 

Who knows what people do for work here. It was also a Saturday, so maybe most of them were off, it was the weekend, slightly overcast in the morning, with sun breaking through by afternoon. But the air here, the streets, all the tree-canopied squares, the patina of the buildings, the worn valleys in the stone steps down to the river. Anyway, it was a balm. We were healed by it. We knew immediately as we walked along the streets.

The students of SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), which has buildings throughout the city, lounged in the sun and shade at sidewalk cafes or floated through the squares on hipster bikes. There were people visiting from all over. I heard the Spanish of Mexico City, some other tongues I couldn’t place. Several weddings going on in the squares. A bunch of white kids at a bar drinking sodas, all excited, their faces and bodies covered in powdery paint at a bar. They had just played out an old Indian holiday game and were amazed by themselves.

The squares are what give the city itself. There are 24 of them, each the quiet fulcrum of a small neighborhood. The squares are big enough to support a small forest of live oaks, the trees with the undulating, massively cantilevered limbs that shade everything. They reach easily from the squares across the streets to the far sidewalks. Then there are the azaleas, shrubs, statuary, etc. The integration of landscape and city is so unlike anywhere else. Cars can get where they are going no problem. But people walking also can, and are primary. You can always cross the street, easily, practically without thinking.

Maybe it’s the scale. Maybe Savannah is small enough so that somehow these squares, designed in the 1740s and through to the 1850s, can work. Maybe you couldn’t translate this balance of the natural and the urban in a larger city. But Savannah is amazing. It is up there with the more storied, larger cities of this country. If New York is the city of all American cities, because of its shear size and wealth and age, and if San Francisco is the most beautiful, and Seattle, notable for its unimpeachably dark weird, then Savannah is the serene hip.  

There should be more Savannahs, more iterations permutations of this place. There is no place like it. 

                    leaving Surf City, for Savannah as it turned out

 a rare pass for Yellow Truck, about to blow by a moped

old guy on the way to Walterboro, closing in on biodiesel

in Ladson, SC after risking all to find a drink of biodiesel. would never know they had it if wasn't noted online. 

SAVANNAH! headless binoculing. This one's for you Norell

Some Savannah hotties. nice kickstand on the aqua one. no pic, but there are also plenty of fixies intown

the canopy of live oaks in one of the squares

Yellow Truck in Orleans Square

lightpost

porch

 coming down the stairs of author Flannery O'Connor's childhood home

DAY 18: Phantoms

WALTERBORO, SOUTH CAROLINA | SATURDAY, MARCH 27 - Woke up today in a Motel 6. Lowdown highway exit of fast-food restaurants and chain motels. 

Day before: Myrtle Beach turned out to be not quaint, not small and sleepy with beautiful scenery, but a jungle of romper-room colored hotels and drunken people balancing cigarettes on their lips. Just another spring break binge town. No crosswalks. People dodging cars to cross the street.

We'd already been on another goose chase for biodiesel in Wilmington NC. Cape Fear Biodiesels, the local co-op with the golden B99.9, wouldn't sell to us or anyone without signing on for a $50 membership first. That was the online pitch. They never answered their phone or returned messages and the two biodiesel stations they listed on their site as alternative places for fuel, for B20, turned out to have none. The stations had given up on biodiesel months ago. So, Cape Fear Biofuels, WAKE IT UP. 

Adrienne beginning to think Ben Dugan right: http://yellowtruckadventure.blogspot.com/2010/03/day-15-life-is-exercise-in-dismantling.html?showComment=1269583452096#c6622649102558708498 


So, long story short, eventually we found biodiesel in Ladson, SC after another imbroglio of streets without names and chasing roads too small for our maps (maybe GPS could be a good thing after all), etc.  

Arrival after dark in Walterboro. Must be that tobacco country still exists and we're in it. Even the non-smoking rooms, when you finally find a place that has any, have ash trays on the table as you come in.

