Before I left, Muskegon yesterday, I bought some pot at Highway Dispo. Large, open retail space with shiny floors, they offer Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vaporizers, Concentrates, Edibles and Tinctures (I learned to smoke Mexican pot in the sixties, I have no idea what half those things are). Andy, my sales associate, mid-twenties, clean cut, knowledgeable about his product, encouraged me to buy the Lemon Bar flower. And when I agreed, he stopped talking about pot and talked about how much he liked my governor (Walz, in case you didn’t know that).
Last night, I stayed at the Star Motel in Milan (Michigan) and had dinner at the Milan Coney Cafe. The sign on the front window declared it “The Best Food In The Galaxy.” The white board above the cash register advertised the special for the evening, “Fried bologna Sand w/ Fries or Soup $9.99.” I had the fried chicken. I’m not sure about the “Best In The Galaxy” claim.
The Star Motel is one of those privately-owned brick motels built in the sixties with tired carpet, frayed towels and a clogged bathroom sink. I checked in at three in the afternoon, the owner was in his seventies and came to the window in his pajamas and gave me a long course in how to work the TV remote including which of the clearly labeled buttons did what. Then he lost my drivers license and argued that he didn’t lose it and then found it in the copier and somehow it was still my fault. The room was $65.00.
Larry was my neighbor at the Star Motel. He was gone when I got up at six. He was born in Alabama and travels the country working on high-voltage power lines. Bald, beer-gut, worn and wrinkled complexion, he smoked a cigarette and leaned on his twenty-year old Tahoe while we talked construction. He said he no longer works at heights, that the high work is “a young man’s game,” that he’s fifty and wants to retire in five years and wander the country on a motorcycle “like you.” There’s a lot of lonely guys living in these old motels.
This spring, I rode the Harley Davidson from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg; eighteen hundred miles of hard, cold rain and sixty mile-an-hour winds riding the high plains and the Rocky mountains on two-lane asphalt.
Greg is sixty-six, two years younger than me. Growing up, our family moved every couple of years, new house, new school, new neighbor kids, new siblings. Greg and I were best friends, we had to be. Then the Army, college, Peace Corps, travel, careers, marriages, kids, and all the other oddities of adult life happened and we went our directions. Greg was a windsurfer and the wind blew him to Portland.
Greg can no longer assemble coherence. His stories are predicates without a subject. My refrain, as we work to communicate, is “Who?” who are we talking about, who did that wonderful, awful, amazing, inexplicable thing? Only to discover often that the predicate itself, that event, that story, that meaningful anecdote that he’s working so hard to relate, is itself a figment. He’s started having conversations with his bathroom mirror.
A few weeks ago, he walked out of his house at six o’clock in the evening and spent the night on the streets of downtown Portland. Drugs are a problem in Portland and the streets at night are tense and dangerous. Greg struggles with anxiety, his terror as he wandered those dark streets must have been overwhelming, stumbling over people sleeping on the sidewalks, recognizing buildings and street names and unable to assemble that information into directions home. He didn’t have his phone, he can no longer work it anyway, and it took his son, Morgan, until four o’clock the next afternoon to find him.
His kids, Morgan and Madeline, are on it. They’ve hired help and visited assisted living situations and they’re on waiting lists. The memory-care facilities of drooling old people staggering behind walkers are not an option; Greg hikes the Cascades several times a week with his care-provider, Evyn. A large, extended family from the Philippines hosts people struggling with dementia. There is gardening and home repairs to do. It sounds promising.
I sat on a basalt stone in the warm sun and light breeze under a cerulean-blue sky in the New Mexico high desert and talked to Shelly and Ranger; Ranger the dog. Shelly’s from Minnesota, Spring Valley, and now she lives in New Mexico where she’s a campground host at a private campground some miles up the road. Short, dark hair, fifty or so and trim, she’d walked up the same two-mile rocky path as Remi and me to get to the top of a small hill overlooking the snowcapped mountains, a life-fit path if not a CrossFit path.
The years hadn’t been easy, I could see it in the grey wear on her face and the tired in her eyes. She’d lived in Oregon, Alaska, Louisiana and other places she told me and I don’t remember. She asked me, “How familiar are you with the bible?” In both hands she held the book, grocery bag cover held together with yellowed scotch tape, the title neatly lettered on the front in faded-black Sharpie, dozens of tattered scraps of paper sticking out as bookmarks.
I shuffled my feet in the red volcanic dust and thought about the question, about the beauty, history and geology that surrounded us, about the billions of years it took for our planet and our species to be not ready for that question. “Let’s talk about dogs,” I said.
And so we talked about dogs; until we didn’t. Ranger was a rescue dog, he was a year-and-a-half old. He appeared to be some mix of German Shepherd, lab and basset hound (the floppy ears). He wore a tattered grey bandana for a collar. He and Remi were instant playmates.
Shelly’s husband committed suicide thirty years ago that day. He was from New Mexico.
I’m 67 years old, I’m a US Army veteran, I’ve lived overseas for many years in both Europe and Asia, and I’ve traveled the planet including 13 months riding a motorcycle around the world, the Sahara Desert crossing sticks in my memory. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 30 years, I founded and ran a business for 28 years (you know that, you worked for me), I put two kids through college without debt, paid off our house and had enough money left over to retire. I spend my summers traveling the southern states on my motorcycle talking to people I meet and writing about them (last summer I was in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama (including a NASCAR race at Talladega!), Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio). I subscribe to several newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Guardian, BBC News and Al Jazeera; I read a lot and I am passionately and unabashedly liberal in my beliefs.
