Road Trip!

Road Trip! tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009-06-01:/roadtrip//351 2009-08-10T15:44:17Z In which John Syme ’85, senior writer at dear old Davidson, makes a wide loop to the Grand Canyon and back with Dodger the dog and a cheap tent in the back of his 1967 Mercury ragtop, tracking down alumni where they live and breathe, work and play. Movable Type Pro 4.21-en Home Sweet Home: Road Trip Summer 2009 Will Live On In Heart and Soul tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4622 2009-08-06T19:03:44Z 2009-08-10T15:44:17Z

Constant Readers,I have been back home (sweet home!) in Davidson, N.C. for over a week now, so it's time to...

John Syme

Constant Readers,

I have been back home (sweet home!) in Davidson, N.C. for over a week now, so it's time to wrap up my Road Trip Summer 2009 travel blog, and send it to archives where it will live on for the future reference of posterity (mine if no one else's!) at blogs.davidson.edu/roadtrip (which can be reached geographically on the Davidson homepage by clicking News, then Blogs). But first, some notes:

I am, unsurprisingly, a couple of shades of tan darker than I was in June, in spite of SPF 85 ritually slathered on every day on the road. (I was especially diligent about my ears, so that I will not have to wear Band-Aids on them when I am an old man. Not a good look.)

The sun-protective Tilley hat I left town with on June 13 turned out to be too floppy for an open car at 75 mph, so I did the baseball-cap-and-bandanna thing most of the way. Additional tip for those without auto AC: A bandanna (pictured) dipped in icy cooler slush helps keep a body cool on those long summertime hauls. Dodger wore sunscreen, too, on the pink parts of his delicate l'il snout. Here at the moment of our return to Davidson, his cruise control is still set on "Squirrel!" (July 24, photo by Bill Giduz '74)

I am greatly enjoying preparing all my own food, in my own kitchen sweet kitchen. Nothing out of a can shall cross my lips, and lots of fresh summer fruits and vegetables shall cross them often. (That last week of hard driving put me over my annual limit of drive-through gut-bombers and Beanee Weenies in a tent. Hellooooo, farmer's market!)

At my office sweet office, I'm adjusting to sitting at a desk again (I am up to a half-hour at a time without jumping up and running in circles like the dog), to central air-conditioning (my hands and feet got cold the first few days), and to long pants (creased khakis instead of wrinkled camp shorts that smell like gasoline and antifreeze).

My laundry is done, my friends are hugged, and the Comet sits quietly in the rain under a cheap spun-bond cover from the WalMart in Flagstaff, Arizona---just until I can figure out how to zip back up the rear window that came completely aloose from the canvas in a high wind on Route 66 near Tulsa. That was a full day, I recall.

]]>

Though the trip itself is done, I know that, like a dearly departed loved one, it will live on in heart and soul, just like its predecessor trip in 1989, just like any such deliberate parenthesis we craft into the syntax of our lives. So there will be time and space to write more about What It All Means (or Not), notably for Davidson Journal readers in the fall issue slated for publication in October. The alumni I met and sometimes stayed with brought a touch of home and Davidson family to a trip that was largely based on my own free agency from one wide-open day to the next---just the right mix!

In the meantime, herewith a random sampling of a few more thoughts and images to round out the previous posts here of my wide loop to the Grand Canyon, points West, and home again. Six weeks, 7,200 miles, friends old and new, and fresh perspectives on time itself---which, this trip reminded me yet again, does not really even exist.

What's really important, Burma Shave signs along Route 66 still want to know: saving a little travel time, or true love? The carefully-placed signs read: "Cattle crossing/Means go slow/That old bull/Is some cow's beau!"

Moo: For cowboys in Goodland, Kansas in 2009, refueling the truck means refueling its cargo, too.

"Time marches on" is the flip side of "Time does not exist." Notably, I found something inauthentic, or at the very least overly self-conscious, about the whole Route 66 thing. I enjoyed rolling down some of its historic stretches, knowing what I know from The Grapes of Wrath and Wikipedia. But when I would blow into one of the little tumbleweed towns, boarded up save for the ticky-tack tourist stuff, I felt sad more than anything. That said, the museum in Chandler, Oklahoma was air-conditioned, and it was kind of neat-o having the vintage Comet in Seligman, Arizona, one of the hot spots for old cars and old car festivals on Route 66. I betcha cellphone shots of me and Dodger in the Comet are on lots of summer travelers' Flickr sites about now.

The James Dean facsimile was out of focus in this picture I took of him/it in Seligman. Was it this 1954 James Dean or was it my 2009 Lumix that didn't want to connect across the years? You decide, because... it's... "driving... me... insane!!!"

One thing I did find on Route 66 that was totally authentic was a place called Oscar's Auto Sales and Parts, a huge junkyard and expert mechanic's shop of a sprawling, grimy place in Grants, New Mexico. Oscar found a replacement hubcap for my 1967 Mercury Comet Caliente ragtop that was original to that model, charged me $10, and then he and his grandson, Oscar also, polyurethaned the Mercury emblem back onto the front of my hood for free. They even gave me a keepsake calendar, which I would hang at my campsites, and now have hung in my kitchen with pride and fond remembrance.

