The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  A couple of phone calls and a knock on the door, and there he was, lanky and gnomic, wearing jeans and a blue Indian-style shirt. Chet had flyaway white hair and a white beard that he tucked into his shirt for some mystifying reason, which he eventually explained to no avail. His features were large and well-formed; the giant ears had been pinned back many years ago to discourage involuntary tacking in high winds, so it was up to his noble nose to give focus and gravity to the entire facial conglomeration. He carried himself with the quiet aplomb of the professional actor. Chet was fond of me and I him. I offered him a seat, and we proceeded to catch up—the comings and goings of our children, his search for community among the far-flung and long-lost, my writing process.

  We adjourned for a dinner reservation nearby. A quick stroll along the ground floor of the Arcade, out the back door, and soon we were seated in the noisy frat bar front room of a highly regarded tavern. Though the decibels peaked and troughed relentlessly, we gabbed with enthusiasm. Chet described his curious method of decision making, which involved a rubber cork on a length of chain that, held aloft, waggled one way for “yes” and the opposite for “no.” His divination technique had a friendly name I immediately forgot.

  It developed that Chet had decided to forego the Federal Reserve Bank of Rock ’n Roll in favor of visiting an old friend from his days in the copy department of a greeting card company. His little rubber stopper jobber had advised him to alter his plans. I felt a twinge of abandonment, but quickly adjusted to the new normal. We agreed to meet for breakfast in the hotel and then proceed on with what the cosmos had in store.

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has affixed itself to the shore of Lake Erie, a striking prism of glass, a bell jar of nostalgia and hype. A banner across the marquee announced THE ROLLING STONES. The ticket guy proposed that I take advantage of the opportunity to pose against a blue screen holding a red electric guitar with rocker intention. At the end of the visit, a 4x6 print would be available for purchase. Oh, no thank you, not this time. I’ve posed as Elliot on his bicycle with ET in the front basket, and nothing could possibly ever come close to the stupid magnificence of that.

  Holy Shit! The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a ridiculous, entertaining, exhausting place, crammed to the gills with minutiae, a lot like Ash U, but without the Republicans. In addition to the tsunami of ephemera, small print to squint at and presumably read, there was treasure—you could find pieces of the plane that took Otis Redding down, an “Otis” fragment and a “Redding” one; Jimi Hendrix’s sofa, an uncomfortable-looking section of a sectional; Michael Jackson’s glove revolving on a plexiglass pedestal, pinned by a spotlight, resplendent and dead as a butterfly; and CBGB’s awning that I used to see from my New York window until a couple of years ago. It sometimes had the feel of uniquely glamorous, museum-quality episode of Hoarders. The exhibit hall in the basement was pitch dark, with labyrinthine, chronology-averse catwalks and cul-de-sacs that shunt you from Metal to Doo-Wop to Disco in an eyeblink. The whole thing was claustrophobic, overreaching, and spectacular, like Aretha Franklin being squeezed into one of Diana Ross’ gowns.

  On a higher floor, I ducked into a dark theater, stood in the back, and watched a compilation film of the famous inductees, beginning at the museum’s inception in 1986 with this bunch: Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Elvis. It played the soundtrack to my life. When it came The Band’s turn, Levon Helm sang a snippet from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Just a fraction of a second, it seemed. Those seven words was the entire length of the segment, but my breath caught and my eyes filled. This crazy place was too rich for me.

  My final stop was the city of Akron and the house where Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, two drunken Vermonters, met, and where, on June 10, 1935, Dr. Bob Smith took his last drink. From that date, Alcoholics Anonymous marks its beginning. The modest house was built in 1915 and Bob Smith was its first owner, living there until he died in 1950.

  I am sober since 1985. For me and many, the story of how Bill W. met Dr. Bob carries the resonance of creation myth. The principles and history of AA all depend upon the simple practice of two alcoholics sharing an honest conversation. Only that kind of intimacy can keep us from drinking. I believe this in the very center of my being.