Something must give. So all the pretty gardens of Charleston, SC are out. Pushing on to Savannah. la, la, la, ha, ha, ha

Rocks in My Pocket

Good jog/run along the Atlantic. The beach here in Surf City is a welcome surface for my knees. Still not setting any speed records. Walked back with rocks in my pockets - literally. We found the beach covered with thousands of translucent stones. Beautiful. Gifts for friends who make jewelry. Onward to Charleston in a minute.

DAY 17: Swim

SURF CITY | FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2010 - We went for a run along the beach this morning. Then I slipped away, sneaked past the surf into the water. Not long. Just in. A stolen dive. And out the other side of the wave. 

Then back to the shallows.

The water about 56 degrees. Cold, but good.

We found translucent stones all along the beach. Never have seen so many so smoothed and flat, oval, more like sea glass than stone. Like all the clouds from the other day's mackerel sky fell to the sea.

                The pier at Surf City around 6 am this morning

DAY 16: Local Peanuts

        Day 16: From Richmond, VA to Surf City, NC. 264 miles.


RICH SHARE, NC | MARCH 25, 2010 - The towns along here, on Rt 285, shadowing 95 through the countryside, are small, stubborn affairs, more memory and dream than present. We see nearly as many greyed out, falling down houses as living ones.

But maybe that's just us. The ruins being abandoned, left standing, that they're left undisturbed, collapse in slow motion, unpilfered from, unsalvaged, left for the vines to run through and swallow before the metal roofs settle to the ground - we haven't lived in these self-contained, so naked, agrarian economies. A palatial house dies achingly slow next to a house that carries on, sheltering new vehicles under its porticos.

I didn't know, growing up, the young man in mirrored sunglasses sitting on his porch in a rocking chair mid-day, or the guy at the auto garage, also sitting, in a metal chair in the afternoon, everything done, since day before last.

The tractor in the field, some anyway, are gargantuan now. The sun glances off the windows of the enclosure, no human visible, the brown wind lifts from the wheels.

There are so few people in the landscape here, visible briefly then gone again. The entire day, I saw three kids only. Two girls running in front of a sunny mobile home. And a boy in front of a corner store in a three-building downtown, mechanically whacking a long light branch to the ground in front of him, as he walked, head down, maybe watching dust unsettled.  

We stopped here in Rich Share, hungry, wanting to stretch our legs a little, hit the gas station restroom. It's peanut country. I found a bag of local peanuts for 99 cents. "BeST Roasted in the Shell Peanuts." They were from down the road, in Roxobel. Tasty. Meat and shell whole.

N

                Contemporary second-hand, Rich Share, NC. 
                Note the chiminea at center between the urns.

Alas...

It's official: Jeff's the writer, I'm the photog. Well, not even THE photog - but that's what I'll be mostly doing. I am not the prolific poet that he is. (I prefer visual expression for public consumption.) I'll leave it to him. But I am going jogging this fine morning in Surf City, NC and I may even get a driving lesson in...

DAY 15: Part Two: a few images

The top image is the "normal" or most direct route between Bethesday, MD and Richmond, VA. Traveling the interstitial mindlessness known as I-95, it takes about 119 miles of driving and 2.5 hours, according to google maps.
The bottom image shows the roundabout route we ended up taking - 225 miles. Estimated travel time roughly 5.7 hours. 

                                   Leaving Bethesda

                               Capitol Yellow Truck 

                                    Roadside, cross

                                      Breathe, barn

        Yellow Truck remembers a past 
                                  herding lonely barns 

                    
                    nina's new and nearly new bikes

believe it or not, the address of the alleged biodiesel station in Reedville, VA. 

                     another bridge we crossed today






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DAY 15: Life is an exercise in dismantling your dreams

RICHMOND, VA | MARCH 24,  2010 - On a remote European mountain, a long time ago, Friedrich Nietzsche was hungry and alone, tired and bitter. Sitting in a yoga pose, channeling a prophet named Zarathustra, he said, "We must run into the sun at every moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness."


