Thursday, March 31, 2005

The problem with this whole Texas diary thing is that I didn't actually do much note-taking on the trip. I wound up exhausted at the end of each day, with little will to write. So, you know, pretty much business as usual. But there was also another concern that made me question whether I'm cut out for this sort of thing. A sizable fraction of the driving portion of the trip was spent in arguments between my aunt and uncle. There is something profoundly unsettling in being a captive witness to an argument that doesn't otherwise involve you. Worse, it left me with a serious problem: I didn't want to come back and write about this series of largely directions-based arguments. I didn't think that was particularly interesting, nor did I (or do I) think it was fair to turn these private moments into public ones.

And yet. . .

Well, what is writing other than a public airing of private pains, real or imagined? Don't you have to be willing to burn bridges? I don't know the answer. I'm certainly not willing to do or say anything controversial. (As you will see when I wonder, later, whether a trip to an art gallery would be too politically heated.)

Anyway, I can only go with what I've got.

Dallas to Austin, some unconscionably early hour to the early evening (Central time), 3/8/05

Every sign I see that welcomes me to DFW International Airport or provides instructions on how to get around DFW International Airport makes me think "Awesome, David Foster Wallace International Airport!" As a result I am consistently disappointed.

The rental car complex is almost totally abandoned at 5:30 AM, save for our party, the man behind the counter of Dollar Rent-A-Cars, and maybe one or two other early-morning car renters, but the building is expansive and the other counters are far away. While everyone else is negotiating our rental I wander over to the visitor information kiosk, looking to stock up on pamphlets. I wound up with only two; one for a museum which I think we eventually did visit, and the other for a gun range. The range's pamphlet features a blond woman in a tanktop firing an automatic rifle. I hurry back to show it off. (From the ceiling of the rental car complex a number of paper models of airplanes are suspended, with various world traveler-type scenes painted on them.)

We rent a minivan and we're off, with one stop along the side of the road to argue about directions, trumped ultimately by the driver and front seat passenger getting out of the car and switching places. After that we're off again (in the opposite direction) heading into the sunrise; a sunrise like none I've ever seen, over a perfectly flat expanse that seems to diminish the whole concept of earth. The sky is huge and cloudless, half of it turns a ruddy yellow as the sun appears. Because of our schedule, and much to my regret, I never get to see a Texas sunset. (My personal top sunset was from the eastern shore of Puget Sound, with the sun disappearing behind the Olympic Mountains.)

It turns out we're driving straight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Austin, a trip that the internet had told me was four hours long. I am beginning to feel uncomfortable, though the uneasy silence following the brief dispute has lifted. Something in my stomach is not sitting right, perhaps as a result of changing air pressures. Or, I don't know. This gets worse.

There are more churches visible from the freeway than I have ever seen. There are also several adult video stores, each one framed by purple neon, which, combined with the vast swath of brightening sky, makes for an entertainingly eerie mix of color.

Have I mentioned how flat things are? Texas, from this vantage point, is the skin of a pudding. We pass a few small rises just outside of the city, but for the most part the land is almost oppressed by the sky. All things considered, I'm going to come down in favor of mountains, even though the mountains of home occasionally explode. (This week when I am out of Washington will happen to be the one time in my life thus far that Mt. St Helens sends up a large enough ash cloud to be visible from where I live.)

The other thing is: Texas freeways: What's the deal? I hear quite a lot about tax burdens, living as I do in the red part of a blue state. Boo, taxes! But it turns out that Washington taxes are apparently used to maintain the transportation system, whereas here in Texas they seem to rely on the principle of benign neglect. (Of course, while the road to Austin is quite rough and ragged, it's also home to some major work crews, so this problem is probably being taken care of.) There is also a certain stinginess when it comes to the length of on- and off-ramps, and I see almost no overpasses, where here almost every exit or entrance to the freeway is an overpass.

We pull off the freeway in what looks to be nowhere at all, and drive for awhile until it becomes apparent we're in a town. For breakfast, I'm told, though I'm not feeling at all like having breakfast. Welcome to Waxahachie. We eat in a small place called The Courthouse Cafe, which is my first exposure to authentic regular Texans. The waitress says y'all and it is adorable. At the same time, it feels very much like the sort of place I might have breakfast with my family at home. Rural. I have hotcakes with a large (and very good) slice of ham, along with two cups of coffee, which seems like a good idea because it is who knows when o'clock. In retrospect, it probably wasn't.

I don't get to see too much of Waxahachie. The Courthouse Cafe is downtown ("the Historic Downtown district"), and we sort of meander down there. I get the feeling most of the city spreads out in the direction we don't travel. We pass by (into, actually, before realizing our error) a graveyard. There are also several mortuaries in town. The actual courthouse, which both gives the Cafe it's name and the district its historicity is suitably impressive. Here it becomes apparent that I am not a good photographer, in the sense of making good photographic choices. I don't think I have a single picture of Waxahachie.

(Waxahachie is my favorite name of the cities we travel through in Texas. My favorite overall, which we passed fairly close to but did not visit, is Gun Barrel City.