Big Oscar and Little Oscar appreciate the lines of 60s muscle cars--and the calendar models who show them off...

I would like to give a special shout-out to all those late-model luxury SUV drivers, in particular those with California plates and/or tinted windows, who gunned it past my happy ass on hot, steep grades: Your car may have a bigger radiator than my ol' Carolina heap, but at least my exhaust smells like real gasoline and my V-8 engine is not hobbled by a catalytic converter that makes it smell like a seventh-period chemistry lab after too much lunchroom egg salad. So, nyah! Stick that in your bankrupt state emissions testing tent and smoke it. Actually, my Comet could probably destroy one of those things at half-throttle---as long as it wasn't in the desert.

You don't want to go over about 60 in the Comet on a desert hill in this heat. On the other side of this rise we came to the Laguna Mountains: huge thousands of feet of elevation in the lateral space of 10 miles, with radiator water stops every mile. Serious business at 110-plus degrees, particularly with no AC. Well, I figured, the dog is young and strong, and the car and the man at the wheel of it are strong. We never had to stop, but I can assure you I positively crawled up that steep grade at 42 mph in the truck lane, to balance the radiator's potential for boiling over against keeping up the wind speed on Dodger in the back seat. ("Him wa' vewy, vewy panty-panty.")

For the record, ye olde Comet did great on the trip, averaging 18.4 mpg highway (enough to keep it safe from Cash for Clunkers). It warned me with subtle changes in sound and smell of impending repairs, rather than just flat breaking down on the side of the road, which it did in the early years of our relationship before I learned how to keep it happy. This time, with no actual breakdowns and minimal delays: I got a transmission valve replaced in Santa Fe, new axle bearings in San Diego, a gasoline tubing repair in Palm Springs, and new U-joints and a transmission seal on the drive shaft in Alamosa, Colorado. The thermostat housing started dripping green at start-up temperatures in Missouri, but I was close enough to home by then that I was in the mood to just let it drip a little. Besides, it would seal right up when it got to operating temperature. "I'll deal with that tomorrow, at Tara... yes, Tara!..."

A thing I noticed throughout the trip was how much better my coffee seemed to taste on the road. Whether at a campsite in the morning or after an afternoon nap break at a pulloff in the woods, I would boil up a little water with my pocket stove and fix a cuppa with my Melita one-cup filter, in the same blue enamel, cowboy-style cup I used cross-country in 1989.

This old cup: Maybe it's the rusty spots in the chipped enamel that add a little je ne sais quoi.

Ahh, the open road. I could go on and on. But six weeks was about right, and it's good to be home on this side of the Mississippi, with a happy new collection of screensavers. Here are my two favorites:

El Morro National Monument, El Malpais, New Mexico:

"Oh boy, wide open spaces, my favorite!"

Palo Duro Canyon, Amarillo, Texas:

"Where to, next?"

Thanks for reading, everybody. Your virtual company on the open road made it an especially bon voyage!

-30-

]]> Don't Know Much About History tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4621 2009-08-05T01:18:09Z 2009-08-06T19:05:58Z

Way back in May, as I planned this transcontinental voyage, Carol Higham, adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Davidson and...

John Syme quote. The important thing here is that Carol told me about her new Western U.S. history textbook, Conquests and Consequences, co-written with William H. Katerbery of Calvin College. Even more important, she brought a laser-printed galley proof to my office, for me to pack along in the trunk of my Comet. I could picture the stack of sheets blowing off a campsite picnic table in Colorado, so I paid Central Services in the college union a buck fifty to wiro-bind it.

One of many illustrations that enliven the pages of Conquests and Consequences is "Geronimo in a Cadillac"---a Native American harbinger of my own journey west as "WASP in a Mercury"?

]]>

The idea for Conquests and Consequences is a little different than the history books I remember as a student. Carol and her co-author present their work as one voice in the ongoing scholarly debate and discussion of history---well-informed disagreement encouraged! There's an emphasis on diversity, not for its own politically correct sake, but because, well, history is more diverse than a lot of mid-20th-century textbooks presented it. In fact, the idea is to use the basic text as a core from which other authors can complement and expand perspectives, with satellite texts under the aegis of the same publisher, Harlan Davidson, Inc. The satellite texts will present a number of different perspectives, including those of women, African Americans, religion, water, and the environment.

So, coming soon to a classroom near you, an innovative approach to answering age-old questions about what is now the American West, such as (from the preface): "How have diverse societies and empires shaped and reshaped the region over the centuries? In the American era, has the West been more of a colony or a region? When was the American West a colony? When exactly did it become a region? Is it today a national and international center of power in its own right? How does the concept of the frontier function in the West?"

