8/21/99 -- From Most Arid to Most Humid

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Warning: the first part of this update is low on pix, high on wordy musings. After new Mexico it becomes more similar to the other entries.

8/15/99 -- Today was pretty slow compared to the past couple. I woke up and drove towards the Grand Canyon, as I was saying in my last update. To the right is a view of Lake Powell from the road Past Glen Canyon, which is on the way down there. I didn't actually upload until after I found that the good signal that I'd been getting was from a carrier that AT&T doesn't have an agreement with, so I had to call up AT&T and ask where I could get a signal. It turned out that that place was Tuba City, 70 miles away from the Grand Canyon, and a little out of the way form the route to the North Rim, closer to the route to the South Rim. Otherwise it was wait until Flagstaff, but I hoped that I could upload and make it to the Grand Canyon before sunset. In answer to one of the rep's questions, I said that I'd been on the road for 2 and a half months. For the very first time in my entire life, someone working for a phone company referred to me as "dude."

"Dude, you've been traveling around for 2 and a half months? In a car?"

"Yup."

"What kind of car?"

"A Saab 900."

(Laughing) "Hard life, man!"

"Oh yeah, 16 valve and turbo, it's a pretty sweet ride."

"What year?"

"86."

"Good year!"

He then told me that he wished he could be doing what I was doing. I told him that he should, and he said that he was in the middle of putting a new engine in his VW bus. For another breath of fresh telecom air, he wished me happy trails and a safe journey before thanking me for calling AT&T.

I drove off towards the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, thinking I'd probably wait to upload until I got to Flagstaff. Then I realized that I'd been driving on the wrong road for half an hour or more, and was headed straight towards the South Rim. Ah well, I decided that the South Rim would be just fine, and I'd stop and upload at Tuba City on the way. Which is exactly what I did.

After I uploaded, it was clear that I wouldn't see the Grand Canyon that evening, as the sun was already setting. I just hurried to the park anyway, and found a rest area to bed down in. When I found one I headed back to the town of Tusayan, a strip of hotels, souvenir shops, and restaurants catering to South Rim visitors. I am right now eating at an overpriced diner, but it's the best I could do, being exceedingly low on provisions and cooking zanshin.

Starting somewhere: I'm sad because I am nearing the end of my travels for now. I need to be back in New England by the 1st of September, Providence, to be precise, so that I can register for classes for the Fall semester. However, I'm going to try and make it back by the 30th of August, so that I can see off Sean, who's headed to Israel for 9 months. Passing off the travelers baton, as it were. That leaves me 11 days starting tomorrow. Now, people can and do fit an entire vacation into 11 days, and count themselves as fortunate! But see, I've got a half a continent between me and Providence, and lots to see. Now, I meant what I said when I wrote that I wouldn't trade any of my time in LA for time here on the road, and I still feel that way.

On a closely related note, I'm also sad because I'm feeling rushed, and I'm passing some very interesting things by. This was inevitable from before I set out, but I can still be sad about it. For example, I gave Sunset Crater Volcano a bye back in Arizona, and today I passed over White Sands National Monument.

Other things make me sad, too. Today I... well, let's go back to yesterday first, then I'll come back to today.

Yesterday I awoke in my tent. I was dreaming the strangest dream I've had in a long long time. I no longer remember what it was about (typical for me, I remember that I've been dreaming about once a month, and actually remember a dream about twice a year). Of course, nothing could compare to the dream that Ian Demsky was telling Marc and I about at Cathy's house, but I digress. On my way over to the rest stop after the overpriced dinner, I saw that I was in a State Park (just outside the National Park boundary) which allowed camping free of charge. So I pitched and went to sleep, and that's the first time my tent's been unpacked since LA. Mmmm, flat surface sleeping, a pleasant change from the front seat of my car every once in a while.

I packed up slowly to give the dew on the tent a chance to dry off, and when I was all set, headed back into the town for coffee -- and noticed that they had a PC and a sign which advertised internet access. At $5 for 1-15 minutes, I think my cell phone is cheaper!

