Days 1,2 - Phila -> Raleigh, NC -> Asheville, NC -> Chattanooga, TN


(If I did it right, there’s a photo of Baby and me/I just before leaving Wednesday morning.)

While planning the trip, I had envisioned sitting down each evening, glass in hand, the bottle I brought of 12-year old Macallan single-malt on a nearby surface, and spending an hour or so capturing the essence of the day/drive just completed. Tonight, my second on the road – I am in a motel off I-24 near Chattanooga, TN – it’s a reality. (The Scotch tastes great after driving almost five-hundred miles through a patch-work of sun-showers and thunder-storms.)

The route from Philadelphia to Raleigh was a familiar one in years past. When Julia was little we would visit friends with a vacation home outside Charleston, SC, and Raleigh was our overnight stop at the home of one of my oldest friends – since 7th grade, my first year in the US – and her partner. (They were also my destination this time, and we had a nice, low-key visit.)

Given that the route was I-95 most of the way, I had no expectation of meeting anyone interesting since the big rest-stops, with their Roy Rogers and Cinnabons, are places where way-farers eat, “do” (and mind) their own business without socializing with strangers. However, starting south of Washington, DC, the rest areas are just that: picnic tables, bathrooms, and, occasionally, vending machines. Yesterday, at one south of Richmond, I had an encounter that reminded me again about being a minority in this country. Thankfully, unlike some at other times, this one was benign, though depressing.

I had just parked to have lunch and was rummaging behind my seat for a magazine, when the driver of the car facing mine across a narrow grassy strip approached mine. He was in his mid-forties, about my size and build, with dark, wavy hair, and wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt with the name of a college I didn’t recognized embroidered on it. By facial features and skin tone, it was clear that he was from the Indian sub-continent, most likely Indian or Pakistani in origin, though I wouldn’t venture to guess which. (While I claim to be able to tell apart Chinese from other Asians, don’t believe me.)

He had a big, friendly smile on his round face and, with an accent we would all recognize, launched – without any preamble, like an introduction – into a lengthy warning about being careful on the road because of the David (?) Berg decapitation by Muslim extremists making it dangerous for our non-Caucasian faces. I was surprised at his earnestness and real concern/belief about revenge-seeking Americans possibly attacking “foreigners” and touched by his out-reach. It also took me aback enough that I had no adequate response except to agree to be careful -- I didn’t tell him that I had Mace cannisters and a heavy police flash-light (“Spray and club”, as I have told friends who asked what I would do, “Spray and club!”). He then went to his car and came back with a yogurt container and a spoon. “Please, take this for your lunch, I have another”, he said. I declined, politely. And then, feeling that Chinese reciprocity-cum-one-upsmanship gene act up, I reached into my insulated bag and offered him one of my Fuji apples, which he accepted. We smiled some more, he returned to his car, which had Michigan license plates, and I ate my lunch with diminished appetite.

I waved good-bye when I drove away – he was still there, shifting things between the back-seat and the trunk – and thought about his experience of looking “different” vs. my own. Listening to the basis of his fear and concern, which I did not want to share, I felt sad because it meant that my mother was the winner of a running argument from my teens into college years in the late 60s and early 70s. She constantly harped on how it didn’t matter who I was inside, that there was no “Harrison” but a “Chinese guy” in the eyes of this society. (You can imagine how well that went over with me, a budding hippie with long hair and patched blue-jeans….) We have come so far and yet, like yesterday, it seems not at all.

Tomorrow, another 500+ mile day to Natchez, Mississipi.

Tuesday, May 11 - D-day minus One

I've been thinking about the nature of a road-trip, how it's always an exploration of both the external world and the one we each carry inside. In the successful ones, the two paths converge periodically, re-provision each other with lessons about the shared experiences and, enriched, continue on. In that model, the postings here are those meeting points where the recounting and reflecting take place. (If the Muse is with me, the good ones will be gourmet picnics. If she is away cavorting, you'll get the literary equivalent of a low-fat meal: a posting nutritious but dull.)

Some of you may want to skip the ruminations and go directly to the pretty pictures when they start appearing in a couple of days. And that's fine...because I won't know who you are. (There are no Cliff Notes, however, and I am sure to give a pop quizz.)