It was the conclusion of the preface that caught my eye in a way that it only could have been caught in hindsight on my own trip West. Their conclusion is applicable, in its own way, to my trip and this very blog: "It has been an exhilirating experience, both daunting and fun, to step out of our familiar areas of expertise and the relative privacy of the classroom and write a survey textbook. All errors of fact and foolhardy interpretation are, of course, of our own making and responsibility."

I could not have said it better myself.

]]> Drive Time Radio tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4612 2009-08-01T23:29:03Z 2009-08-04T17:44:53Z

In my six weeks of drive time across the United States of America this summer, geography was not the only...

John Syme all over the musical map. So sue me. Stuff works my nerves.

Me, my Tilley hat, my dog Dodger's hindquarters, in my driveway on our day of departure: June 13, 2009. (Photo credit: The lovely and talented Jennifer Foster '92, announcer and producer, WDAV 89.9 FM Classical Music Radio, a listener-supported service of Davidson College.)

]]> Anyway, with a total distance traveled topping out over 7,000 miles, the long way out to southern California and back again, I also had ample opportunity to employ sundry of our modern music industry's delivery formats, in addition to making overweening pronouncements on said music's actual content.

I listened to the radio, I listened to the iPod (on my early-model car's late-model Pioneer stereo, as well as with personal earbuds doing yoga at the Grand Canyon), and I listened to retro "cassette tapes" from my personal "stash." Even more retro than cassettes: Once on my trip I had the chance to listen to actual "LP" "albums" on "turntables," thoughtfully provided in guest rooms of the ACE Hotel and Swim Club in Palm Springs, California. Festive! Really, who could have known I would have occasion in 2009 to feast my ears once again on a vintage vinyl version of Barbara Mandrell's "Sleeping Single in a Double Bed"? Honestly, I never would have guessed that, would you?

Love your hair, hon, hope ya win!

When extreme desert temperatures fried my iPod, and I was traveling too fast from one boondocks to the next to get decent highway radio reception, I relied on my own collection of vintage cassettes---frozen in time on my first cross-country trip the summer of 1989 and thawed out now in the searing noonday sun of this present Mojave moment, on the selfsame butt-scorching front seat of the same old 1967 Mercury Comet convertible that I was driving back then. Sometimes I wonder about me.

One difference between then-and-now recording'n'playback protocols that struck me while listening to those cassettes was the long blank spaces at the end of a side. Remember those, when the playing times didn't match up, so there was a big ol' chunk of nothing but magnetic hiss in there at the end of side B? Even the professional tapes had that going on. Oh well, cassettes were an improvement over eight-tracks, which simply gashed your favorite song down the middle. For the record, for my 14-year-old self, that would have been Jackson Browne's "Here Come Those Tears Again." ("Baby, here we stand again/Where we've been so many times before...")

This time around, I was on vacation, with no wristwatch and no particular place to go. So, rather than fast-forwarding through the recorded voids on my old cassettes, I let them play through, occasional empty space for thinky thoughts.

First, it occurred to me that the commercial radio stations I had been listening to contained not any tiny fraction of a nanosecond, atall, that was not filled with either music, noise purporting to be music (kids these days...) or breathless jabber. Second, I thought, Hmm, that's just like the rest of the world: filled up with way too much of the irritatingly insubstantial and the deeply unimportant.... I mean, is it too much to ask that there be just a teensy pause now and then between this barrage of auditory stimuli, just a little space to put in between my thoughts, in order that they might, you know, like, fully form? If you can't pause, could you at least slow down? Why, nowadays with the Internets and all, not only is every cranny filled with jabber of one sort or another... no, even the spaces behind that are filled with hyperjabber, all too often signifying, at best, not much. Gripe, harrumph....

But I digress. The reason all this occurred to me all over again when I rolled in home to Davidson is that I realized how much I had missed the unhurried, deliberate and dulcet tones of WDAV 89.9 FM Classical Music Radio, a listener-supported service of Davidson College. And I'm not just saying that because station manager Ben Roe kicked in some gas money for some blog entries. That gasoline is long gone, and I'm saying it anyway: WDAV is one of the things that is good for a world that too often ails me. I had listened online to WDAV 89.9 FM Classical Music Radio, a listener-supported service of Davidson College, a few times in my Motel 6 rooms, but through those long miles in the car across Kansas (and Kansas, and Kansas, and...) I missed the station's presence on the pre-set button of my Pioneer.

Classical music, of course, represents another time, and so another take on time itself, and thus on form, and on content, than the jammed-up overloads of today. But just so: WDAV is a lively, consistent and soothing soundtrack of my workaday world, brought to me by my Bose, my car radio, and the desktop boombox of my officemate Bill Giduz '74. Plus, lucky me, the people of WDAV are my next-door work neighbors on Main Street in Davidson. We have good fun, whistling while we work, so to speak. I give them my jar of pennies when it's their fund drive time, and they supported me when it was my fun drive time! (Sorry, that one was too obvious, a little College Relations humor, there....)