Having laid out a little of my history and perspective, and you know me as a co-worker and an employer, besides, I have to ask: Do I seem delusional? Do I seem like a person likely to be seduced by propaganda, false media and angry friends? If I do, stop reading. You shouldn’t read shit from delusional people.
If you’re still reading, here’s a quick thought experiment for you: apparently, a lot of people believe that Trump’s 4 indictments and 91 felony charges in 4 different jurisdictions are a “deep state” operation orchestrated by Joe Biden or his henchmen. A scenario like that would require that literally thousands of people be able to keep a complicated storyline absolutely secret not just for years but for the rest of their lives. Nobody, not attorneys, not juries, not court officials, not clerks, secretaries, police officers, or janitors can disclose their secret enterprise, despite the fact that revealing the secret would earn them thousands (or millions) of dollars and hours and weeks of TV fame. Does that seem likely? Really? People are people.
Now, let’s talk about you: I assume from your messages that your news sources are primarily Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Qanon and the various other websites, blogs and social media outlets that inform the MAGA faithful as well as the friends and people you choose to surround yourself with. And from those sources and associates, you have taken on a world view that is both false and destructive, a world view that is vengeful, bigoted and cruel, a world of lies, partial truths, conspiracy theories, self-dealing, self-aggrandizement and nonsense. The MAGA arguments are not something you will convince me of; in fact, it is not a conversation that I’m willing to be part of. But it is something you should reflect on.
And so, my former friend and co-worker, I wish you the very best. I warn you that outside the media and social bubble that you now live in, the world looks much different, it believes in science, humanity, justice and equality, it believes in an imperfect country forever working to better itself. That’s the America I believe in and want to be part of. Let’s go our different paths.
My plan was to follow The Great River Road, the Blues Highway, the Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, from Minneapolis to Memphis then cut across to Birmingham for two days of NASCAR at Talladega with my son, Eli. Neither of us has ever been to a stock car race so, yeah; if you’re going to celebrate the South, NASCAR! We bought infield passes, because the “ribs are better in the infield.” That’s what they told me on the phone.
In Missouri just before Bob Dylan highway meets Interstate 64, I changed my mind and decided to cross the river to East St. Louis and ride south to Cairo, on the Illinois side. My purpose was to stop and visit with Frazier Garner, General Manager of the East St. Louis Monitor.
I walked in the front door and staff called for him and he greeted me and remembered me from earlier in the summer and we shook hands. Almost no small talk, it didn’t seem to flow, and then I told Frazier that the lynching photo hanging in his office stuck with me. I was curious about how he managed the anger.
The rage he denied he directed at me, spitting the words that he was “about love” and that he had no anger in response to the photograph, that the photograph didn’t matter, that he didn’t care about the photograph, that the photograph that hung on the wall in his office in such a way that every time he walked in he had to confront it, in such a way that his every visitor had to confront it, that that picture wasn’t important. This went on for a number of minutes until he stormed out of the room. I didn’t argue, there was no point at which I could interject or clarify or make amends. After he left, his sister, a co-worker, came in, initially looking at me with suspicion but nodding with what seemed to be an annoyed understanding once I’d described the exchange.
I’m thinking about emailing him an apology and trying to set things right but I’m not sure about that. I like Frazier and I’d like to visit with him again. The problem could be that Frazier, after fifty-some years in the newspaper business writing to and about the black community, has had his fill of well-meaning white people that speak and write pretty words that change nothing for him or his readers. Or maybe the random white dude stomping in the front door of his office and asking about his feelings deserved a firm fuck off. Or maybe the man who’s been fighting the fight his entire life has the right to wonder where I, the bleeding heart liberal I imagine myself to be, have been for the last fifty years. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. Something to think about.
Last night I stayed at the Quality Inn in Cairo, Illinois, the only motel in town still open for business. They have a breakfast buffet that includes Trix breakfast cereal, waffles, scrambled eggs from powder, sausage patties from powder (I guess) and coffee. Perfect. At breakfast, I met Angela and Alijah, Alijah is Angela’s niece and has a week off from school. Angela delivers school busses for a living. They’re from Atlanta and are on their way to St. Louis. The bus has a gasoline engine and no governor and they’re doing seventy-five.
Last night a friend asked me how I find the small, locally-owned motels where I tend to stay. I told him I just wander around whatever town I’m in until I see a motel-looking building that doesn’t have a Holiday Inn Express sign on top. You don’t meet interesting people at a Holiday Inn Express. And that’s the purpose of my wandering, to meet interesting people: steel workers, powerline workers, asphalt workers, concrete guys, carpenters, electricians, windmill erectors, engineers, government inspectors, young couples, retirees, farm laborers, tugboat crewmen, low-budget lawyers, helicopter pilots, circus workers, long haul truckers, cowboys, mechanics, salespeople selling toilet paper and John Deere tractors, beat up women and exhausted children, people with wheelchairs and walkers, people on porno shoots and sexy trysts, drug dealers, rodeo riders, addicts, drunks, hookers, fellow motorcyclists; silent people, noisy people, people who don’t speak English, people beaten down and moving on, people with their heads held high and moving on. These motels house the rich, colorful, fabulous and messy tapestry of our society. And every person I meet has a story to tell. A little situational awareness is advised.