So I headed into the Grand Canyon park. Apparently the ground that I'd covered the previous night is called the East Rim Drive. I arrived at the first viewpoint, and that's what you see on the left. I kept only two pictures of the Grand Canyon, feeling that really nothing I could capture on a regular format (not a panoramic) camera can do it justice. At my first glimpse of the canyon, I just started laughing. It was like my first glimpse of the Badlands, but times ten. I stood and stared for a minute, then accosted a couple walking away from the viewpoint. "This is the Grand Canyon, right?" I asked.
"That's what they tell me," the dude replied, without missing a beat.
"Pretty grand," I said.

I just wanted to see what their reaction would be. The woman pretended the conversation hadn't happened.

The South Rim was just as over-populated as everyone I'd spoken with had said it would be, but I guess I didn't notice too too much. I drove from viewpoint to viewpoint, spending about 10 minutes at each after the first, at which I spent about half an hour. I was considering hiking a piece of the Bright Angel Trail, but I knew I had to cover ground that day, so hiking was really out. If you go and view the full size image for the picture of the canyon above, you can see a little green "S" of trees in the lower left quadrant -- that's part of the Bright Angel Trail. When I'd made my way all the way over to the visitor center, I sat down and wrote some postcards. Clouds rolled in and covered the canyon as I wrote, and by the time my mail was posted, it was pouring.

I opted against riding the shuttle bus along the West Rim Drive (it's closed to cars during peak season) in the rain, and instead beat it out of the park on the East Rim Drive, retracing the path I took into the park the previous night. I stopped at a few lookouts, and at one point saw a woman (who was driving a new Saab 93) wearing a cool hat with an SLR waiting patiently in the rain for the perfect lighting shot over the canyon. I didn't realize at first what she was up to, but I kept glancing over at her, and when I did figure it out, I laughed and said "ha, you're waiting for the lightning," (like she didn't know what she was doing, I guess. I just wanted to open a dialogue) and she told me she had a few, but she wanted to make sure. We spoke a while, and while we were talking, a massive bolt of lightning struck the canyon perhaps 6 - 10 miles away, the kind of bolt which strikes once, then strokes again and again in a few different patterns in roughly the same place (yes, I know very well that all lightning consists of hundreds of pulses, I'm talking about something else). Dawn (the woman's name) and I both gasped, and Dawn caught it on film.

Before she left, Dawn took my address and told me she'd send me a print of that picture she took while we spoke, since I'd told her my camera's shutter's response time was too slow to catch lightning in the act. I of course gave her the address to my website in return.

Well that was it for the Grand Canyon. I was sad as I left, knowing that I didn't hike because I was short on time.

I emerged from the park and headed South to Flagstaff, where I got online and uploaded the update to my marked up map, which had been the last file to go up the day before, but was interrupted by the batteries to my phone and computer running out at the same time.

From Flagstaff I just hurried East to New Mexico, heading through the Petrified Forest National Park on my way, stopping only to check out the trail called the Crystal Forest, pictured to the left, briefly. I'd seen petrified wood already on this trip, and although I could have taken a whole day to walk through the various trails in the park, I was hoping to spend the night just outside of Albuquerque, and compromised. The wood was similar to what I'd seen in the Petrified Garden outside the Black Hills, but I saw much, much larger samples in the Park.

I also stopped briefly to gaze at the Painted Dessert, a part of the same park. Pictured at right are some neat formations known as the Teepees, for rather obvious reasons. The red cap is a clay, the white stripe is sandstone, the black stripe is magnesium-bearing, sand, and the red strip below is iron-oxide-bearing. Very neat.

As you can see, the sun was setting by the time I was leaving the Painted Desert and getting onto I-40 East. I had passed through over 10 separate regions of rain, as apparently the four corners states were all covered by this humongous high-pressure system. I got a great picture or two of sunbeams:
Nice, eh?

So I continued on my way, and made it to a rest stop a score or two miles from Albuquerque, where I collapsed.

The following morning I set out into Albuquerque, and took care of a few errands. Firstly, I'd been meaning to pick up a copy of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy by Sarah McLachlan for quite some time, and I'd head it playing at Julie's house in LA and had the whole album stuck in my head. For another I needed new tires!

So I followed signs for "Pueblo Indian Center and Information Center," looking to ask someone about where I could get some music. I saw that the center was quite large, and had a museum dedicated to the Pueblo Indians, about whom I knew very very little. I'd passed over the opportunity to visit the oldest constantly inhabited village in the US, the Taos Pueblo, when I took Santa Fe off of my route, and I passed by, but didn't visit, the second oldest, the Acuma (sky city) Pueblo, that very morning. So I went to the museum.

