Tue 31 March 2009
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
OCRACOKE, N.C. — You lose sight of land on Pamlico Sound, and I lost track of time. At that point where the last of the marsh reeds disappear on the southern horizon, and before the water tower at Ocracoke provides evidence to the north of a spit of an island in the Outer Banks, I realized I had fallen into a misadventure and would probably not be seeing my friends anymore that day.
In Chicago, the snow keeps falling in what has been the coldest winter of my life. It snowed again this past weekend, and Tom Skilling at WGN is threatening snow again this weekend. Imagine snow on Opening Day as it warms to a high of 41 degrees at Sox Park. Today, it's mostly melted but there are still little mountains of snow a-hanging around.
I escaped for eight days, headed down to North Carolina to see a good friend at Camp Lejeune and keep his wife company as she hobbles around on crutches, having blown her knee out on a bunny slope. He's in between tours of Iraq. It was important to me that I see him. And who doesn't want to a place with an ocean and a state that at least sounds warm, like North Carolina? It was a really nice time, before my misadventure on the North Carolina Ferry System.
We saw giant hovercraft come out of the sea and bear down onto the sand, practicing a faux Normandy invasion. The latest winter storms had blown black sand and fossils all over the beach. We ate venison steak and drank Irish beer. On the first full day there, we took a walk deep into the swamp with his dog, and the neighbor mutts panted along, under electric fences, past piles of bear shit and across mini-streams. When the water overtook the land, we paddled along in a canoe. Much of North Carolina's coast is endless swamp, a sandy soil where pine trees cover the dry spots. Beavers made it worse, flooding the land with their stick-built dams. Out of spite or out of ignorance, the dogs pulled at the beavers' dam with their jaws, ripping out the logs. The water gushed out. The beavers slapped their tails.
I landed in Raleigh on St. Patrick's Day, and it struck me as a coincidental trip toward origins. My family immigrated to Raleigh from Belfast, Ireland, 300 years ago, give or take. I had never been there, but I could see the history of the place. The beautifully old sagging brick buildings, the antebellum debutante feel of Meredith College, where I met an actual Irish girl on the day of green. (She was otherwise a disappointing lass, alas.)
And my friend taught me how to drive a stick shift so I could drive along the ocean. The ferry to Ocracoke Island takes 2-1/2 hours. I thought it would take less than one. I never realized how slow boats are, beating back all that friction of the nautical miles. There's a lounge on the boat and, half-starved, I raided the vending machine of its chips and its honey buns and its twinkies. Mostly people just sit in their cars. There was one attractive girl who kept wandering lonesome about the top of the ferry as the wind blew hard across the blue sea. I liked the way she fit inside her pants, but it was too cold to stay long in the wind, and her boyfriend waited for her in the truck, indifferent to the view.
I sailed to these Lake Michigan waters a year ago guided by a Polaris that no longer shines for me. I have only my own light to guide me from now on, and I don't know what to think about that. I keep reading back lines from Hamlet: There is nothing neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so.
But isn't that a double negative? With one more credit, I'll have a master's from Northwestern University, the Big Ten's top university. I really like Chicago, actually, despite its terrible weather, and I live a solidly, writerly Nelson Algren type of existence. But I don't think I'm going to stay. I don't know. I have the ghost of faith that a couple of opportunities in San Francisco might come through. And so I may sail on, this time with the current. To a good harbor town.
The ferry left me off on Ocracoke, finally, and I raced the Corolla across the 14-mile island only to be denied passage onto the other ferry that would take me north towards Cape Hatteras and Kill Devil Hills. I had to wait another hour for another boat. The wind was whipping about on that unprotected island, but I took the time to gather seashells by the seashore. Another 40 minutes on a boat, and then I saw the sunset beside that famous lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, N.C., the one with the candy stripe of black on white. I drove far out of the way to avoid another ferry and got back to my friends' place. I arrived just before midnight. The next morning, I left their house before dawn to catch a bus to the airport, anxious to return to my Illinois home.
Fri 2 January 2009
Life in the lull
(this was a response to a Craig's List posting)
Oh, the lull — the life is passing you by, the better days that once that were, the greater story someplace else, the four walls of your existence bouncing echoes as the flashing blue-silver screen chirps anxiety and inauthentic characters.
Oh, I know the lull. You think you love the musty smell of a used bookstore cranny, taking pictures with your Nikon, catching that perfect angle of Sears Tower at night or a certain friend looking the other way, caught in thought as you attempt to steal a bit of her soul. Or his soul.
You think you like these things, you say you like these things, and so I ask, why don't you do these things? Are you waiting for the couch to blow a spring and jolt you upward and outward into the life that goes on all around you? Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Oh, but I know the lull is not so easy. You're a speed skater going around the frozen velodrome and your feet are fixed in grooves. You're the needle tied to an arm playing the same worn out groove and it's a hit from 2005. Even your favorite television characters have grown up and moved out and rejoined the living, left their silly fiction play with the product placement.