  Swooping over the swells and dips and swells of the red brick streets of the old suburban neighborhood, a fluttery anticipation tussled with the real concern I might get hopelessly lost. My directions had me slowing down to make a turn every three or four blocks. It felt like it took hours to find 855 Ardmore Avenue, and I knew the house was going to close at three o’clock. And then, there I was, parked at the curb of a leafy street like any other. The house sat high on a corner lot, white with yellow trim and a wide front porch.

  I couldn’t help feeling just a little self-conscious, climbing the twelve steps (yes, the twelve steps) to the front door. Once inside, that sensation dropped away: the house enveloped me. Standing in the front hall, one could see, or certainly sense, the four exterior walls of the house; it was that small. This also meant the house was full of light. First thing, I signed the guest book. A half dozen people milled around in the entry and living room; coming or going, it was impossible to tell.

  A stocky, open-faced guy in blue coveralls approached and asked if it was my first time. I chuckled, and he chuckled back. The name embroidered above his pocket said “Doug.”

  “My name is Doug. I can give you a tour, if you like. We’re all volunteers here,” he said.

  “I’d like that,” I said. “This is my last stop in Ohio. I’m here on purpose. I guess we all are. On purpose, I mean, Dr. Bob and all . . . Doug.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah. Let’s start upstairs then.”

  I poked my head into the three bedrooms that had provided respite for countless drunks, often forcing the two Smith kids to bunk in the third floor attic. This must have been a lively place; both before and after Bob Smith stopped drinking.

  On the ground floor, what struck me was the kitchen table, around which Bob and Bill had their life-changing conversation. In addition to two half-full coffee cups, I saw a plate of Windmill cookies, the kind I see all the time at meetings in New York. The only spot on the globe where I’ve felt the presence of such quietly turbulent spirits was Delphi in Greece in the early morning. Maybe that’s a reach, but the restorative legacy of 855 Ardmore Avenue is unquestionable.

  Eventually, Doug and I made our way down to the cellar, a whitewashed room remarkable for nothing in particular. For the Smiths, being on a corner lot allowed the basement to have a set of double doors that permitted off-street parking. Photographs of Dr. Bob’s automobiles lined the walls.

  “How much time do you have, Doug?”

  “Seven years clean and dry in a month.”

  “That’s impressive. It sorta rolls along after a while, the not drinking and going to meetings,” I said. “This commitment must help. How often do you take people around?”

  “Only once a week.”

  “Only? How come?”

  “There’s a demand. Some people say it’s the best job in Akron.”

  “And you’ve got the Tuesday afternoon commitment. Lucky me.”

  The two of us continued the conversation in this abbreviated vein—questions, simple answers, fencing, sideways admissions.

  It’s all in the eyes. “AA eyes,” as my friend, Brigid, says. What Dr. Bob called “the language of the heart.” Doug and I struck a chord of commonality in half an hour. We didn’t have much in common in the specifics of our lives, but we weren’t drinking, and that took care of just about everything. I couldn’t have been happier, what they meant when they talked about the joy of living.

  For you, the pleasures of Ohio are there to be discovered.

  V was raised by wealthy people in suburban New Jersey and grew up to be neurotic, alcoholic, homosexual, and old. For thirty years he worked on Wall Street managing other people’s money
until the office closed in 2008, when he decided to try his hand at poetry and nonfiction. V completed an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2011. His publishing credits consist of an anecdote in the Metropolitan Diary section of The New York Times about shopping for styrofoam with a nickel stuck to his forehead and an essay in The Common about therapeutic spelunking.

  STEPHANIE GLASER

  I Have a Problem with the Blood of a Woman

  A certain bonding happens over biology.

  Stationing myself next to Ba-Ba-Reeba’s restroom, I stopped every woman who entered and asked, “Perdon, tiene usted un Tampon? TamPONE? Tampax? Playtex? Kotex?”