Now we get back to me being sad about things. It turns out the Pueblo Indians (completely unrelated to the Navajo, I learned, despite that the Navajo Nation covers much of the four corners states, with reservations all over) are a group of Indians (there are 19 remaining Pueblos) related to each other, but governing themselves separately. In addition, each Pueblo speaks a variant of one of three mutually incomprehensible languages. In their legend, this is because a long time ago (evidence shows that Pueblo Indians were roaming the Southwest as early as 1000BC) the people quarreled, and were cursed to speak different languages to prevent the quarreling. They started out as nomads, hunting and gathering, and began to settle down when they learned to farm maize. Then the Spaniards came and forced them to convert to Catholicism, and exploited them for labor, it's a story we all know too well. Eventually there was a successful revolt, but that only lasted so long before the Spaniards returned.

Finally I can articulate at least part of that which has been bothering me ever since I noticed I was in a part of the country with as low a Caucasian content as I've ever seen, and to a certain extent, since I met Mike in Fort MacLeod. It's all the Indians. What keeps them going? I don't get it. (Now's a good time for me to remind you all of my standard disclaimer.)

Normally I'm not one to emphasize race. Rather, is my abiding belief that all people are fundamentally the same, regardless of race, religion, or political allegiance. In fact, sometimes I'm sure that a prerequisite to global peace and harmony is what I think of as "the shattering of the past." That is to say, even though history hopefully teaches people what mistakes of the past not to repeat, all too often it teaches people to hate the children of the people who wronged their parents. The only chance we have of ever getting along is to forget that some white people enslaved some black people, that some Serbs killed some Albanians (oooh, getting with the current events!), that some Germans slaughtered 6 million Jews and assorted millions of others (I'm not winning any fans with that last statement, so stay with me here). I'm not saying we should forget with respect to the actual perpetrators of those events. I'm down with war crimes trials, harsh punishments for hate crimes, etc. Sure that guy Misolovic needs to be taken out. But I am saying this -- for how many generations should a person's offspring be held accountable for their actions? I say people need to do a little forgetting.

That line of thought can be taken one step further and we can reach the conclusion that if you forget the historical baggage associated with a race, race itself becomes an issue of aesthetics. See, I'm not a big believer in this notion that people seem to take for granted that just because you have similar skin or belief in god to some other people that you get to speak for any or all of them. Well sure you can understand them better than other people in many cases. But it's a little presumptuous to say you have a right to represent their opinions.

However, there are cases in which even I cannot stubbornly refuse to admit the validity and importance of a person's belonging to a specific culture with a heritage. With Natives it's more important than any other group, that lives in the US, since they are more cohesive and traditional than any other group I've ever heard of. After all, they are allowed by the Federal Government to live in dedicated areas where there is a tribal government and the laws of the states don't completely apply. I'm not so sure that's such a hot idea. Sure I feel that the way the Europeans hoisted the continent from the Natives was a terrible thing. But I don't think that equates to the Europeans not having a right to settle in North America at all. After all, seen from a global perspective (the one I try to use most often), it's all land that we must share. Of course, that's not how it happened, but let's fast-forward to today, shall we, and deal with the situation at hand, not make policies solely to apologize for the crimes of our ancestors, for which we are not to blame. When I drove through the reservations, I saw a few things. Casinos everywhere. You all know by now how much I hate casinos. And yet that's the only industry on a reservation. Undeveloped land everywhere. Stands by the side of the highway pandering Indian crafts to tourists. Lovely. "Chief Yellowhorse friendly Indians 1/2 mile ahead. Blankets $9.95." Not that there's anything wrong with profiting from traditional crafts, just the way it's couched it seems like that's selling their culture as cheap trinkets. And when I was in Tuba City, gassing up my car, a guy approached me and asked me for two bucks. When I told him sorry, no, he just asked again. "C'mon, man, just two bucks..." I've lived with panhandlers all my life, coming from NYC, but never before had I been asked for a specific, multi-dollar sum, except for that guy Mike in Fort MacLoed, which makes it a common theme with stone drunk Indians. Again I feel I must point out my standard disclaimer. The Native American populace is in trouble, I tell you, and it's depressing as hell.