Another time, my artist cousin the house painter dreamed of Spain. He dreamed of Spain for seven years, so long that in the end he knew he couldn't go. The dream had become so beautiful. To go was to risk losing the country he had borne so closely for so long.


By nature we are serious. Americans especially. So industrious. So serious. And dreamy. Every day we are spectacularly dreaming and then working to make it real, pull it from the sky to earth. 


Today was like that. Adrienne and I had been driving all day. All day we were heroically driving the tangible back roads, outside of dreamy abstractions like time and schedule. We were drinking in the old barns, stubbled fields still grey from winter. Only once or twice we had to speak. We mentioned aloud - interrupted the ongoing unspoken conversation - how oh, there was a successful farmstead. It was all white fresh lines and fields a deep low luminous green. "Monsanto," I said. "They all work these days for Monsanto," Adrienne replied. Then we went back to silent mode. We both knew the rest of the narrative, before and after, Monsanto owns the farmers' seeds.

We were on our way to Reedville. It fit the triangulation plan: we could go back roads; we would no doubt get lost at some point and end up talking with local strangers. Or we would find them at a store or on a sidewalk of some small place. A place; part of the plan, finding place. And we would be getting our first taste of 100 percent biodiesel. At Kilduff Oil, a public filling station at 691 Main St, small unknown town on a spit into Chesapeake Bay.


Well, it took a lot longer than we figured it would to get there. And when we came down Main Street, closing in on four pm, it was beautiful and quaint and deserted and all. The road ebbed away into a sandy delta that ran up against wharves, a fish pound and trucks and boats. But nothing like a fuel station. 


We turned around, drove a bit back up the road, slow-like, looking at all the still put-together Victorian houses. Then we turned around again at a corner gas station, lurched back into the road and came back down the terminus of deserted Main Street, not a person to be seen, slower this time, looking, peering. 

Adrienne spotted it. There. No. 691 was a house, like another other, no sign out front. Well, maybe the guy made the biodiesel out back, we decided. We parked and got out, scrambled down to an outbuilding past two fishing boats in dry dock. We found guys inside milling boards from wood.


"Nope," they said. "Haven't had biodiesel for about 10 years."


Mold, they said. One had a nephew worked for Cummins diesel. Called it bioslime. When it sat in the marine diesels it grew a mold, they said. Didn't last. Never really caught on. Nope. But do what you can. Straight diesel. They're getting the sulfur content down.


We talked awhile while two ospreys lifted and fussed at the end of the dock. Apropo of nothing, I pointed out the birds' giant mess of a nest on the pilings in the harbor not far off. The day was slow and at its end. We went on talking, listening. We learned from the two fishermen how the restaurants wouldn't probably open until Thursday or Friday this time of year, that we'd have to take Route 360 back to Burgess, take the 33 down to Kilmarnock for something to eat. 


"You have a good map of Virginia," the one suggested, asking obliquely.


"Pretty good," I said doubtfully, to let him know that our map wasn't so good and that I knew it.


So we went back to Yellow Truck, more than a little upset once we were on our own again. Totally foiled. And then every station we checked from the website printout seemed suddenly to be hundreds of miles out of our way. And then, as we drove off for Kilmarnock, not sure what our plan was, I wondered aloud if the whole thing, the whole voyage, maybe was pretty much ill-conceived. I wondered if the desert of No Biodiesel might stretch all the way to California. And we snapped at one another about who was more of a genius, etc. for getting us into this mess.


In Kilmarnock we had more heart ache. They hid our nachos under cold cheese whiz and microwaved jar salsa, then sprinkled real cheese along the plate border like art. As we sucked down the chips, we realized we would have to give up our plan to continue along the coast, at least for the rest of the afternoon. We'd have to head inland, Richmond was the closest place with biodiesel, the least out of the way. But when the woman answered the phone for the Richmond station, she laughed at me. "Baby," she said. "I'm sorry. I've never heard of biodiesel in my life." When I persevered and asked what kind it might be, if they had it, wondering if the B20 advertised on the website could be right, she had to ask someone else in the store. He didn't know either. I could hear him shooing her off in the background. She came back on the line. "I know it, baby. I work in a gas station. But I'm gas ignorant." She laughed some more.