  Just moments earlier while enjoying a beer and tapas at the Barcelona bar with some Americans I had met on a train from Madrid, I discovered the added company of my period. Yikes—my supplies were a few miles away back at a pension off Las Ramblas. I asked my new friend Allie if she had a tampon. Nope.

  Back in the bathroom, there was no dispenser in sight, and no one who came in seemed to have any spare tampons or pads. Didn’t anyone carry backups? It was time to act since I didn’t want my only pair of jeans to be ruined. Leaving Ba-Ba-Reeba, I searched the streets near Plaça de Catalunya. Surely, Walmart had invaded Catalunya.

  It was siesta time, and the nearby shops and stores were closed while shopkeepers observed the afternoon break. It seemed inevitable. I would have to approach the intimidating women of Iberia on the streets.

  AFTER ARRIVING IN SPAIN . . .

  For the past few days, I had lumbered past elegant Spanish women who sauntered with precision in the highest and thinnest of heels along the city streets, avenues and cobblestoned alleyways of Barcelona.

  It began the day I emerged from the train station, Estacio Sants, and tied my rumpled denim jacket around my waist, hurled my dusty duffel bag over my shoulder and trudged forth in my burly velcro-adhesive sports sandals. I felt large. Grande. Muy grande.

  Spanish women, generally speaking, can make you feel like you have a permanent personal flotation device secured around your waist, and not just junk in the trunk but the whole junkyard back there. Think of standing next to Penelope Cruz — many Penelope Cruzes.

  Clad in posh tailored jackets and short skirts that never appeared to crease, wrinkle, or ride up to expose cellulite, the young women of Barcelona looked like they were constantly working a Catalan catwalk. Their polished appearance included the perfect application of makeup, too. Long ago, I accepted my “dewy” complexion. I never once, however, saw shine glistening on a Spanish woman’s T-zone.

  As an American woman and solo traveler, I had assumed that I was stronger and more independent than most European women. In a troubling development, strength and independence took a back seat to beauty. But, seriously, despite navigating in precariously high heels, what made these Spanish women strong and independent?

  Meanwhile, clodhopping my way along the famous street, Las Ramblas, I looked for a place to stay. Fortunately, the owner of the pension I finally found was a dowdy woman who definitely had settled for sensible rubber soles. She was, according to my brief observations, the only woman in Barcelona with orthopedic shoes.

  BACK TO THE TAMPON SEARCH SCENE . . .

  I stood waiting for some younger women to pass by. Soon, two Penelopes came into view. It was worse than I expected. They both wore the uniform—the tailored jacket/miniskirt combo and strappy heels. Bright red lips and long dark hair that was so glossy I could practically see my desperate reflection within it completed their look. No doubt they were fashion muses. One for Dolce and one for Gabbana.

  Did I dare ask them? Would they recoil at the sight of me? Would I be shunned like a pair of underwear at a young Hollywood starlet’s debut in front of the paparazzi? More importantly, would they have a tampon between the two of them in one of the designer reptile-skin bags they each carried? I approached slowly, stopped them and then told the muses my situation.

  “Perdon, tengo un problema con la sangre de una mujer.”

  There. I said it. Because I couldn’t recall learning verbs such as “bleed,” “stain,” or “spot” let alone “menstruate” in my high school Spanish class, I settled for the primitive, yet direct, statement that translated into:

  “Excuse me, I have a problem with the blood of a woman.”

  The muses looked at each other and then back at me. I was ready for the bitchy blow off. Instead, one muse took my hand, and the other hustled us down the street in the opposite direction they were traveling. We stopped at a pharmacy that was closed. The two women halted, consulted each other and then pointed to a large distant department store, El Corte Inglés. As they assured me I would find what I needed, I had the feeling the muses would have taken me to Spain’s manufacturing plant of Tampax if they had the transportation.