After that it is miles and miles of Texas countryside and intestinal distress. We stop in a town with an unusually shaped water tower. Not that it is shaped like, say, a boot, or a UFO, or Bigfoot, or anything. It is just sort of odd looking. I take a picture of it, and am very greatful for the chance to get out of the car for a moment.

We stop at a Texas reststop and discover that, while the toilets are technically inside, there is no roof, just an overhang over the actual stalls. Here I am introduced to the just slightly different cadence of Texan birdcalls, but I am not well-educated enough in birds to know which species our two states have in common and which are unique.

There are billboards everywhere, or at least more than are at home, but I think this has more to do with the greater population density than any intrinsic cultural difference. I am, however, amused by the occasional billboard promising a Starbucks at the next exit, this being a feature of the Washington landscape that doesn't need any particular advertisement. (Though lots of things that are "Washington" in the popular mind are really more "Seattle" or "I5 corridor," but I am going to take credit for them anyway, here, because I can. There was a Seattle's Best Coffee at the airport, too, come to think of it.)

Some restaurants I had never seen before, or never seen in person: Schlotzsky's Deli, Waffle House, a series of Czech-themed roadside eateries whose name I didn't record, Popeye's Chicken, and a place named something like The Texas Land Development Agency, which turned out to be a steakhouse. (Just yesterday, at Wal-Mart, I found Schlotzsky's Deli brand potato chips, and there is one in Spokane, so I guess this is more ignorance than anything else.)

By the time we get to Austin I have had enough. To be delicate, I am in serious need of some private time in a comfortable bathroom. So I guess I change the plan, which was to "do" Austin and then find a hotel. We find a hotel first, and after an hour or so of rest and recovery I feel much better. It is somewhere around 1:00 PM, Central time when we arrive, and let's say 2:30 when we set out.

Austin is a college town, and the state capitol, and Bruce Sterling lives there when he isn't teaching at some design school. Borges taught at the University of Texas there for a time. It is, again according to the internet, full of hip things to do and see. Our traveling party is slightly less than hip. We visit no bars. Nor do we go on campus to see what I hear are two pretty cool museums. Nor do we go to the hamburger place internet friends of mine had recommended. We do go to the capitol, and the Austin Museum of Art, and actually I think that's it, though that took the rest of the afternoon. We also went to Denny's, where the waitress insisted that I go to SXSW, and I had to sheepishly insist that we would be at a wedding when it started, and on a flight out of the state just a day or two later, even though I would really, really like to go.

The capitol building is nice, though it doesn't really feel like a place where important decisions are made. Not to slight it at all; it is a very fine building. Taller than the U.S. capitol, apparently. But throughout this trip I am dogged by a gap between my intellectual appreciation of the historic things I see and my own visceral experience of them. (Or, through the filter of what I fear are my largely wasted college years: the gap between the phenomenal object and its cultural presence, which ought to be a part of that object, but I can't seem to properly entangle the two.) Like, I sat in for a moment on a real debate about real Texas law in the House of Representatives. (The Senate was not in session.) And aside from the old saw about lawmaking being like sausagemaking, I felt sort of. . . I'm not sure. Disappointed carries all the wrong connotations. It wasn't so much that things failed to meet my expectations as my expectations themselves were only nebulous and half-formed. I took a picture of the room where press conferences are given, for no apparent reason. (That is, behind my taking of the picture. I presume they give press conferences there because that's where they've put all the press conferencing gear.)

Also, Texan legislative pages seem to be uniformly cute girls.

Out front there is a large monument to Confederate soldiers, and my father and I almost got into a debate about the causes of the Civil War, but we didn't, which was good, because a vacation isn't really the place for it, and neither of us are anything beyond the most amateur of history enthusiasts. There is, here and elsewhere, a kind of disconnect between what I regard as my cultural history and the events I am presented with. Like, I can't quite put myself inside the struggle for Texan independence. Speaking of which, another interesting thing was the very short terms of office for governors in the period leading up to the Civil War, and during it, and indeed after it. Testimony to the great controversy, and I liked it because it wasn't part of a display, or commented on in any way; just a deduction made from the years displayed beneath their portraits.

And did I take my notebook into the museum to write down what pieces I looked at and who made them? No. I saw a Picasso and a Warhol. My favorite pieces were a fake map of I-35 which looked perfectly normal and real but which documented a section of the interstate (and indeed of the country) that doesn't exist, a complicated sculpture of blocks that resembled a cityscape while not quite being a model of one, a spastic painting consisting of many overlapping line drawings that made me think of a series of coastlines projected on each other (apparently I really like art that evokes an imaginary locale), and some other stuff I don't even remember now. Uh, there was a kind of hazy self-portrait achieved by a putting a diffusive screen over a flickering panel of LEDs which I thought was great, from a technical as well as an artistic point of view. My father thought it a little odd when I looked at every painting from the side, but I like to get an idea of the texture, if any.