What gets to me so, now that I think of it, is how much I don't get it, and how I'm so embarrassed by my complete lack of even the most preliminary understanding that I can't even approach the issue with some random person like I might ordinarily do. (Don't believe me? Try and picture me in Bedford/Stuyvesant grilling the people standing outside an AIDS clinic about their feelings about black/white race relations. It happened.)

So I guess I'll have to live with that uneasy feeling for a little while longer. I crave an understanding where there is currently a blank. Perhaps I'll have to wait until I move West after school to look for enlightenment, or perhaps I'll search out people of Native blood at school to ask for their help with this. I expect that whenever I do, I'll look back at these words and realize how wrong I was in even the most peripheral of the impressions that I had.

Perhaps what makes me the most uneasy is that my all-purpose answer -- to jettison your culture and go study some trade and define your own purpose in life and get out there and live it, seems a too harsh when applied to Natives. But maybe that's only because their situation is harsh, and I've led a privileged life and feel spoiled... perhaps it is the way though, and it's just tough, and just because I lucked out doesn't mean that other people don't have to work through some hard shit.

Oh well, all that mental boosheet has tuckered me out, and I'm sure I've pissed off a few people... if you think I'm off-base, let me know. I'm just about to head off to sleep, but first the end of today:

After I got my Sarah McLachlan album and got new tires, I headed South to El Paso, the furthest South I will be on this voyage. I stopped for lunch on the way in a town called Hatch, where I provisioned a bit and, not being able to stomach anything warm due to to heat (finally, a day where the mercury exceeded 100 degrees!), I chowed down on bell peppers, carrots, a tomato, and some mango. I tried to get a soft-serve chocolate-vanilla swirl at the Dairy Queen, but -- what the hell! -- apparently DQ isn't serving any ice cream except for vanilla any more?!?!?! Does anyone out there know anything about this? What, all of a sudden people don't like chocolate ice cream? The attendant was a little frightened by my reaction, I think. Too bad -- that's consumer feedback for ya. Besides, I wasn't yelling at her, I was just a little incredulous. So, there, above to the right you can see the DQ which negged me.

I know, by now you're saying "Avery, what the hell, you've got no pictures of the Pueblo Indian center, or of Dawn, that woman who's hopefully sending you a print of lighting striking over the Grand Canyon, of anything interesting, WTF?" Well, yeah, I noticed. I've been a little off these past two days, I guess.

Anyhow, apparently Hatch is some sort of Chile mecca, 'cause there were tons of farmers markets selling bunches and bunches of the things, so I had to get me some. I can't wait to cook with them.

I also passed the following hilarious town:

When I got to El Paso I opted against crossing the border to Juarez, smelling a tourist haven from miles away. Instead I made East for Carlsbad, intending to spend the night nearby and hit them in the morning. I crossed into Texas at about the same time that my trip odometer marked my 11,000th mile!!! Damn, that's a lot of traveling.

I headed East out of El Paso without stopping. Just outside of the city I got a glimpse of what looks to be common Texas landscape -- green plains covered with Broadleaf Yucca. Well, the AAA map of Texas has a picture of a Yucca plant on the front panel, anyway.

Shortly after I passed out of El Paso I began to see the Guadalupe Mountains in the distance. I made it all the way through the Guadalupe Mountains National Park and to the rest stop just East of it before the sun had completely set, affording me a great scene to gaze out on while I broke out my dinner prep:
I was quite content to call it a day at that point, which was good, 'cause it gave me the hours I needed to write this monster journal entry.

Well, that's it for tonight, oh! except for one thing which I wanted to write down so I didn't forget that I saw it. This is too funny -- perhaps 100 miles back I passed a white Dodge Omni -- and I always notice Omnis, and Plymouth Horizons, the same car, since I owned and Omni. This Omni was wearing a bra. For those of you who don't know what a bra is in the context of cars, it's that pretentious leather hood and grill protector that you see on sports cars. Not on Dodge Omnis. Supposed to protect the hood and grill of the car from little pebbles and such. If I ever get that Porsche that I want, I'll get a bra for it. I didn't have a bra for my Omni. And I painted that car myself.

