My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  I walked up the path to a trailer that belonged to a young woman named Celina, who worked as Jan’s assistant manager until she got pregnant. Jan told me that Celina had recently broken her leg trying to do the hokey-pokey on roller skates and also that she had her hands full with her baby, so I thought she’d be home, but the trailer was shut tight. The windows were high slits, and they were curtained; there was no way even to peek in. The trailer seemed more than closed—it seemed sealed and seamless and impenetrable. I knocked anyway. My knock rattled the door and made a flat, metallic sound, as if I were knocking on a can of tuna.

  How Jan and Jim came to manage the trailer park is a roundabout story. Jan was explaining to me once how fast an old trailer can burn down, then told me a story about one night when she was the assistant manager here. She and Jim were asleep in their trailer when they got a call about a fire. Jan called the fire department, and as she went out the door to check out the burning trailer, she tripped and fell and hit her head hard, then got up and steadied herself and continued. She arrived at the burning trailer, saw that no one was inside, went looking for the tenant, found her at her parents’ trailer, broke the news to her, and then, while heading back to the fire, noticed a couple of people sleeping in a doghouse beside another trailer. She then briefed the fire department, comforted the hysterical tenant, and reported the squatters in the doghouse to the police. Only about twenty minutes had passed, but by this time the trailer had burned to the ground. Nonetheless, Jan considered the evening a success: When the manager’s position opened up, she decided that if she could handle so many things in the middle of a crisis, all the while dizzy headed from a fall, she ought to apply for the job. It keeps her busy. “We’ve worked like Trojans to make the place better,” she says. “And not everyone’s easy to deal with. But as a manager I’m not allowed to cuss people out or hit them. It’s considered unprofessional behavior.”

  The week I spent at Portland Meadows fell at the beginning of the month, when rent was due. There was a lot of turnover, because some people weren’t making their rent and because the horse-racing season had just ended and all the track people who’d been living at the park had left for the southern Oregon circuit. In the Laundromat, a sign was still up, saying NO WASHING OR DRYING OF HORSE BLANKETS, THANK YOU. THE MANAGEMENT. New people were moving in. A forklift operator had just bought a trailer from one of the horse people who’d had a losing season. One afternoon, he came into the office while I was talking to Jan, waving a syringe with a crusty-tipped hypodermic needle. He was holding it with a pair of pliers. He said he’d found it while he was cleaning the trailer. “Second one, Jan!” he exclaimed. Then, still waving the pliers, he started chatting about the racecar track just west of the trailer park. “Some of the big drivers come through here,” he said. “I like being around them. I got some cars myself. I run Bumpin’ Bombers, they’re like jalopies. There’s Street Stocks, Limited Sportsmen, Late Models, fantastic stuff.”

  The phone rang. It was someone from one of the trailers calling to tell Jan that there was a woman running around the park dressed only in her underwear. “We can’t allow that,” Jan said into the phone. “This is a family park.”

  She clamped the receiver with her shoulder, reached for another phone, and called the police, saying, “Yes, sir, this is Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park. We have an individual walking around here just in her panties.” While she was talking, I flipped through the new park newsletter. There was a calendar showing a happy face on Sundays and a sad face on the day that seventy-two-hour-late rent notices would be sent out, and a puzzle with hidden words in a grid of letters; some of the hidden words were neighbor, maintain, fix, weeds, trash, rats, rent, manager, pain, bugs, garbage, mailbox, hog, and notice. At the counter, a man with lank black hair stood with his arm draped over the shoulder of a weary-looking woman with chopped blond hair and a soft, saggy chin. When Jan hung up the phones, he said, “Jan, this is my long-term sister. She’s looking for a For Sale.”

  Jan said, “We have quite a few. Especially because this is the time of the racetrackers’ leaving out.” She started reading the list of trailers for sale. She was interrupted by a woman who came in to ask if she knew a way to remove a tattoo that wouldn’t cost a fortune. Jan suggested blemish concealer or bleach water. The woman said, “Well, bless you,” and left. The phone rang again; now the nearly naked woman was partially clothed but still roaming around the trailers. Jan called the police with an update and then went back to reading the list of trailers for sale.

  Kathie Eyler, Jan’s assistant manager, had been writing up eviction warnings, and she put down her pen and listened. She has been in the park eight months. Her husband works in construction and is an ordained minister—he runs the Bible study group in the park. She had lived for years in North Dakota on a sheep ranch thirty miles from anything. Her husband used to own his own company, but it went bankrupt, and then they moved in their trailer four times in four years. “Don’t get a single-wide,” she cautioned the couple. “Ours is a single-wide, and some parks won’t take a single-wide. I don’t know what we’re going to do, because we want to take ours with us when we retire.”

  The Avon man came in with a delivery for Jan. The postman came in. “Space twenty-three?” he asked, holding up a wrinkled envelope. Jan said they were gone.