I said earlier that I was concerned about the political implications of the museum, but in fact by this point I no longer cared, because I had suffered for this vacation. But by political implications I do not mean art about political subjects, like, say, a weeping eagle or a collage of George W. Bush's head pasted over the bodies of pornographic actors (erotic event reenactors?), neither example being a real work, thankfully. Rather, the very nature of a work of art can have political implications. There was a flat panel of aluminum, painted a deep red and then covered in a sheet of something like plexiglass to highlight its sheen. It was pretty, one of my fellow travelers remarked, but it wasn't art. Well, what does that statement even mean? And so on. I avoided starting up a discussion about what constitutes art, even though it might have been rewarding, out of my aforementioned deepseated fear of controversy.

The chicken sandwich I had at Denny's was delicious, though my stomach still felt a little edgy. We then retired to the hotel, around 7:30, which is when I wrote, in my notebook, the following:
7:35 PM, Texas time, Austin
I should write down everything that happened after Waxahachie, but I am exhausted. To sum up: intestinal distress, long drive, extreme discomfort, relief, motel, art, capitol, girls at capitol, no books or CDs. Elaborated tomorrow.


My father and I shared a room, and we intended to watch Nova, but it was a rerun, and we were asleep well before 8:30.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

I should mention that I spent I lot of time trying to figure out how to describe cities at night. I wanted to avoid descriptions that carried a lot judgmental weight. I wound up with both flowers and fungus, because they do look a little like an uncleaned surface in a humid climate, but I didn't want to be all "The HUMAN PRESENCE is like a VILE GROWTH upon the FACE of the EARTH."

But mostly, and I thought about this on the way back, they look like circuitry. Or I guess circuitry looks like cities.

"this tunnel is a Texas mile"


Seattle, 10:30 PM (Pacific Time), 3/7/05

There is some urge, I guess; some kind of genetic timebomb quietly ticking away, that drives people in my family to prefer the late night ionospheric howl of AM radio. Granted, we're in the mountains, and yes, a little noise can keep you alert. I don't dispute these facts. The real problem is that once we clear the Cascades, once we're surrounded by an invisible wealth of radio signals (I mean, this is the Big City now, bright lights, office buildings, hotels with fancy dress balls or something going on where everyone knows each other and hey, who are these guys tramping through with their suitcases, all "Hey, where's the airport shuttle?" So there are a lot of radio stations, is my point.), what are we tuned into? Easy listening lounge music. "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head." Even adjusting for the atrophying effects of age and small town living that have been visited on us, we are too cool for this. We must be.

We are the only people on the shuttle. Myself, my father, my aunt and uncle, whose son is getting married, hence this trip. Our driver has a slight trace of an accent, Carribbean or something. I go to the airport on this shuttle all the time is what I seem to be trying to say with my studied nonchalance. Look at the casual slope of my leg. I would very much like to stop doing this, but I am stuck in some sort of self-conscious loop, despite the fact that, as I said, the only person around who was not there shortly after my birth is busy driving.

At the security checkpoint everyone takes off their shoes, but I hesitate, because I have not flown since 1998, and I watch TV. I could be being Punk'd. I think that, if we have to take off our shoes, they ought to put some carpet down. A week from now I'll be doing the same at Dallas/Fort Worth International, and an older gentlemen will say that he wears his shoes on planes all the time, and, after being warned that sometimes people with shoes on have to go through special security, he chooses to keep them on, and, of course, gets waved aside and wanded. (Dirty. No, but they just use their handheld metal detector wand.) Also, at DFW, they spray the ground with some sort of citrusy disinfectant.

In addition to making sure we don't have bombs secreted away in our shoes, I guess this makes us less likely to break out into sweet kung fu battles.

30,000 feet above the darkness of the interior, 1:53 AM, 3/8/05

The lights of cities blossom occasionally beneath us, like weird alien flowers or fungal blooms. While considering these organic images it occurs to me that what they actually resemble (in a one to one correspondance) are maps of a power grid. From this height, at this hour, the distinction between the city and the symbols which represent it falls away. (I just read that Borges story about the empire whose mapmakers make a map that is the same size as the empire.) My aunt has suggested that a long array of lights we recently passed was Colorado Springs. If we took off at 11:30, we ought to be no more than half an hour from landing, from a city blown back up to its monstrous proportions. Also I'm starting to feel a little uneasy, in an intestinal sense. This will get worse before it gets better.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Today I leave to spend a week in Dallas, Texas; the easternmost point I've ever been to. Possibly the southernmost. My intention is to keep some sort of diary of my trip. This seemed like a good idea until I came here to post my pre-trip thoughts, and discovered I had none.

The weather in Dallas is stormy and quite a bit cooler than here, where we are enjoying, if that is quite the right term for a major climatic change, near record highs. Seventy-five degrees and clear blue skies is almost perfect weather for me personally, but, you know, maybe not in winter, which is a quaint season we used to have back in the 20th century.

Anyway, my bags are packed and my observational tools are ready. (A notepad from Wal-Mart, a disposable camera from Best Buy, rung up by a woman named Orchid; a pen I got at an agricultural conference.)

Step one: the long drive to Seattle.

(I probably won't be able to update this until I get back, so don't expect real-time blogging, but more of a trip-in-retrospect series later.)