Ok that just about does it. Oh yeah, one last thing, I stopped to grab a picture of myself in front of the only salt flats I crossed over. The Guadalupe mountains are in the background.

I woke up spontaneously at 5am on the 18th to catch dawn as it happened, which was a treat. Then I went back to sleep till around 9. When I got up, the first thing I did was change the oil in my car. After that, I headed into the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

Along the road to the caverns I saw hundreds of Prickly Pear cacti littering the landscape, pictured at left. They are commonly found all over the Southwest, but I'd not seen them in such concentration till then. They have these deep purpley-red fruits which Natives used to use for food. I read about that on a short little hike around a trail which lead from the road to an overhang of rock which had served as shelter for Indian runners for thousands of years. The trail had tons of signs in front of all these different desert plants and explained what they were and how they were used by Natives back in the day. I was so surprised when I saw a species of Juniper that lives in the desert! When I read about the fruit of the Prickly Pear cactus, I ran my fingers over one to see if it was squishy or hard. What is was was covered with scores of teeny little nearly invisible spines which lodged in my fingers, which I had to remove with the only tools I had available to me -- a knife blade and the pliers on Onthank's leatherman, which he'd left in my car by mistake. Muttering "Ayzeh Basa" over and over, which is a bit of Hebrew which has never left my vocabulary, which translates roughly to "what a pain in the ass," I dug at my fingers with a knife blade and pulled little chunks of skin off with the pliers till the spines were gone. A lovely experience. Above and to the right is a picture of the landscape around the Carlsbad area.

When I got to the visitor center, I learned that the best of the ranger guided tours, the ones where they issue you hard hats with spelunking lights and you get to crawl through the caverns, all get booked days in advance, and the best I could do was take a ranger guided walking tour through the "scenic rooms," a group of awesome caverns where the formations are so close by that they made them accessible only to those being led by rangers, since there was too much damage being done. So I took that tour, which was led by this hilarious old ranger named Andy. He'd been working at the caverns for over 40 years, and was retiring in 30 days. He was what people refer to as "a dry wit." I'll get to an example of that in a minute.

We were led down into the caverns and there I saw some absolutely amazing formations. The standard stalagmites and stalactites, but also super-thin "soda-straw" stalactites, most of them hollow, "popcorn rock," which is all bubbly, and drapes, broad flat flows of calcite caused by water flowing along rock faces (as opposed to dripping from the ceiling). We saw the evidence of the earliest human explorers of the caverns, the very first of whom was a 16 year old illiterate Texas ranch hand named Jim White. He went down into the caverns with a makeshift lantern -- a coffee kettle filled with Kerosene with a rag stuck in the spout. It was with that makeshift lantern that the early explorers left what is now protected as "historical graffiti" -- initials and names written in soot on the walls! To the left is an example of this historical graffiti.

We toured through the rooms while Andy told us about the history of the caves, and the explorers, and about a movie that was made in the caverns, and about the bats which spend the summer roosting in the caves. Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned the bats until now. Well, bats are my absolute favorite terran mammal. Perhaps it's because they are poorly understood (I remember rumors from summer camp that bats, if they could, would fly onto your head and lay eggs in your hair), or maybe I just think they're cute, or maybe it's the echolocation thing (which makes sense, since my all-time favorite mammal is the dolphin), but anyhow, I love 'em, and was super psyched to be in a cavern near hundreds of thousands of 'em. Mexican Free-tailed Bats, to be precise. They migrate up from the South in the summer and spend their days in the Caverns, and their nights feeding on insects in the Pecos and Black River valleys. It is during their stay in the caverns that they bear offspring, typically one per mother. The bats are responsible for attracting people to the caverns in the first place, since guano is an excellent fertilizer, and people would mine it and sell it. Seriously, they were guano miners.

Anyhow, one of the things which again made me sad was that since I needed to be moving on, I couldn't hang around the caverns for 6 extra hours to see the bat flight at 7:30 in the evening, when all the bats boil out of the natural entrance to the caverns in such a thick cloud they look like smoke from a distance.

When we got to a cave called the Queens Room, Andy sat us down and shut off all of the artificial lights so we could enjoy the cave in it's natural state. We were all very quiet for a few seconds and listened to the one thing you hear naturally in the caverns -- the drip, drip, dripping of water. I think I mentioned, when I was in the Black Hills, that the ranger who led us through Jewel Cave did the same, except that time it was us all blowing out our lanterns.