Later, after dark, when we came into Richmond, I called back the same gas station, looking for directions, call me stupid, and someone else answered. It was a woman, she said no, there were no cross streets, the road the place was on, New Market, was all alone. No, none others near, she said, nothing near, all alone. It seemed impossible. No cross street.

The only way we were going to find Varina Pit Stop, we realized, was with wifi. So we got onto a highway, drove back to the outer rings outside the city and found a cheap motel. After food and a beer, we would find the place on the map, we knew, in a matter of minutes.

But American Idol was on. First things first. We were in no hurry now. We had Yellow Truck safely parked in the motel lot, under grey metal lights and the American flag, out there flying above the parking lot, through the something-something night. We had our bags inside. All was good. 

We could resurrect the dream in the morning. We would find all the biodiesel we needed. Once again, we had that unserious knowingness, that dreamy self-assuredness I don't know where from. Sometimes a bed and a room can do that. A full belly. We would improvise a new path in the morning.  We would run back into the sun just as soon as it came up.

We had to dismantle several dreams before we got here, flopping on our weird anonymous beds. But our road would be infinite all over again we already knew and were peaceful again. Already, in one day, we had traveled a thousand infinite miles, luxurious doppelgangers, from somewhere to nowhere.





 

Day 14: First Gear

Jeff says first gear is the most difficult. Once I get through that, the rest will be pie. We will see when he gives me my first driving lesson today in Mount Vernon. Jeff also says that the first runs are brutal. I am supposed to be miserable for the first several weeks as I try to come back to health and fitness. My knees and shins are begging me to stop, but I won't because I believe he is right. And already the second half of the run feels better than the first. Jeff also says I should just jump in and write a blog post, once I get going it will come more easily.  So the next several weeks are a lesson in physical and mental momentum and I will do my best to make it out of first gear.

DAY 14: Birdie love

BETHESDA, MD | MARCH 23, 2010 - Just back from the morning run, coffee on, Adrienne came up into my sister's kitchen. I had the French doors slid open to the deck so all the pretty bird calls came in.
"Two cardinals," I said. See them, the manbird red in the tree and the womanbird dusky tan below on the fencepost.
Adrienne did.
The manbird called again and flew from the pine past the porch between the houses.
"She'll follow I bet," I said. And the womanbird did.
We kissed.
"Birdie love," Adrienne said.

 

DAY 14: Mackerel Sky

BETHESDA, MD | March 23, 2010 - Out for a run, early and cold under a mackerel sky, alongside all the black and silver cars making the morning commute down Massachusetts Ave.

Mackerel sky: a sky my mum's mum Muriel used to know. Clouds small and flat, closely packed in sheets of ovals, like flanks of the fish. Old sayings mention it, saying, "Mackeral in the sky, three days dry."

Muriel has been dead for years now. Strong Scottish woman from Nova Scotia, a nurse, divorced her husband before people did that with so much regularity. My dad mentioned it the other day, her phrase. I'd never known, all these years, that she read clouds, too, from under 1940s custom wide-brimmed hats.


Mackerel sky. Clear weather coming after the deluge of yesterday.

Will head to Mt. Vernon today, wind in yellow truck along George Washington Memorial Parkway, along the west banks of the Potomac.