So when I do this trip again in 20 more years, here's hoping that the music delivery systems of that day will mean that I'll be able to just stream WDAV straight into my car. In the meantime, it's good to be home.

My Bose at home: Wake me up before you go go.

]]> Dodger Goes East tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4604 2009-07-29T14:55:34Z 2009-07-30T16:17:51Z

Tank goodness Antonio, my new bes frend in Pomm Sprangs, fix us up a picnic for the rolly house, cuz...

John Syme

Somehow the chilled fennel and steak filet salad and homemade polenta (upper left wit the fork in it) from the night before, chez Antonio, my new bes frend in Pomm Sprangs, tasted even better ina hot parking lot near the end of our epic desert trek. My Him was hot and tard, but shared Hims meaty niblets, and put ice coobs in my warter. I love my Him.

]]>

Butt first we went to New Mexico and Colorado. They is plenty open spaces in New Mexico and Colorado. The rabbits are big as me, and the prairie dogs can disappear down a hole before you can run over and say howdy.

Wide open: I am slap in the middle, all teeny tiny nex to the mountings.

Then we crost a big square call Kansas, and Him call me Toto all day and laff and laff. Like I say, I don't unnerstan him sometime. In the nex big square, call MissurUH, they was some big waters in the sky. Looka here:

I not so sure bout this.

Are You so sure bout this?

After another Mo Tell Six room, we stop in Memphis to see my old friend Bailey and in Oak Ridge to see my new friend Diamond, an some kitties. Then we goed back to Davison an seed Toots the kitty and I sleeped and sleeped and sleeped and dreemeded of all the windows I looked out of and all those yellow lines and the wind in my ears.

Some Davison peeples in Arkansas name of Ward '94 and Christa Abbott Davis '96 has some very great window to look outa.

Where we going next, huh, where?

]]> Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Put Another Dime In the Jukebox, Baby! tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4601 2009-07-28T14:13:38Z 2009-07-28T21:21:04Z

Oof. By the time I had made it through all the storms of south central Missouri in my leaky old...

John Syme never have such a thing as that bedspread in my home. Please. Come to think of it, I would never have that bed, either. Ah, well. Motel 6 is, like WalMart, what it is: When you need it, it's exactly what you need, but when you're done, you don't want to just hang out there. So anyway.

Dodger was excited to see Linda again, too, even if she is a vet. I mean, it's not like she's his vet, with all the shots and the pills and that dreadful back-end business and the inhalant bordatella vaccines sprayed all up in his everso delicate Pointer nostrils. No, today, good Linda was just a happy friend to man and beast, and especially to this man and this beast.

Linda and I kept ourselves so generally cracked up over nothing during our 24-hour visit that I, like, totally forgot to get out my camera. So here she is grinning studiously in E.H. Little Library back in the day. We loved rock and roll. Still do. So, in fact, does my Davidson colleague, campus news guy and photographer Bill Giduz '74, who took this picture when he was new on the job at alma mater in the early '80s.

]]>

The river was one of the natural features that led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make a "declaration of taking" of land in the area and begin in October 1942 to build from scratch what would almost overnight become the walled and secretive town of Oak Ridge. It was home to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb. Today, science, industry, and government are all still big players, though the wall is gone. Street names are after states and universities and even Tennyson. Vintage houses are of five basic floor plans designated, in true government fashion, by letters of the alphabet. Linda and her kids live in a D house.

I missed seeing Linda's kids, Warren and Marian. Other people's kids sometimes do it for me and sometimes don't, but these two grabbed me at hello, a fine young lady and young man, and they make me laugh and love my dog. What else do you want in a person, hmm? I'll have to go back for more kayaking when they are back in town.

Our cellphone pictures of kingfishers, ospreys, and herons (oh my!) didn't turn out too hot, so here's little me with my driver's arm tan, instead.

Linda and I saw a heron and a kingfisher and even paddled within 30 feet of an osprey nest and watched mama osprey tearing apart strips of fish. I romanticized that she was feeding her young, but Linda, the vet, gently pointed out that the mama bird was, in fact, having the fish for herself. Truth be told, I don't even know that there were any young in that nest, and between us, turned out we didn't even know if it was the right season for hatching osprey eggs. Somehow, in the way that only old friends can make it, that was hilarious. But we agreed that the mama osprey was quite a sight, and so we hushed for a few minutes to take in the sight of her, living her little life large, exactly as nature intended.

Rock and roll.

]]> My iPod: R.I.P.? tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4596 2009-07-25T02:51:31Z 2009-07-25T18:27:21Z

My iPod bit the dust. At a Motel 6 in Kansas, I went to update my hallowed Road Trip playlist...

John Syme Well!

Now, you might think that corruption would have happened to me sooner. Say, the week before, when southern California's Mojave desert temperatures in my glove box where the iPod lives surely topped 120 degrees. And what with southern California being, you know, pretty corrupt. But no, this musical corruption was visited upon me and my iPod in Goodland, Kansas. Who knew? Lord, Lord, Lord.