The famous formation pictured to the left was, for years, called "The Eternal Kiss." Andy told us a great story about this pair of formations which appear to be touching for the ages. People thought it was romantic and special, and for years and years romantic couples would come and see the formation and have their picture taken in front of it. Some people would be married in front of it! Andy said that he had conducted a few marriages there. The thing was, you can't really see if they are touching from the ground. Harry, a maintenance man who worked for the NPS, was so curious about the formation that one day, on the pretense of installing a new light fixture, he got up by ladder on the side of the cavern wall where he could look down on the contact point. "What do you think he saw then?" Andy asked the group. Some people muttered what they thought -- they touched, they didn't touch... "He couldn't tell!" Andy told us. So Harry put a ladder up by the formation itself where he could study the contact point closely. Apparently he still couldn't really tell, so he got out his Visa credit card and slid it between the two, and found that they do not touch.

Well, the word went out, and so did Harry, since what he'd done was totally against the regulations, and people found out that their novelty romantic weddings were done under mistaken pretense, got divorced, tore up their photos (I don't know if that part is really true), and some talk radio man, I forget who, redubbed the formation "The Frustrated Lovers."

Andy was quick to point out that the lovers weren't doomed to eternal frustration, though -- they were like chivalry, he said and what was chivalry? Dead, someone said. "No!" Andy thundered, "how dare anyone say chivalry is dead. It's not dead, it's dormant." And so are the lovers, dormant, and perhaps one day they will finally kiss, and find out that it wasn't worth it. ;-)

I left the caverns at 1:00pm, and drove into Carlsbad for lunch. I asked around for a park, and was told to go to the Municipal Beach park, where I discovered, to my delight, that there was a little swimming hole open to the public, and showers as well! While I cooked my mac and cheese, I met the guy pictured to the left, Brent. He had moved to Carlsbad a few months ago from Alaska, and was looking for work. I think most of his work experience is as a foreman of work crews, but he'll do anything, he said. Things were a little tight for him, since Carlsbad was waaay low on jobs since the major industry of the area, 3 copper mines, had closed down. Thousands of men out of work, and their wives were now working as cashiers for $5 an hour or something like that, and the only thing many families could do, when dad makes the money and has been a miner for 15 years and there's no more work all of a sudden -- put the house up on the market and move to where there's a mine.

Brent had had a really poor phase in his life a few years ago, being an alcoholic and getting divorced, but he found help in AA and was all better for years now, and seemed to me to be very kind and generous in his attitudes towards others, in a way that I don't think I can be, since I come from a highly privileged background. Brent, on the other hand, has been homeless, and destitute, but overcame his addiction, pulled himself up, and is now a highly charitable individual. He explained to me that being selfish was like taking everything that was given to you freely and saying "it's all mine!" and you really have to share what you can. When we talked about how I was feeling about the Native American issue he helped me put my thoughts more in order, and he agreed with me that giving money to someone who just asks for two bucks is not going to help that person fix the problem in their life, just so long as you are willing to contribute to an organized program in some way. He used to carry extra sandwiches with him on his way to work in one city.

We hung out for over an hour, and then I took a quick dip in the river, and showered, bade Brent farewell, and took off, intending that to be my last dalliance till I reached New Orleans.

I spent the rest of the day driving hard into Texas, without pausing at all. When I finally stopped for the night, I was 40 miles West of Abilene. I'd driven for 5 hours.

The following day I did the biggest drive I've done in a long long time, possibly the longest stretch I've done this whole trip, although the drive from Jasper to Vancouver and the drive from the Dunes Nat'l Park to LA were both pretty huge, too. I drove from Abilene, TX, at a longitude of 100 degrees, all the way to New Orleans, LA, which is at a latitude of 90 degrees. That is approximately 750 miles in one day.

What was awesome was that since I did that drive in one day, I saw the countryside change from Southwestern to Southeastern, it happened as I drove across the Mississippi river, pretty much, just West of Baton Rouge. At first I was in a desert, then I was in a swamp. But it wasn't just the countryside, it was the character of the road, and the way people were driving, I suppose, I could just taste the difference. Two lane highways instead of 3 lanes. Trees flanking the road just past culverts.