DAY 13: Lemonade Song

WASHINGTON DC | MONDAY, MARCH 22 | THE SETTING, NATURAL, POLITICAL AND OTHERWISE, OF A SPORADICALLY UNRECORDED, HALF-DREAMED, LARGELY-UNDERTAKEN DOCUMENTARY: The setting. Two days into spring on the National Mall. Health care, almost, for all, has just been passed. 32 million more Americans will join the club of the medically cared for. Very, very more democratic than the day before. Cherry blossoms blossoming. Magnolia bloomin'. Lime-green weeping willow hanging down, almost sweeping the soaking wet ground. Bees in boxes on the White House lawn. But you wouldn't know it. You can't tell walking around these capitol buildings, between the stones piled upon unmoveable stone, city of patriotism, of unbearably symbolic pomp and weight. There is no huzzah, no hurrah. 32 million more. History made. And still the buildings and the people are quiet, calm, average. It is business as usual on the Hill, at the central nerve of this nation. The guards at the security gates have new guns, beautiful sleek black shotguns with shiny shells, a half-dozen in a row, all exposed. 

.....Me and Adrienne, Fiance One and Fiancee Two, are in DC trying to foist a big adventure on ourselves. It is Day 13 of our lemonade song, this home-made adventure that will purportedly swell into public momentum which will then calm into regular jobs and sweet unargumentative love and so forth.


.....Essentially, we will record our journey, the details and motivations of which I will relate in another minute. The rules of the game are this. I go first. I tap away at the keys. Then Adrienne, if we are lucky, points out what is wrong or ill-natured or foolish in what I have just said. Then she and I improvise another movie or take a break to eat something.

So, very quickly, so as not to bore or upset anyone who is still reading, here is how we began Yellow Truck's Big Green Adventure.


We graduated from architecture school in January. All very well and good. Then we found out, what we already pretty much knew, that there were no longer jobs in architecture. Oh there were one or two. But mostly, all jobs had been eliminated, put on lay-away or discontinued. So that was interesting. Somewhat unexpected, not fair, stultifying, etc.

We watched TV for several weeks, getting in touch with our elderly retired selves, eating dinner in synch with Pat Sajak, Vanna and Alec Trebeck.


Not knowing what else to do, we decided to pursue work in the field of design/build, a little-known off-shoot of Big D design. We got one job, to design and build some stairs, and then another, to design and build a lakefront garage with a storage loft.


Well, we didn't have any tools at hand. But I had plenty of tools in Florida, in the cottage I had once lived in, but now rented out. We also needed some transportation, something to cruise up to the jobsite in, so we settled on something reliable. It would be a Toyota pickup. I know, Toyota. No brakes. Etc. Well, I happen to love Toyotas and always have, so no problem.


Then I discovered that I wanted a diesel pickup, but still a small, fuel efficient pickup, so that I could burn biodiesel on my way to the jobsite. And I figured, it might as well, be in Florida, because that way we could fly to Florida, buy the truck, get the tools and then drive back to our two jobs the scenic route and see this great land of ours the USofA. Problem was, no diesel small-body pickups exist in this great country more recent than 1986. So it was going to have to be a very old truck. All the more reason to make it a Toyota. 


Well, we found Yellow Truck on eBay in Long Island New York. We watched the five-minute video on You Tube. We asked some tough questions via email, like, Does she burn any oil? Ever done a compression test? When was the timing belt changed last? All very good questions. Very succinct. All could give you a very clear picture of the engine's health. Only problem was that the seller was also a flipper. He didn't know too too much. He'd only owned the truck for a couple of months, bought it off a guy from Oregon who owned it most of the truck's life. So he was protected from knowing the truth, or at least from knowing very much of it, which freed him up to talk only about what made the truck so mint. Like, fresh tires, new batteries, glow plugs. Little things, little sweet inconsequential things. And it didn't hurt that the truck was yellow and cute and that Adrienne immediately loved it and fell for it. So we had to have it. There wasn't much more to it. I bought it at auction, sight unseen. Our work truck as love story. Let's hope, anyway. Pastoral, we hope, as opposed to tragic, or foolish or both.


As for the lemonade. We get dealt lemons. We make lemonade. We makin lemonade tomorrow too. We heightening the stakes. We full of a fiercesome faith. We live dogs, not dead lions. We live. We stand in a field, yellow truck faithful, idling alongside, and we drink in the open sky.