Was it the Mojave Desert or "Smokin' in the Boys' Room" that gave my iPod a fever? Or maybe it was Tina Turner's classic "Nutbush City Limits." Swine flu?...

]]>

But no, my muscial muses had other ideas. Here I was with no iPod, no CDs (I had uploaded them all to my Mac and then given them away to loved ones), and no prospects this day of a satisfying radio experience (on a 400-mile driving day at 80 mph across Kansas, no stations, such as they are and what there are of them, last for more than three songs). So, I dug into the cavernous depths of the Comet's voluminous trunk. A Mountain Dew's worth of sweat, a bumped noggin, and a couple of choice cusswords later, I found the prize I sought. Carefully wrapped in a shop rag underneath the spare tire were two zippered foam-rubber-and-nylon boxes of cassette tapes, most of them dating to a 1989 cross-country trip in this very same car. I opened one and peeped inside to see what I had packed.

In Kansas, I listened to extant cassettes from days of yore. And listened, and listened, and listened. Sixteen cassettes is not a lot when you are driving across the high lonesome prairie, which, I swear, expands in the heat.

Some of the tapes were store-bought (how quaint!) but the best of them I had recorded myself, on my first real stereo in my first real apartment. Recorded them from vinyl albums, kids, with a diamond-tipped stylus on my strobe-lit, pride-and-joy Pioneer turntable and Toshiba receiver. See, boys and girls, that's how we "transferred music files" back in the day. Put that in your earbuds and smoke it.

Here are just a few of my thoughts that day:

Eric Clapton's album Pilgrim is a beautiful expression of the many facets of stupefying loss and pain---but maybe not the best thing to be listening to all by yourself when you are many hundreds of miles from anybody who loves you in the middle of, as noted, Kansas.
The dance mix of Jody Watley's "I'm Looking for a New Love (Baby)" is a good antidote for the pain and loss thing.
Jeannie C. Riley's "Harper Valley P.T.A." is a gem of a 1968 one-hit-wonder. It was also , by the way, transposed into a festive 70s made-for-TV movie starring Barbara Eden in a killer mini-skirt. If I ever decide to do some really bad drag, I'm getting white go-go boots and channeling both of them.
If Vern Gosdin's gospel country rock rendition of "Way Down Deep" does not make your speedometer gain at least 10 miles per hour, there is something wrong with your car.
Linda Ronstadt sounds just a little bit whiny sometimes, bless her heart.
Merle Haggard's name is perfect, for Merle Haggard.
Was that really true, that 70s story about Rod Stewart and the emergency room?
And so on.

The lifesaver selection in the pile of cassettes was a compilation of a couple of Hal Ketchum albums, digital versions of which I had already enjoyed several times this trip, but which were now trapped impotent in the sickly iPod. But joy of joys, what once was lost now was found, an analog blast from the past. The cassette's yellowed label was hand-lettered in my sister's careful cursive, a long-ago stocking stuffer. Bless you, Sister.

Ketchum usually gets lumped in with country music classification, which is not wholly incorrect. But for my money, he is in a category by himself, an exquisite lyricist whose catchy, original, unhurried melodies he delivers in a rich, mellifluous tenor, with just enough vibrato emotion and even an occasional, sparing, but pitch-perfect soar into falsetto. Hal Ketchum is, in other words, ideal road music. Imagine, if you will, the sound of a long, thin aerial whipping through hot highway wind, overaid on top of this:

"No Easy Road"

Don't know where, don't know when, this road I'm on is gonna end/It's been my friend, it's been my sin, my next of kin./Traveled high, traveled low, rain still falls, the wind still blows, one thing I've learned, one thing I know, there ain't no easy road....

or this:

"Mama Knows the Highway"

Mama knows the highway by the song/When she hears a good one, she always sings along/She don't ever worry 'bout what's gone, she says good country music, never steer you wrong.... She can tell Wyoming by the wind, she can tell another trucker by the rig that he's in/She knows where the real South begins.... She can gauge a café just by looking at the sign, little ol' places always share the grand design....

Or the 1999 tune "Long Way Down" from the album Awaiting Redemption, prescient to our own times in a macroeconomic sort of way, even though it's really about something else entirely, something very personal and specific and at the same time universal:

Got a silver Eldorado settin' just outside the door/She'll burn a little rubber if you put her to the floor/Times are getting tough so we don't run much anymore/Look out son, it's a long way down.... Remember my amigos, you are talking to a man who has lived a whole lot longer than anybody planned/As I stand here now before you, with the past at my command, look out son, it's a long way down.

I even briefly considered trying to track ol' Hal down. At my next Motel 6, I Googled him to a spread outside of Nashville where he lives with his wife and kids, says Wiki. But, I never have been good at figuring out what to say when I meet famous people---I mean, what, "I just love your work!"?---and I figured he might take me for some kind of stalker fan weirdo, so I decided that we should remain imaginary friends. But here's big thanks, Hal, for the musical moments sublime.