As for my goals for this road-trip. (We HR-types always need goals so that we can measure performance against them......yecch!) For the "outer" trip, cliche-ish as it might be, it's to see the America I've mostly flown over; to gape at vistas that don't stop at the edge of a page in The National Geographic magazine; to experience mile-by- scenic/monotonous/depressing/extraordinary-mile the size of this country (just the out-bound portion of my drive is 4243 miles, according to MapQuest); to discover what I have in common with the strangers with whom I share the designation "American"; and to find if there is a place with my name on it. (Strangely enough, one place I am staying overnight is Ferndale in northern California, a small, coastal town that was used as the set for the Jim Carrey movie "The Majestic", which is about a man with amnesia who is embraced by a town's people as their golden boy who was thought to have died in WW II.....)

Measuring the capacity of my bladder in hours-between-rest-stops is an added bonus. But not a goal.)

As for the goals of the parallel inner trip...in the next posting, which will have the first photos, and which will be written from my first stop, my friends Margie and Grace and their brood, in Raleigh, NC, 408 miles and seven hours from Philadelphia.

May 7, Friday, D-day minus six.

At this stage of life, I hope to have done something worthwhile, become (somewhat) interesting, created something marvellous, been somewhere otherworldly, raised Cain sometimes, loved someone well, and gained a bit of wisdom, somehow. But I have never done what I am about to do.

I sometimes wear a ring that has a verse from Goethe inscribed on it:

Keep not standing
fixed and rooted:
briskly wander
briskly roam.

That's as good an answer as any for this undertaking: a solo drive from Philadelphia, PA to Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA on the Monterey Peninsula and back by way of the Pacific Northwest. The routes -- Southern, out-bound and Northern, in-bound -- will cover 8000+ miles and take approximately thirty-six days.

Although the decision was only made a week ago, both the itinerary and the car - "Baby", as Julia, my daughter calls it, since she says it has replaced her (hardly!) in my affections, is a 1999 Silver Porsche Boxster -- should be ready tomorrow. Other preparations, principally the mental/emotional ones, are not quite as far along. However, just like when I made my first (and only) sky-dive, it's better not to have too much time between deciding and doing: to quote T.S. Eliot, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions, which a minute will reverse".

Getting "Baby" ready -- all sports cars and ships are "female" by convention, so please no accusations of sexism, at least not over that!-- was not cheap: it seemed like the answer to every question at the dealer's service department was "About a thousand dollars", as in: "How much for a new set of tires?" "Oh, about a thousand dollars...." "And the 30,000 major maintenance?" "About a thousand dollars...." "What about upgrading the headlights to the Litronics?" "That's about a thousand dollars." "And if I want a GPS system?" "Also about a thousand dollars.".......The upshot is that if I am lost and pulled over in Mississipi by a Sheriff at 2 am, I will be hand-cuffed by the light of regular headlights. But the tires will be new and the car will start with no problems.

As friends will attest, I have never been car-crazy and getting a Porsche, even a pre-owned one, was out-of-character for someone who has never needed a car in the city. However, my attraction to Baby is visceral and, thus, inexplicable, as are all great loves. (If life is like a road and a car is like a woman, the perfect partner in both categories is one that can both get you into trouble...and get you out of it. I've got the car....)

Getting the itinerary set has meant a series of trade-offs while allowing room for the unexpected. Considering the constraints, which include getting to Carmel by May 27th to attend a wedding where I have a speaking part (more on that later) and needing to find another income-stream since my last one ended a week ago (maybe more on that as well), I still will be checking off more than a dozen places in the "1000 Places To See Before You Die" book that Julia gave last year. (It will bring my personal total to over 130.)

While national parks and monuments, historical/folkloric sites, and great scenery dominate my route and stops, the highlight is highly personal. It's Robinson's Gulch and Deep Creek, a remote place in the Hell's Canyon section of the Snake River between Oregon and Idaho. Sometime around May 27, 1887, as many as 41 Chinese miners were tortured, massacred, and their bodies mutilated by a group of horse-thieves with robbery as the motive. The remains were left to rot, with some locals behaving well (a few bodies were buried in Lewiston), while others behaved despicably (one skull was converted into a sugar bowl used in an area ranch). It was the largest killing of Chinese in this country. I read about it when, a few years ago, the transcripts of the grand-jury investigation were found hidden in the back of the safe of Walla Walla County's historical society. I became interested in writing about these men driven by famine in China to leave family and home to pan for the last gold grains in played-out claims, only to die horribly and anonymously, their bodies desecrated, their fate unknown to loved ones. June 7, the day the tour boat from Lewiston drops me off there for a few hours, is close enough to the anniversary date to experience the site in the season of their deaths. Spring in America brought an end, not a new beginning to their lives. I want my piece/poem to memorialize that fact.

Well, I still have map print-outs and packing to do. I will be making regular entries here, possibly nightly, and post photos if I figure out how -- this is my first web-log. Email me comments, if you'd like, at harrison@mytao.com