The best part came when I got to Baton Rouge and beyond -- I was driving over a huge swamp, and the highway, I-10, was essentially a many mile long bridge on concrete columns over the spillway where the Mississippi goes when it floods. It was pretty funny when I opened the window of my car to take that picture, it was the first time I'd broken the seal on the car's inside since Texas, and I was slapped in the face the the highest pressure air I'd sampled this entire summer. I had just spent a week in the most arid climate in the US, the contrast was startling to the point of making me laugh. I really disliked it at first.

Oh, yeah, I'd established contact with Mr. Ewen back in Carlsbad, but was ahead of my initial estimation, so I him called when I got to Shreveport, the first city in Louisiana, and told him I'd be there that evening. He gave me directions, and I said probably 9 o'clock. Well, I arrived on his doorstep exactly at 9pm, which makes me extra-special super-duper mac-daddy cool, whaddaya think of that?

We went out to dinner at Mulate's, which was a typically New Orleans kind of place, and I had me a seafood platter of fried Catfish, Crayfish, Shrimp, Oysters and Jumbalaya (which was not as good as the Jumbalaya I'd had at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago, but everything else was great).

When we got back to Josh's house, I spent some time online reading email and catching up with the Zete discussion list, and reading some current events.

When I woke up yesterday, it was about 11am, and I immediately set to work on the journal, and spent some more time online, and loafed, until Josh got back from work (he's a 4th year med student, I forgot to mention, doing his child psych rotation). Then we chatted for a bit and went out to dinner at Trey Yuen, where they make some of the best Chinese food I've ever tried.

After dinner, we headed over to the French Quarter, and Bourbon Street! Well, Bourbon Street was everything it is made out to be, and I think it's a self-perpetuating center of people stoking the hype. There's this energy there, this vibe of super-cala-party-listic-expi-skanka-dotious that people want to be a part of, I guess.

Josh was a great host, since he's been living in New Orleans for 4 years now, and knew all the things to show me, and had in mind for me to try a few specific things. When we got close to Bourbon Street, I could feel the party in the air. People were just milling around laughing and drinking in the streets, and people were lined up on second floor balconies of drinking, dancing, and music establishments surveying the scene and keeping their eyes out for women who might want to show off their tits for beads, and other special Bourbon Street moments.

That's right, women showing off their tits. I'd thought that that was exclusively for Mardi Gras, but apparently not. To the left is a shirt I saw in a window, solidifying my impression that there's something weird going on here. I'm a tad curious, to say the least, about the motivation of these women who lift their shirts for cheapass plastic beads that they could buy for a buck at the store right next to where they're standing when they lift their shirts. Mind you, being a man, I don't really mind, I mean I love tits. I think they're great, and so long as our society insists that they're too sexual to be uncovered in public, I'm gonna be staring when they're revealed in the context of boisterous randyness. I don't have the same reaction in the context of coed nudity, which IMO is about relaxing our concern with body image, and I imagine that if I spent enough time somewhere where everyone goes about topless, I'd stop paying so much attention. Anyhow, that's just my reaction. What I wonder about is why women do it. Abby Tillier (I think she's using Fab's last name) would say low self esteem. Rob, Josh's housemate, said "attention." That makes sense... but... then why don't the same women show their tits anywhere else? I'm sure they'd get just as much attention if they did it in Times Square, for example. I think it's what I was saying before -- a self-perpetuating chunk of hype that people want to be a part of... but how did it get started?

There on the left is a typical balcony. Josh took me first to a place called the Tropical Isle, where they serve the "Hand Grenade, New Orleans' most powerful drink." From the brochure that they had on the bar:

What's in a Hand Grenade? We can't tell you exactly because its' a secret. We can say that it has a wonderful MELON FLAVOR with lots of liquor and liqueurs and other secret ingredients, but it doesn't have a strong taste. BUT WATCH OUT! The Hand Grenade has a kick!!! It's much stronger and better than a Hurricane.

Hand Grenade Drinking Guide:
Drink #1: Will lift your spirits and make you happy.
Drink #2: Will give you a nice buzz.
Drink #3: Will result in a complete loss of your inhibitions.
Drink#4: Will cause you to dance in the streets. Females may be prompted to show their tits.
Drink #5: YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN.