Um, by the way, you didn't by any chance corrupt my iPod on that "Long Way Down"?...

]]> Lawrence, Kansas II: Faith and Reason tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4588 2009-07-21T22:25:59Z 2009-07-21T23:09:27Z

When I blast e-mailed Kansas and Missouri alumni before heading east from Colorado many miles ago, Davidsonians came through. My...

John Syme

Turtle soup, anyone?

]]>

While I munched a portobella and wilted kale sandwich, and Andrew a turkey and swiss, our liberal-artsy conversation ranged across the spectrum of sciences, arts, and humanities. Andrew says he's in an interesting spot there in Lawrence. He and his new bride are members of the relatively conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church. "But I'm also an evolutionary biologist," he says with his clear-eyed smile. Everyone at church knows what kind of work he does, and everyone at the office knows he is a Christian. No conflicts for him, seeing the active hand of God in creation through his work, and also believing strongly that Jesus Christ brings the "something more" to human spiritual life. But he gets in the middle of some interesting conversations, nonetheless, particularly in church.

As for the two of us, we had one of those great Davidson discussions that hinges not on agreement on all points, but on absolute respect, not on winning an argument, but on enlarging the perspectives in question.

Salamandridae Notophthalamus viridescens, an extinct species of salamander, is still used in classifying other species, extinct and not. The shelves to Andrew's left contain mostly extinct species.

Back in the specimen collection, Andrew had hoisted several jars of salamanders collected in New Jersey in the 1930s. "If you went there today, I'm sure you'd find a shopping mall," he had told me. Our lunch conversation about God and creation brought me full circle back to that moment, and it struck me that, whatever an individual's beliefs might be or not be in a creator of this world, there is, in fact, a creation that we must all help manage. Thanks, Andrew.

]]> A Peculiar Day tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4587 2009-07-21T17:08:46Z 2009-07-21T17:40:47Z

After I left Lawrence, Kansas, yesterday, I had no particular place to go---the winding-down icing on the cake of my...

John Syme After I left Lawrence, Kansas, yesterday, I had no particular place to go---the winding-down icing on the cake of my six-week vacation/reportage/sabbatical/furlough. So, when a map showed me the town of Peculiar, Missouri more or less in my southeastern trajectory, I thought I'd go there. It is a wonderful word to me, "peculiar," moi having been blessed with a few quite peculiar friends and family of the Southern gothic variety. I do so hope they count me on their short lists of same.

Anyway, what was most peculiar about Peculiar was that no one seemed to know for sure exactly how it got its name. The vet tech was from "off," so she didn't know. Next door to the vet in the strip shopping mall, no sign of life in the magistrate clerk's office, only a mid-eaten lunch. The cops next to that had the blinds pulled. A peroxide laundromat chick walking around the block with her paperback opined that a train conductor back in the day announced this town with no name as "peculiar." A mechanic two blocks behind the laundromat moved two steps out into his driveway to respond "No clue," without moving his face at all. Peculiar, indeed.

]]>

If you can't make up your own cutlines for this batch, I can't help you.

I had to leave Peculiar in a hurry on account of some serious electrical stormage bearing down on a southwesterly track (thank you for being specific, nice lady at Pyro City fireworks and gas station).

So, here's what Google and Wiki tell us:

"One tradition says Peculiar got its name by a spiritualists who declared it 'peculiar' that he had seen the site in a vision.

"Peculiar received its name in 1868 when the first postmaster, Edgar Thomson, had his first choice, Excelsior, rejected because it already existed in Atchison County, Missouri. Several other choices were also rejected. The story goes that the annoyed Thomson wrote to the Postmaster General himself to complain saying, among other things, 'We don't care what name you give us so long as it is sort of "peculiar",' (with 'peculiar' in quotation marks). Washington approved that name. The post office was established on June 22, 1868."

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar,_Missouri)

]]> Lord, Lord, Lord tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4586 2009-07-21T03:53:05Z 2009-07-21T17:03:45Z

Kansas is a very, very long state, even at 75 mph steady, in a hefty crosswind. Happily, Jesus is everywhere....

John Syme

Kansan interstate landowners freely express their First Amendment rights.

]]>

Anyway. If you think that I did not have Jesus, God Almighty, Mother Nature, Father Time, and the rest of the cosmic Gang foremost in my mind, heart, and soul when Dodger and I were trying to outrun this clabber of Wicked Witchy clouds in central Missouri just hours ago, well, bless your heart.

"Arooo?"

The Gang got us to yet another Motel 6, in St. Robert, MO, not too long after dark. (I'm pretty sure Dodger thinks it's the same motel every night, but I know it's not, and this is one of the nicest I've stayed in.)

Special thanks to Mike Warner, my Missouri-native buddy who relayed to me from Charlotte his first-hand knowledge of the Show-Me State, current weather reports, and precise map information, from his laptop via cellphone, those modern-day miracles. Lord, Lord, Lord.