The lull, the vortex, the void, the limbo, the super-inertia of the gravitron, it's a hard thing to pull out of. You can only do it yourself, but I--I just might be able to throw an arm into the lull and try to help.
I live just north. Have you been to Armadillo's Pillow at Sheridan and Pratt? It's the best. Books cheap cheap cheap. And classic nooks crannies to go along with the classically quirky and rodent-like mascot. If you like, we could peruse together there...
Or just talk for a little while this way. You sound attractively interesting, if lull-bound.
From the other side,
This is Chris at 25
Fri 26 December 2008
So long to this bone-bleached part of the world
PORTLAND, Oregon — My element in September, as I traveled to the East Coast, was water — or rain, more precisely, but also wind. Hurricane Gustav drenched me as I left Chicago; Hurricane Hanna soaked me to the core as I arrived in New York, walking through Queens. Hurricane Ike delayed my return for 12 hours as I sat in northwest Indiana, the tracks washed between South Bend and Gary.
This time it was water again, for sure, but in its frozen form, snow. The Inuit, you know, have 37 words for snow. I saw dry, powder snow fluttering like down in a pillow fight at the Minneapolis train station. Snow like Siberia, Dr. Zhivago snow, lacking all heat sun-shined snow in regions so cold it can no longer snow, crossing North Dakota, stopped in Rugby, the geographical center of North America.
Blowing, drifting snow, sitting beneath the windmills in a white birthday cake dessertscape of Eastern Washington. Dirty, slushy snow in Roseburg, Oregon. Wet, piling-up snow on the freeway from Salem to Portland, transforming our bus into a sleigh, eight cylinders of Greyhound diesel into eight tiny reindeer and our mustachioed bus driver, Curtis, into a kind of curmudgeonly Santa Claus, more Billy Bob Thornton than Miracle on 34th Street:
"I live in Portland.
Sedna the Inuit Witch-Goddess is blowing the harsh wind of her icy throat down from the Arctic through the Pacific, from Sarah Palin-country to the godless Volvoed Northwest, and Seattle and Portland are enduring the worst winter storm in 30 years. And I walked into it, half-willingly.
Oh, I may have hoped for the gentle rain I knew and loved, but that would not have been as dramatic for my return to PDX and my descent back into Roseburg (rising again to the hydroelectric emissions-free light rail of Northern Oregon three days later, give or take).
I'm not exactly sure why I came out here except I had the opportunity. I had to see an old friend in the depths of Oregon, an oracle, a recluse of sorts, I guess.
After detoxing from my fall quarter at Northwestern, I had nine days to fit in a mad, illogical trip across the continent and now I've set myself up to make my mother very sad if I miss Xmas for a fourth straight year. I am a bad son. I'm coming, ma, the train'll get out tonight, I promise!
All traffic is shuttered north and south, from Vancouver to Eugene, and probably further south. Nothing will leave Seattle tonight. But somehow, Amtrak thinks it can make it back up the Columbia River Gorge tonight, five hours delayed. I told the conductor, I'm game. Why not.
Every step of this journey has been delayed. I guess we left Chicago on time. That was not delayed. But I woke up Monday morning with the sun on the wrong side of the train, and that set the tone for the rest of the trip. It was 30 below zero in North Dakota and Montana as I passed through (that was the daily high) — so cold the rails cracked west of Williston, N.D., and tipped over 30 freight cars full of corn, spilling them all over the tracks and snow. I made a couple new friends on that leg of the journey, a couple from Cornwall, and Miss Lissy Savage, who playing in it for the first time ever as we stopped in the Twin Cities, said it felt like corn when you slide your feet across it.
From N.D., we were bused into the night of Big Sky Montana on motorcoaches with red velvet seats. Put back on the train in Havre, Mont., when we woke up Tuesday in Sandpoint, Idaho, we were told that we'd have another bus waiting for us in Spokane, Wash., the train would make it no further. The bus was six hours late leaving Portland for Roseburg on Thursday (which just gave me time to walk all along the waterfront of PDX, which was sunny and beautiful).
I was pushed off (not literally) the noon Greyhound from Roseburg yesterday, marooning me in southern Oregon for another five hours till the evening bus arrived. I sat next to a new arrival to snowy? Oregon on the bus, he saw my copy of the Buddha's Dhammapada, and we struck up a conversation that lasted four or five hours, all the way to Portland. When Curtis the Greyhound Sleigh Driver delivered us to PDX, eight inches of snow had already fallen, which pretty much stranded me in downtown, except he and his wife were so kind to let me crash at their place in Hillsboro, which I knew would be an easy Max ride back to the city this morning.
The city is surreal today, lots of people about, shopping in this bleak economy, transported by the light rail. Almost no cars anywhere, like some kind of liberal frozen wet dream. Beautiful.
The trip's not over. I've got 2500 miles of tracks before I arrive in Defiance, OH.
Oh, oh, oh-i-o, oh-i-o, oh-i-o
Truly sorry, I see clearly Calmly crashing, I pace faster than anyone Hinges rusting, they swing louder than anything Truly lonely this place is flatter than it seems I'm upset and I leave the doors wide open