  I hurried to El Corte Inglés, which wasn’t closed for siesta. Entering the expansive store, I repeated my blood-of-a-woman saga to a clerk who was working at the cosmetics counter. She immediately took me by the hand. I towered over this wisp of a thing who, despite her youth, looked like a professional chemist in her white lab coat.

  I must have looked like a trained circus bear following behind her while we weaved through perfume counters and hosiery aisles to the department drugstore. Taking me directly to the attending clerk, who was with customers at the time, the cosmetics chemist explained my dire situation. In an instant, the pharmacy clerk turned away from her customers and took me to the sanitary products aisle.

  I figured then I could take control of the situation, but the clerk took one box after another describing the strength of each one. “Aqui, SOOPER PLOOSE,” she said turning to me and letting me inspect the product. I pointed to the Super Plus box and nodded. Back we went to the register. Ignoring the women who were still waiting, the clerk rang up my purchase, and then she took my hand and steered me in the direction of a restroom.

  After the threat of major leakage had passed, I wanted to celebrate the recent show of sisterhood somehow. Surely there was a Catalan karaoke bar where I could meet up with the helpful Penelopes from El Corte Inglés. We could swill beers and sing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” or do something along those lines. I would just have to overlook all the fashionable footwear, and that, essentially, in comparison, my feet appeared to be strapped to discarded tire remnants.

  Stephanie Glaser is a teacher and freelance writer. Enjoying the humor in life, she writes about travel mishaps (mostly her own) for her blog, Travel Oops. She lives in Salida, Colorado with her family and teaches English composition and public speaking at a local community college.

  JEFF GREENWALD

  Surfing the Millennia

  Arizona’s remote stone wave crashes into memory, where it will return again and again.

  The afternoon before visiting the Wave, we watched a madman stagger out of the desert.

  My friends and I were hiking back from Buckskin Gulch, part of the surreal Vermillion Cliffs National Monument on the Utah/Arizona border. Our permit for the Wave was for the next day—but this poor soul had just been out there. He’d lost his way coming back. His eyes were wild, and his broad-brimmed hat askew.

  “I went up the wrong wash,” he gasped, visibly calmed as we showed him the path back to the parking lot. “There’s no trail . . . the maps they give you are !@$#% worthless . . . I’ve been lost for an hour and a half.”

  At least he didn’t die out there. Some people do. The Wave may be one of the most visually stunning, ardently photographed features in the Southwest desert, but the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t make it easy to find (or to find your way back).

  “People come to the Wave and expect to have that ‘National Park’ experience,” says BLM Monument Manager Kevin Wright, who administers the area from his office in St. George, Utah. “But there’s no formal trail out there. Or potable water. And in the summer, it gets over 100 degrees.”

  All of which, of course, is part of the appeal.<
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  The Wave is a tangible hallucination, a convoluted corridor of multicolored, brilliantly striped sandstone. Its history dates back to Pangaea: the single, giant continent that once covered the Earth.

  Back then, about 170 million years ago, the North American and African plates were splitting at the hem, forming the Atlantic Ocean. But dinosaurs roamed freely across the enormous, sandy desert that covered the Southwest: land we now call Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

  “The dunes marched along, leaving layer after layer,” says Ron Blakey, author of Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau. “The dune that makes up the Wave may have thousands of layers in it—and it’s part of other dunes that also have thousands of layers. So the cross-bedding we see today may have billions of layers—each one representing the advance of a sand dune.”

  For more than 100 million years those dunes were buried miles underground, where they hardened into a layer of rock called Navajo Sandstone. Slowly, those layers were uplifted—until, a mere 4–5 million years ago, they breached through the ground. Water and minerals seeped into the now exposed sandstone; the wind sculpted its surface. Over many millennia it was painted and carved, creating the fantastic shapes and rainbow-hued stripes (called Liesegang bands) that now enliven desktop screen savers everywhere.