For now, it's time for me to say my Missouri prayers and hit another Motel 6 pillow. Good night and God bless us every one.

]]> Lawrence, Kansas: Home of the Jayhawks, blah blah blah tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4582 2009-07-20T14:36:49Z 2009-07-20T15:45:44Z

After miscalculating mileage in a big square state yet again, I had the beginnings of a massive tension headache by...

John Syme

Wildcat avatar on Massachussetts St., Lawrence, Kansas, 2009

]]>

But just what do we mean by happy and loved? George continues to plumb life's existential questions for answers. He teaches a program called Avatar, and sees patients from teenagers in group homes to institutionalized schizophrenics. Mainstreaming psychiatric patients through programs that allow more independent living are one of the biggest changes he's seen, since a trip to Paraguay in medical school convinced him to begin looking at new ways to help people, with and without mental problems, to be more independent. One challenge with the approach is that the programs that allow a safe, more independent life for patients outside of institutions cost as much as the institutions. Still, progress moves forward.

In the other direction toward the historical past, George's Kansas roots run back five generations, about as far back as you can go, he says, without being Native American. His mother was born in Goodland, Kansas (where I had spent the night before in a Motel 6), then she moved to Texas at an early age. But family stories abound of the great-great-ancestor killed by Indians in the mid-19th century, of the great-grandfather who made an annual, weeklong trek by wagon team to Kansas City, for supplies. Even in George's neighborhood, Old West Lawrence, he can point to the one 19th-century house that was not destroyed by Quantrill's Guerillas on Aug. 21, 1863, a culminative attack in the vicious disagreements over slavery in Kansas.

But Kansas entered the Union as a free state, by God, and it remains so. Even for Wildcats on Massachussetts St.

]]> Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Colorado tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4580 2009-07-19T03:14:59Z 2009-07-21T03:22:02Z

Turns out my buddy Ricky has been up to a good deal since 10th grade, as have I, so we...

John Syme

Heading up the seven-mile dirt road to the preserve, with Ricky and Foxy the Australian Cattle Dog following in the dust, behind Dodger the Carolina Fool Pointer's head in the rearview. Unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes....

]]>

There's a funny thing happened, driving along down the eastern Colorado territory's Arkansas River canyons toward the high prairies. My iPod had died, there was no radio reception, and I was sick of the cassettes I'd brought. So I just decided to listen to the aerial whistling in the wind and think. And the funny thing that happened was, I didn't. For a solid hour, I just rolled along and looked, rolled along and looked, didn't think a single thought, all the way until the Arkansas plopped out in a valley past Canyon City, on its way to the Mississippi. That's all I can say about that right now, honest, just one of the emptiest and fullest hours I've spent the whole trip.

Then, I was over that. I needed to git me some miles done. So, I started for the big roads, got to the I-70, where eastern Colorado, which I did now know, started to feel like mid-America Kansas, which I did. One sign promised "Next Exit: Point of Interest" with no further information. Whatever it was, was not visible from the highway at 80 mph, that's all I can tell you. I wound up in Goodland, Kansas, for the evening. It seems good enough for now.

]]> Taos, New Mexico tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4573 2009-07-16T23:56:28Z 2009-07-17T02:04:41Z

Two nights in a row in a Motel 6 will bring you back down to earth from the rarified airs...

John Syme

Ye olde 1967 Comet was manufactured with New Mexico speed limits in mind. (N.B.: The dash temp gauge, third from left, reading "cold," has been supplanted by a mechanical after-market gauge that pegged a robustly comfy 230 degrees here at a flat 80 mph.)

]]> Farther east, I could not resist stopping off in Winslow, Ariz., to stand on the corner made famous by The Eagles' "Take It Easy" and further glorified by the local arts group, which commissioned a statue, a mural, and even an honest-to-God flat-bed Ford.

"Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see/ It's a girl, my Lord, in a flat-bed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me...." [Dodger: "Him am not right."]

A quick stop in the souvenir shop across the street and a burger at the Sonic drive-in on the way back out of town...

(left) I chose not to purchase a Route 66 Christmas tree ornament; (right) In Winslow, wheels aren't the only way to "drive" in to the drive-in.

... then on across I-40 another 80 miles in an hour, to the Motel 6 in Gallup, after vainly attempting to follow a "Camping" sign into the windy dusk of mesa flats worthy of Stephen King, on an Indian reservation, no less. I mean, the sign just dumps you out on a dirt road with no further information, just jackrabbits bigger than my dog---who, of course, I let run to have his go at it while I studied my maps, but he didn't catch anything.

Today I whisked through Santa Fe a second time for lunch at Tomasita's with my lovely cousin Maria. She took me there last time I visited, in 1991. You'd think she'd come up with something new by now. Seriously, it was some of the best New Mexican blueplate I've ever eaten. And now I am at the Sagebrush Inn in Taos, where Georgia O'Keefe once painted, awaiting the arrival of a Boulder, Colo. buddy from high school. "So, what have you been up to since 1979, you old dog, you?..."