  Another envelope. “Space ninety-eight?” Gone, moved back to southern Oregon to work on a potato farm. Another envelope. Gone, but just to another space in Portland Meadows. I had talked to the guy who’d moved to the other space; he had told me that he’d bought a trailer after living in Chicago, then moved around for work or to follow better weather or when the mood struck him. He worked now as the assistant manager of a quick-repair auto shop. He said at first he worried that everything about the trailer would be strange—even just getting used to living in something shaped like a shoebox. He worried that it would be noisy, but he said he was used to noise. He said, “After all, I spent years listening to clowns playing bumper tag at midnight in the city of Chicago.” He said it was now twelve years since he’d had a real house, and he thought he’d miss something about his old neighborhood and his old life, but he didn’t.

  Art for Everybody

  One recent sultry afternoon, inside the Bridgewater Commons mall in central New Jersey, across from The Limited, down the hall from a Starbucks, next door to the Colorado Pen Company, and just below Everything Yogurt, a woman named Glenda Parker was making a priceless family heirloom for a young couple and their kid. This was taking place in the Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery, a plush and flatteringly illuminated, independently owned, branded distribution channel for the art-based products of America’s most profitable artist, Thomas Kinkade. The young couple were from a moderately priced gated community not far from the mall, and they were bashful and pleased because they had never bought a family heirloom before. Also, they had never bought a painting before. Actually, they still hadn’t bought a painting, since what they were buying was not a painting per se but a fifteen-hundred-dollar lithographic reproduction of a Thomas Kinkade painting, printed on textured brushstroke canvas with an auto-pen Kinkade signature in the lower right-hand corner.

  This was not an ordinary day at the gallery: It was a Master Highlighter Event, a two-day guest appearance by one of Kinkade’s specially trained assistants, who would highlight any picture bought during the event for free. Highlighting a picture is not that different from highlighting your hair: It entails stippling tiny bright dots of paint on the picture to give it more texture and luminescence. The customer could sit with the highlighter and watch the process and even make requests—for a little more pink in the rosebushes, say, or a bit more green on the trees. Some highlighters—Glenda was one—would even let the customers dab some paint on the picture themselves, so it would be truly one of a kind.

  “Is this your first Kinkade?” Glenda asked the young woman. They were sitting in front of a large easel, on which the couple’s picture had bee
n propped. Beside Glenda was a digital kitchen timer, which she had set for the highlighting time limit of fifteen minutes, and a Lucite palette heaped with small blobs of oil paint.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “It’s our first.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Glenda said. She smiled warmly.

  “My grandmother just passed away,” the young woman said. “The money she left for me—it wasn’t quite enough to invest, but I didn’t want it to just disappear. My sister also inherited money from my grandmother, and she bought a Kinkade, too.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” Glenda said. “You picked a great one.”

  “I just wish I’d heard of him sooner,” the young woman said, twisting a piece of her hair. “There are so many that I love now that are already sold out.”

  “Oh, yes, that does happen,” Glenda said. She dotted some white paint on the underside of a cloud.

  “I can’t believe I never knew anything about Thomas Kinkade before this,” the woman went on. “I had passed the gallery before, but I didn’t really know anything about it or about how . . . huge he is. I mean, he’s just this really huge thing! It’s almost like a whole world.”

  THE PAINTING that the young couple bought was called Evening Majesty. It is one of Kinkade’s most popular images. It features mountains and quiet shadows and the purple cloak of sunset, but it could just as easily have featured a lavishly blooming garden at twilight, or maybe a babbling brook spanned by a quaint stone bridge, or a lighthouse after a storm; it’s hard to distinguish one Kinkade from the next, because the effect is so unvarying—smooth and warm and romantic, not quite fantastical but not quite real, more of a wishful and inaccurate rendering of what the world looks like, as if painted by someone who hadn’t been outside in a long time. In a Kinkade painting, if there is a bridge or a road or a gate (as there often is, since Kinkade likes visual devices that carry you into the picture frame), the bridge or the road or the gate is finely detailed, and the burr on the cobblestone or the grain in the brick is so precise, it could have been drawn with a whisker. But every edge and corner is also softened slightly, as if someone had stuck it in an oven or left it in the sun. The effect is wee and precious—the cottages look as if they had been built out of cookie dough and roofed with butter cream, more suited to elves or mice than to human beings. Even big things, like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Yosemite Valley, look tiny and darling, like toys.

  Kinkade’s paintings are filled with lampposts and windows and images of the sun, and the lampposts are always lit, the windows are always illuminated, the sun usually in a dramatic moment of rising or setting. Light is Kinkade’s hallmark. His pictures have a weird glow even in dim settings. If you go to a Kinkade gallery, you will be taken into a special room where the picture you’re interested in will be shown to you under bright light and then the light will be turned down slowly, and as it gets darker, the dark areas of the painting will get lighter, an effect Kinkade has said is produced by layering the paint on the canvas. Kinkade has trademarked the slogan “Painter of Light,” and receptionists at Media Arts Group, in California, the company that produces all Kinkade art-based products, answer the phone, “Thank you for sharing the light!”