I can indeed attest to the potency of the Hand Grenade. I thought that bit about females being prompted to show their tits would have been more clever if they'd used the proper word -- compelled -- instead of leaving me with the impression that drinking the Hand Grenade might cause people to come over to you and tell you to show your tits. Although I guess that might be the case as well...

After the Tropical Isle, we wandered down the street some more and stopped into the Famous Patty O'Briens, where there's a very popular piano bar where a woman in a sequined dress and a Kathleen Turner -esque voice was banging out Steve Miller Band's The Joker to the delight of the crowd, and I think everyone was singing along. We went back to the patio, and I got the other way famous New Orleans drink, the Hurricane. To the right are pictured Josh and myself getting our drinks. Now, get this. When we got our drinks, one of the guys serving drinks asked me if I was from Boulder, Colorado. I've been to Boulder. Lovely town built by aging hippies, supporting a University of Colorado, at the foothills of the Rockies, the Flatirons. Mas pot smoking, tons of Tevas, granola and sprouts all over the place, and hundreds of quaint little houses each with their own little yard with a few dogs and a compost heap. Laid back people who grow salsa gardens. Money quietly running in an undercurrent through the town.

No, I'm from NYC, I said, what made you think Boulder? "Because you have long hair and you look like you have a trust fund," he said. ROTFLMAO!!! What the hell makes a person look like they have a trust fund?

After we got our drinks, I went outside to capitalize on an opportunity I've never had before -- that of drinking booze out on the street! Woo hoo! What a novelty. There I am on the left, drinking my Hurricane on the street. Josh was highly amused by how pleased I was to be able to do that.

Another interesting thing about Bourbon Street: go-go bars and sex shops right next to expensive jewelry boutiques, hotels, and various other places of reputable business.

Ok, now for a joke:

Hm, bottomless women? So how do they sit? Hahahah.

We roamed up and down the street a little more, it's really not that big, but there's a lot to see, like on our way back down we came upon a group of about 25 people doing The Electric Slide in the middle of the street to music from one of the bars. BTW, it seems that there is no such thing as a bar without live music in New Orleans, and some Sunday mornings you can go to Bourbon Street at 7am and there are still people there drinking and listening to a band play.

We went over to this place called the Gold Mine, where we drank something called a Flaming Dr. Pepper, which is like a boilermaker, a beer glass with beer in it and a shot glass in the beer glass with some liqueur that tastes like Dr. Pepper in it. We also played a little fooze, which was nice to do.

After the Gold Mine we rolled over the the Cafe Du Monde, where I got cafe au lait and Josh got hot chocolate, and we got these things called Beignets, these fluffy donut dough things covered in confectioners sugar which you dunk in your drink and eat and it is yummy. We hung around there while Josh continued to sober up for the drive home, and ran into some classmates of Josh's, who we chatted with for a little while. Finally we took off down to Bourbon street again and someone tried to scam Josh with a popular gag which begins "hey, I know where you got your shoes!" When you say he can't possibly know, he'll say that he'll bet you that if he guesses right, you give him 2 bucks. Ok, you're supposed to say, and then he'll say "you got 'em on Bourbon Street," as in they're on Bourbon Street right now. And if you say that's a load of crap, he'll bother you and hassle you and call you names and try and make you feel guilty and follow you around until you pay up. Pathetic. There you have the underbelly of Bourbon Street.

We got home at around 3am, and I crashed and woke up at 11am again, at which point I started working on this journal entry for a while, took a break to go out for lunch with Josh to the world famous Mother's, where they server some pretty amazing sandwiches, and some great Jumbalaya. On the way there, after we'd parked the car and were walking toward Mother's, lighting struck a building no more than a mile away from us, and I dropped to the ground! Josh teased me about my days in 'Nam. I couldn't finish my sandwich on account of my stomach protesting that I had abused it the previous night, but as soon as I upload this entry, I'm gonna finish it.

After Mother's I we came back here and I've been working on this journal entry for 4 hours now, on and off, while Josh does some work.

I guess the plan is now to spend the night here and travel to Athens, GA, tomorrow, and drop by Benjy and Shari's place. I think I'm pretty much done with the random exploration part of my trip, and am now onto the visiting friends part.

So, that's it for now.