]]> California Dog Daze tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4554 2009-07-14T10:27:27Z 2009-07-26T19:11:13Z

We getted to go to Dog Beach one mor time before we leaved San Doggio, so I seen all my...

John Syme

I'm on the top of the world, lookin down on creation.

]]>

Laguna Canyon Smellba-a-a-ds

Then we roll and roll and roll on the Dam Eye Five some more but then one big time Him cuss all loud and turn right to the Saint Bernard Mountings instead of going off lookin for Lost Angels, after all. When we roll down the udder side of the Saint Bernard Mountings, it was all hot agin like before we got to the big water at San Doggio. "Mo' Havey" hot, Him call it. But then Him tole me I wood like Pomm Sprangs better than the Mo' Havey hot in Blythe. Him was right. In the Pomm Sprangs, they has a store for dogs, and purty ladies.

The peeples in the dog store "Cold Nose, Warm Heart" has cool warter for me and reminders for Him about my foots in the assfault desert.

John Gilmore '69 and Antonio Romualdo and Him laffed and laffed when I sniffed this here lady panties, but I didn't smell nuthin so funny. Beside, Him cain't even figure out how to make the 'pooter pitcher stand up rightcheer, so there. Hey, some like it hot.

But it was fun, fun, fun at Antonio's, and he has treeses and grasseses and flowerses and a Pomm Sprang in his own backyard that tasteded salty and it was good and I drinked it and drinked it and drinked it, but then it made me peeded inside of the house all by myself. I sorry, Antonio. I like you very much, but I had to peed.

The saltwater Pomm Sprang chez Antonio

Then today I very sad we had to leave very, very, very early in the morning for Mo' Havey hot rolly some more. But okay now I on a air condition floor at a Arid Zona Motel 6. Oof. G'night.

]]> Palm Springs, California: Monday, Monday tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4553 2009-07-13T22:20:31Z 2009-07-14T10:26:41Z

Sadly this morning at 6 a.m., I bid adieu to the ACE Hotel and Swim Club on Palm Canyon Drive,...

John Syme

The Palm Springs gods of Monday were good to me.

]]>

Dodger just loves Antonio!

My jaunty new fedora. Jaunty new Italian swim trunks not pictured. Jury still out on the jauntiness of my nascent graybeard goatee.

Fiddle-dee-dee: Time for my nap in the chaise longue....

]]> Wish They All Could Be California Classical Radio Stations tag:blogs.davidson.edu,2009:/roadtrip//351.4550 2009-07-12T04:36:10Z 2009-07-12T06:34:27Z

It's 9:30 at night in Palm Springs, Calif., and I realize I have had the Southern California classical radio station,...

John Syme KPSC 88.5 FM, on the radio all day. OK, I set it for the dog, truth be told, since classical music on WDAV 89.9 FM is what they play for him at Camp Wagging Tails back home, and what I play for him at my condo while I am at work, on account of his mild (now) separation anxiety. Dulcet tones soothe the savage beast. Seems to work. And besides, who does not want to awaken from their afternoon nap to the sound of applause, hello? Especially now for him, in Dodger's desert dog-days of summer 2009: too many hard, loud, freaky hours of SoCal freeways in an un-air-conditioned, 42-year-old Comet, with no roof to speak of? Who signed him up for this? OK, I did, against my better judgment. But all is well.

photo by Jennifer Foster, WDAV

]]> But maybe, just maybe, the dulcet tones of classical music soothe me, too (leaving aside the possibility of my own savagery and beastery). I mean, even reentering the AC atmosphere of my room from the desert's 114 degrees, I haven't even thought about turning on the television news channels, and the channel-surf crap behind them, all day long. My great, big TV on the wall is mute, bless its tiny, little heart.

I am no classical music connoisseur, I assure you---although I am able to spell connoisseur on the first try. But there is something going on more elemental here, and more timeless, something that only, well, time itself will tell about the music of our own centuries. Satellite "classic" rock, indeed. Snif. Sometimes I just want a solid rendition, from sixty years ago with vinyl scratches intact, or from right now live tonight in pristine digitation, of Mozart's Requiem, played, please, to me in a hammock on a screen porch during a loud, scary thunderstorm of the variety that has scared the beJesus out of, and into, humankind for many a moon. And baby, get me a beer while you're up, it dudd'n git any bettern'iss....

So, you tell me: Does Dodger, pictured here below, look like a day of classical music---okay, with a healthy smattering of Hollywooodish stuff, it's Palm Springs---at an adult volume has done him wrong or right, here at bedtime at the ACE Hotel in Palm Springs? I mean, he is not even supposed to be on the sheets, y'all, it is written in the rules that I signed on to with my credit card.

Ask him if he cares.

The Savage Beast

P.S. Late-breaking 22:19 PDT: Him making happy dog-dreaming squealy noises.

]]>