  By and large, art critics consider Thomas Kinkade a commercial hack whose work is mawkish and suspiciously fluorescent and whose genius is not for art, but for marketing—for creating an “editions pyramid” of his prints, each level up a little more expensive, which whips up collectors’ appetites the way retiring Beanie Babies did. This view annoys Kinkade no end, and he will talk your ear off—even talk past the company’s strictly enforced one-hour interview limit—about the ugliness and nihilism of modern art and its irrelevance compared to the life-affirming populism of his work. He will point out that he has built the largest art-based company in the history of the world and that ten million people have purchased a Kinkade product, at one of three hundred and fifty Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries that carry his limited-edition prints, or through his website, or at one of the five thousand retail outlets that sell Kinkade-licensed products, including cards, puzzles, mugs, blankets, books, La-Z-Boys, accessory pieces, calendars, and night-lights. Last year, Media Arts Group had a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in revenues. It has been traded—first on the Nasdaq, then on the New York Stock Exchange—since 1994, making Kinkade the only artist to be a small-cap equity issue. He owns thirty-seven percent of the company, which makes him, by his calculations, one of the wealthiest artists in the world.

  Kinkade is forty-three years old. He has short, brushy brown hair, a short, brushy brown mustache, a chest as broad as a beer keg, and a leisurely and booming laugh. If you see his paintings before you meet him, you might expect him to be wispy and pixielike, but he is as brawny and good-natured as the neighborhood butcher. He has the buoyant self-assurance of someone who started poor and obscure but has always been sure he would end up rich and famous. He is so self-assured that he predicts it’s just a matter of time before the art world comes around to appreciating him. In fact, he bet me a million dollars that a major museum will hold a Thomas Kinkade retrospective in his lifetime.

  What Thomas Kinkade’s fans will tell you about his paintings is that they are much more than just paintings—overlooking, of course, the irony that they are also much less than paintings, since they are really just reproductions. Anyway, they will tell you that Kinkade pictures are an emotional experience. People get attached to them in a profound way. While I was at the highlighter event, I asked the gallery consultant—the person who can help you match a Kinkade to your sofa upholstery—how she came to have her job, and she said that she had hung around the gallery so often that all concerned decided she just had to be given a job. Her name was Janice Schafer, and when she talked about Kinkade, she was as animated as a jumping bean. “We actually met him!” she exclaimed. “It was such an absolutely amazing thing! He’s even better than the way he is on QVC! A lot of times, the icon doesn’t live up to the image, but he did. He really connects to people. He was so friendly when we met him. You never felt you were in the presence of genius, which you were, and you never felt you were in the presence of someone a lot more affluent than you, which he is.”

  Suddenly, Glenda’s timer buzzed. Janice peered over to examine Evening Majesty. “Oh, I love the way the smoke came out!” she said. “Oh, and look!” she said, pointing to the bottom corner of the picture. “She highlighted the puppy dog, too!” Everyone nodded.

  Janice went to help a customer choose a picture for his wife’s birthday, and Glenda freshened her paints. She is one of thirty master highlighters. Her training involved a seven-day workshop followed by an exam testing her knowledge of the paintings and how to highlight them and her knowledge of Kinkade himself: his birthday, the names of his children, where he met his wife, details of his childhood—in other words, the sorts of intimate tidbits that could be sprinkled into the conversation during the highlighting and that would make people feel they were getting not merely a reproduction of a painting, but a chance to connect with Thomas Kinkade. Glenda said she had been highlighting for almost a year. During the week, she works in a gift shop in California, and two or three weekends a month she travels to a gallery event. Her dream is to travel with Kinkade to Europe and do gallery events there.

  Currently, there are signature galleries in Canada, England, and Scotland; the company plans to expand throughout Europe and then take on Japan. Glenda said that while she is highlighting, customers tell her about their lives and often about some sadness they feel is lifted when they look at Kinkade’s work. “I get a lot of cancer survivors,” she said. “I meet a lot of people who have just lost someone. I send the most special stories I hear back to Thom.”

  Another customer plunked down in the chair next to Glenda. She reset her timer for fifteen minutes. “I’m getting Hometown something,” the customer said. “I already have Hometown something else. What is it? Hometown Morning? Hometown Evening? I don’t know.”r />
  “You’re building a great portfolio,” Janice Schafer said. “They’re nice investments. And this one’s almost sold out. And they do have a history of appreciation. We have some secondary-market pieces here. This one, Julianne’s Cottage, was released for a few hundred dollars in 1992, and now it’s thirty-seven hundred and thirty dollars.”

  “Well, I like the one I’m getting,” the customer said. “It’s like a picture of some tightly knit neighborhood where everything is well and everyone is friendly to each other. It’s nice.”

  “It would be nice with this one, too,” Janice said, pointing to another piece hanging across the gallery. She admired it for a moment and then clasped her hands and said, “You know, he’s like a national treasure.”